Xiaomi Redmi 7A, A Good Mobile to be Thought of !

Xiaomi Redmi 7A, A Good Mobile to be Thought of !

The Redmi 7A is that the latest entry-level phone from Xiaomi and it's targeted at first-time smartphone buyers. This phone brings a tonne of upgrades, both minor and major, over its predecessor — the Redmi 6A — without the worth hike that always comes with a new-generation device. Starting at Rs. 5,999, the Redmi 7A aims to further solidify Xiaomi's dominance within the entry-level segment, but competition has intensified now.

A new design, faster processor, larger battery, and better camera are among the various upgrades introduced by Xiaomi within the Redmi 7A (₹ 6,499). This phone is certainly an enormous intensify from the Redmi 6A (₹ 6,395), but how does it pile up against rivals just like the Realme C2 ₹ 6,499 ? And more importantly, is that the Redmi 7A now the simplest choice during this segment?

Xiaomi Redmi 7A design

The Redmi 7A ditches the easily recognisable ‘low-cost Redmi' look and opts for a clean unibody design. The phone may be a tad narrower and shorter than its predecessor, but at 9.55mm, the Redmi 7A is thicker than the Redmi 6A and tons of other phones out there.

On the brilliant side, the Redmi 7A is sort of comfortable to carry . The rounded corners and therefore the matte finish on the rear feel good within the hand. The rear panel is formed of thick polycarbonate and feels sturdy, and that we didn't feel any flex across it.

We quite just like the matte finish because it's non-slippery and also doesn't smudge easily. The Xiaomi Redmi 7A comes in three colour variants, i.e. Matte Blue, Matte Black, and Matte Gold – and as their names clearly suggest, all three sport an equivalent surface finish. We had the Matte Blue variant for review and it's quite chic.

The phone boasts of a layer of nano-coating material for cover against accidental liquid splashes, but it's not IP-rated, so don't take it swimming with you. As for the Redmi 7A's build quality, Xiaomi is betting big thereon and is offering a two-year warranty on this phone, which may be a first for a Redmi model in India.

The Redmi 7A does look a touch chunky because of its 9.5mm thickness, but we will not really complain about the looks of a phone that costs Rs. 5,999 and offers this type of hardware. Looking over to its rivals, the Realme C2 might look more appealing with its geometric diamond-cut pattern on the rear .

One useful design change on the Redmi 7A is its speaker placement. The Redmi 6A's speaker was located on the lower portion of the rear panel, which meant that audio was muffled when the phone was lying on a flat surface. On the Redmi 7A, the speaker has been moved to rock bottom , and it now sits alongside the Micro-USB port.

The power button and volume rocker are positioned comfortably on the proper and supply decent feedback on being pressed. On the left side, one can find the 2+1 card slot which will house two Nano-SIMs also as a microSD card of up to 256GB capacity simultaneously. Storage expansion will likely are available handy because the 16GB of storage on the phone's base variant might run out quickly.

Overall, Xiaomi has injected some aesthetic freshness into its entry-level Redmi phone lineup with the Redmi 7A, all the while ensuring that the phone is sturdy also .

Xiaomi Redmi 7A specifications and software

As mentioned above, the Redmi 7A comes with a number of upgrades. The phone packs a 5.45-inch HD+ (720x1440 pixels) display with an 18:9 ratio . The display is certified by TUV Rheinland for reducing eye fatigue caused by blue light emission, for a easier reading experience.

The Redmi 7A is that the first phone within the entry-level Redmi ‘A' sub-series to pack an octa-core processor, attraction from the Qualcomm Snapdragon 439 SoC which has eight ARM Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 2GHz. It marks a big upgrade over the quad-core MediaTek Helio A22 ticking inside the Redmi 6A.

The phone comes in two variants with 16GB and 32GB of internal storage, but the quantity of RAM remains an equivalent at 2GB. we've the bottom 16GB variant for review, on which you get around 10GB of usable space for storing .

We quickly ran in need of storage after downloading most of our day-to-day productivity, social media, and benchmarking apps, plus a couple of games. you will need a microSD card if you propose to use this phone for quite just the fundamentals , or if you would like to store tons of media files.

