Xiaomi’s Mi A1 Is the Slow Burn Smartphone Making a Global Impact
Will this be the first phone to receive Android P?
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Having last year earned plaudits for its Mi Mix edgeless smartphone, Chinese company Xiaomi is back at it again with another low-key/high-end release. Now the fourth-largest smartphone maker in the world after well under a decade in the business, the brand’s latest smartphone, the Mi A1 is creeping up behind its many competitors.
The smartphone — focused predominantly on the Indian market at first and now taking hold in Europe — boasts a hard-wearing metal body, 5.5-inch 1080p screen, a dual-camera system with secondary telephoto lens and bares the strap line “created by Xiaomi, powered by Google.” As a piece of tech, the Mi A1 isn’t exactly a million miles from the China-announced Mi 5X — in fact it carries the same Snapdragon 625 processor — but diverges at the point of its OS: rather than Xiaomi’s own system, the Mi A1 wins out in the accessibility stakes by running on Android.
The smartphone is a move into more expensive territory for the brand — pricing out its predecessors with a retail value of around $234 USD for a 4GB RAM model — but is still distinctly cheaper than its direct competitors in the iPhone or OnePlus 5. And speaking of the iPhone — the eighth incarnation of the phone is getting closer.