After launching the Redmi Note 4 Lake Blue colour variant in the Indian market, Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi on Tuesday announced the launch of its first Android One-powered smartphone, christened as “Xiaomi Mi A1” at an event in New Delhi, India. The new Xiaomi Mi A1 is the company’s first smartphone to come with a stock Android version, which has been developed in partnership with Google. The phone also comes with Google personal AI assistant, Google Photos for free unlimited high-quality storage and Google Play Protect. The stock Android experience allows users to protect their contents more secure with the latest security updates. Besides this, the Chinese vendor also announced that the Xiaomi Mi A1 will also get the recently launched Android 8.0 Oreo update pretty soon. Carried a price tag of Rs. 14,999, the new Xiaomi Mi A1 will be made available for purchase in India starting September 12 (Tuesday) at 12 PM IST exclusively via domestic e-commerce website —Flipkart.com, company’s online store — Mi.com and company’s offline store –Mi Home store in Black, Rose Gold, and Gold colour options.
The smartphone will also be available via Mi Preferred Partner stores as well as all leading offline retail partners across the country on the same day. The offline retail partners include Poorvika, Big C, Sangeetha, Croma, Lot, Vijay Sales, Ezone, and UniverCell. At the time of launch, the company also announced its partnership with Bharti Airtel to offer Airtel subscribers an additional 200 GB of 4G data. Customers buying a Xiaomi Mi A1 smartphone can avail an additional 200GB of 4G data for free.
Design wise, the Xiaomi Mi A1 sports a full-metal unibody design with metal frame all around, giving it an overall premium look. Basically, the Xiaomi Mi A1 looks very identical to the Apple iPhone 7 Plus with respect to design, including its horizontally arranged rear-side dual camera setup and the antenna bands. The smartphone features three capacitive navigation touch buttons and a rear-mounted fingerprint scanner, located just middle of the device. The volume rockers as well as the power/lock buttons are all placed on the right-hand edge of the device and a 3.5mm audio socket is placed on the very bottom edge of the handset. The speaker grille is also seen at the bottom edge of the device along with a USB Type-C charging port sitting in the middle.
The main highlights of the device are pure and fresh stock Android version, premium built quality, dual rear camera setup and a powerful 3,080mAh battery. The Xiaomi Mi A1 also features an IR Blaster (infrared sensor) that can be used as a universal remote to control third-party electronics & appliances like set-top boxes, audio consoles, TVs, fans, air conditioners or DVD players. Apart from this, the smartphone sports a dual pyrolytic graphite sheet, which decreases temperature effectively by reducing thermal performance by up to 2-degrees Celsius.
Xiaomi Mi A1 Specifications & Features:
In terms of specifications, the new Xiaomi Mi A1 comes equipped with a 5.5-inch full-HD LTPS display with a screen resolution of 1080×1920 pixels and a scratch resistance 2.5D curved Corning Gorilla Glass protection on top. Under the hood, the device is powered by a 2.0GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 octa-core processor clubbed with Adreno 506 GPU to handle the graphics. In terms of memory, the Mi A1 is backed up by a 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage, which can be further expanded up to 128GB via a microSD card. Talking about its software front, the smartphone runs on Android 7.1.2 Nougat operating system with stock Android UI and upgradable to Android’s next version Android O as per company claim.
In terms of optics, the Xiaomi Mi A1 sports a dual primary camera setup at the rear that comes combined with two 12-megapixel sensors. One camera houses a 12-megapixel sensor with wide angle lens, 4-axis Optical Image Stabilisation (OIS), 1.25-micron pixel sensor and f/2.2 aperture, while another camera comes equipped with a 12-megapixel sensor with telephoto lens for 2x lossless zoom, 1-micron pixel sensor and f/2.6 aperture. The main camera features also include Phase Detection Autofocus (PDAF), dual-LED flash module and Portrait Mode for bokeh effects. On the front, the Mi A1 features a 5-megapixel front-facing shooter with real-time beautification for capturing better selfies.
In terms of connectivity, the Xiaomi Mi A1 supports dual-SIM dual standby using the hybrid SIM configuration (Micro-SIM + Nano-SIM/microSD) slot. That means you can either use this as a dual-SIM phone without memory card option or single-SIM phone with memory card option. Apart from this, the smartphone offers various connectivity options including 4G VoLTE, Wi-Fi 802.11 (a/b/g/n/ac), Wi-Fi hotspot, Bluetooth 4.2, GPS/A-GPS/GLONASS, IR Blaster, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a USB Type-C port for fast charging and data transfer. On the battery front, the Xiaomi Mi A1 comes packed with a decent 3,080mAh battery. Sensors on the smartphone include an Accelerometer, Ambient light sensor, Proximity sensor, Magnetometer, Infrared, Fingerprint sensor (rear-mounted) and Gyroscope sensor. Dimensionally, the handset measures 155.4 x 75.8 x 7.3 mm and weighs 165 grams.