The Redmi 7A also features upgraded imaging hardware. This phone sports a 12-megapixel Sony IMX486 sensor with larger 1.25micron pixels, which is really superior to the 13-megapixel snapper on the Redmi 6A. it's also an equivalent sensor that has been used for the camera-centric Xiaomi Mi A2 , which suggests buyers should be ready to expect some good results. The front camera may be a 5-megapixel snapper which also handles face recognition duties.

Another area where the Redmi 7A improves over its predecessor is battery capacity. The phone comes equipped with a 4,000mAh battery, which is 33 percent larger than the three ,000mAh unit inside the Redmi 6A. The retail package includes a 10W charger along side a Micro-USB cable, SIM eject tool, and a few paperwork.

Connectivity options on the Redmi 7A include 4G VoLTE, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0, GPS/ A-GPS, FM radio, Micro-USB, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. The phone measures 146.30x70.41x9.55 mm and tips the size at 165g.

On the software side, the Redmi 7A runs MIUI 10 supported Android 9 Pie. Our review unit ran the June security patch. If you've got used MIUI before, you'll feel right reception .

To start with, there's no app drawer. Swiping abreast of the house screen opens the Mi Browser (this action are often disabled), while swiping to the left shows the apps installed on the phone. Swiping to the proper opens the customisable shortcuts page that shows utility widgets, calendar events, app recommendations, Twitter moments, etc.

The Redmi 7A comes with a tonne of preinstalled in-house and third-party apps like Amazon, Facebook, WPS Office, Dailyhunt, Ludo Master, Paytm, ShareChat, and Mi Chat, to call a couple of . We found ads in a number of the preinstalled apps also as on the installation permission screen after downloading new ones. We had to disable the “Receive recommendations" option within the MIUI Security app to prevent seeing these pesky promotions.

On the brilliant side, MIUI 10 features a host of nifty features like Second Space for creating a further user profile, Dark mode, Reading mode, and Dual Apps, to call a couple of . One also can enable navigation gestures or accompany the fast ball feature for navigating through the UI.

In case you select the navigation gestures, you lose the power to assign long-press gestures to the default Android navigation buttons. for instance , the shortcut to activate split-screen multitasking on long-pressing any of the navigation buttons is gone. you'll still do that through the app switcher, though. Similarly, you cannot call up Google Assistant by long-pressing the house button, but you'll assign this function to the physical power button instead.

Xiaomi Redmi 7A display and performance

The Redmi 7A's display is an IPS panel with  full HD+ resolution. Its colour reproduction is quite normal and content looks very sharp. The viewing angles also are good, but the utmost luminosity could are higher. Under direct sunlight, the brightness seemed insufficient to comfortably read text and watch media, even when pushed all the high . The display is reflective, and that we found it a touch dull in outdoor conditions

In comparison, we the display on the Realme C2  looks more vibrant. The Redmi 7A allows users to tweak the display temperature and also increase contrast. The reading mode comes in handy in the dark , and you'll also set a custom schedule for activating it.

The bezels at the highest and bottom of the Redmi 7A make it look a touch dated, but once more we've to recollect that this is often a particularly affordable phone.

As far as performance goes, the Redmi 7A is at par with most of its rivals and ran smoothly for the foremost part. We didn't expect an excellent fluidic experience from this phone given its entry-level pricing, but it proved to be an honest performer.

In our day-to-day usage, we found that apps ran smoothly, although they took a touch longer to launch than we are wont to . While switching between apps, we also noticed that the phone occasionally stuttered, especially when quite five or six apps were running within the background. Sometimes, even basic apps took a few of seconds to load, but we could accept that.

The 2GB of RAM is certainly a performance bottleneck, but if you're not running games within the background, multitasking are going to be smooth. Thankfully, we didn't encounter instances of unresponsive apps, something that frustrated us just in case of the Infinix Smart 3 Plus  which is powered by MediaTek Helio A22.

