Xiaomi's Mi A2 review: A tantalising budget phone -- that's tough to buy
Xiaomi's Mi A2 review: A tantalising budget phone -- that's tough to buy
2018-07-25
Jamie may well be the absolute new
champions of phone teasing as the
company came all the way to London in
order to show me this and it is the me a
- it's a great firm that packs a whole
bunch of cool tech and comes with a very
very affordable price tag I thought this
was lovely what a great idea but the
problem for me is that while this phone
is going on sale in 40 countries I'm
told those countries won't include the
UK or the US so it's not going to be
particularly easy to get hold of
certainly not for me here in London
which is very disappointing and I'll
tell you a few reasons why first of all
what I like about this phone is the
overall design it's slim it's easy to
hold even though it's got this big six
inch screen I do like the soft gold
colour on the back and yes you could
very easily argue but it looks quite a
lot like an iPhone in fact I've got the
iPhone 10 here you may see certain
resemblance in this dual camera unit on
the back you'll also notice fingerprint
scanner on the back and the front this
screen goes all the way from edge to
edge which i think is pretty cool
now that screen itself as I said before
is 6 inches technically 5.99 but let's
round that up for the sake of it it's
got a full HD plus resolution so all the
icons and a small text look perfectly
crisp and short maybe we didn't have the
clarity of some of the 4k displays that
we've seen around but perfectly enough
for Twitter and Instagram and any of the
games you're likely to play and in fact
speaking of gaming inside this phone is
the qualcomm snapdragon 616 processor
which in my time with the phone over the
last few days is been more than powerful
enough to play most of the games I've
wanted to play so I have no problem with
the amount of power that this thing has
got now it's running on Android 8.1 Oreo
which is the latest version of the
software and Jeremy has said that there
will be an update to Android P when that
becomes available later in the year I
mentioned price at the start of this
video and that is one of the big points
about this phone it's going to go on
sale in Europe
around the 250 euro mark which in the UK
translates to about 250 pounds or in the
u.s. to about two hundred and nineteen
dollars so there's no question that this
is very very affordable and beats out a
lot of other affordable phones those
like the one plus six for example which
is more in a four to 500 mark so this
does come in a lot cheaper but still you
get a really nice phone experience so
we've seen as well it has got this dual
camera unit on the back now that allows
this phone to do the zoomed in portrait
mode shots that we've seen on various
other phones including the iphone of
course I've had a quick play with those
and we've seen pretty good outdoor shots
there vibrance they've got good contrast
that colors look nice and the HDR mode
works quite well and over in the front
of course we've got the front-facing
camera which takes pretty decent selfies
as well they've got a 3000 milliamp an
hour battery inside it charges with USB
C and because it's using Qualcomm
Snapdragon chips it does support faster
charging as well so overall the me a2
does seem like a really good bit of kit
for such a low price so personally I am
very disappointed that this phone isn't
on wider release I'd love to see this
more widely available across Europe and
across the u.s. as well and you could of
course try to buy it through one of the
various own official Amazon resellers
but personally I'd recommend looking for
phones that are officially on sale where
you live so maybe look towards brands
like while weighs honor if you're trying
to get a decent phone on a budget of
course if you have any other questions
about the Shamy me a to then make sure
to write them in the comments below make
sure to LIKE and subscribe and to keep
your eye on cnet.com for all the news
about the shower means me a to and
whether it ever will come to a store
near you
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