Casual games like Temple Run and Candy Crush ran without a hitch, but an equivalent cannot be said for graphics-intensive ones. PUBG Mobile was set to its low graphics settings by default, and that we noticed stutters and frame drops. Still, the gameplay was comparatively better than most other phones within the same bracket .

When it involves benchmarks, the Snapdragon 439 powering the Redmi 7A performed far better than the MediaTek Helio A22. The scores we got were also slightly above what we have seen from the Helio P22, which powers phones just like the Realme C2. The Redmi 7A scored 826 and a couple of ,900 respectively in Geekbench 4's single-core and multi-core tests. In AntuTu 7, the Redmi 7A put up a tally of 69,990.

Coming to the more graphics-intensive benchmark tests, the Redmi 7A's Snapdragon 439 yielded better results than the MediaTek Helio A22 also because the Helio P22 powering its closest rival, the Realme C2. In GFXBench's Manhattan 3.1 test, the phone returned 13fps. The Redmi 7A's 3DMark Sling Shot score stood at 821.

 Xiaomi Redmi 7A cameras and battery life

The 12-megapixel rear camera on the Redmi 7A captures crisp shots with commendable sharpness and punchy colours, a minimum of when the ambient light is sweet . The photos captured in daylight look good on the phone and are worth sharing on social media. When seen on an enormous screen, however, you are doing notice shallow depth and weak dynamic range, but that's not surprising at this price index .

The photos captured indoors and in low-light conditions weren't as impressive, because they lack sharpness and clothed grainy with tons of noise. The Redmi 7A captures vibrant macro shots with decent sharpness, but there's not much in terms of surface detail. Also, if you wish true-to-life colours, macro shots captured by the Redmi 7A will disappoint you.

A major gripe we've with the camera is that the inconsistent focus lock. The phone struggled at locking focus, and even slight movement resulted in blurry photos. Another issue is that the shutter delay, especially while capturing photos in HDR mode. The phone often made us await a second or two while it saved a photograph .

The camera app offers a good range of filters to settle on from. there's also a beauty mode with five levels of beautification. We found that it essentially smoothens and lightens skin, but in doing so, also blows out the colors of background elements.

There is also a portrait mode that does an honest job of applying background blur, but very often the camera blurred out parts of the topic that ought to are left intact. as compared , the Realme C2  does a far better job of isolating and highlighting the thing focused , because of a further depth sensor at the rear .

The 5-megapixel camera captures photos which will be described as okay at the best . In daylight selfies, we noticed that the Redmi 7A lightens skin colours without even applying any beautification filter, while background details clothed to be soft.

The photos look ok on the phone's screen, but on zooming in, one can easily notice the grainy texture. Low-light selfies have little in terms of detail and clothed noisy with poor colour reproduction.

The Redmi 7A can increase to 1080p video at 30fps. there's tons of jerkiness and focus hunting in videos, and hues don't look good either. Videos are grainy and washed-out overall.

The upgrade in battery size reflects within the battery endurance figures. With regular usage involving Internet connectivity throughout the day, social media usage, messaging, calling, and around half-hour of gaming, the Redmi 7A had no trouble making it past a full day with around 30 percent power still left in the dark on the average . In our HD video loop test, the Redmi 7A lasted 14 hours and 47 minutes. The bundled 10W charger takes a touch over two hours to completely charge the phone.

Conclusion

The Redmi 7A may be a major upgrade over the Redmi 6A with improvements in most areas. the planning is fresh and therefore the build quality is best too. The display is additionally decent for the selling price , and therefore the rear camera performs well under daylight.

The Redmi 7A's battery life is impressive and therefore the performance upgrade it brings is additionally noteworthy. There are occasional stutters when the phone is subjected to worry, but its performance remains on par with other phones during this segment. On the opposite hand, the selfie camera may be a little disappointing, and you'll even have to measure with ads in MIUI.

If you're looking to upgrade from a budget phone that's a couple of years old now or if you're a first-time smartphone user, the Redmi 7A is worth every paisa. aside from the Realme C2 , the Redmi 7A has no major competition out there. However, if you would like a more appealing design and a further camera for better portrait shots, the Realme C2 is that the one you ought to pick.