Xiaomi, ever since its entry in the smartphone market in 2012, has perfected the art of manufacturing high-quality, feature-rich devices. It comes as no surprise that Xiaomi is neck-to-neck with Samsung in the number of units sold in India. Xiaomi focuses primarily on budget and mid-range devices as their demand is high in the Indian…
Xiaomi, ever since its entry in the smartphone market in 2012, has perfected the art of manufacturing high-quality, feature-rich devices. It comes as no surprise that Xiaomi is neck-to-neck with Samsung in the number of units sold in India. Xiaomi focuses primarily on budget and mid-range devices as their demand is high in the Indian market. Samsung, on the other hand, often neglects their lower end devices and focuses primarily on flagships and upper-mid-range smartphones.
Today we’ll take a look at three devices in the sub Rs. 10,000 segment. The demand for budget smartphones in India is phenomenally high, with newer markets opening up due to widespread 4G penetration. The devices in question are the Xiaomi Redmi Y1 Lite, Samsung Galaxy On7 and the Xiaomi Redmi 4.
The Xiaomi Redmi Y1 Lite, as the name indicates, is light in weight at 150g, owing to its metal hybrid body. The Redmi 4 weighs approximately the same and has a similar construction. The Samsung Galaxy On7 is a tad heavier, at 167 grams. The Redmi 4 has a better overall construction and has an ergonomic feel to it.
The Xiaomi Redmi Y1 Lite and Redmi 4 feature a 5.5-inch and 5-inch IPS LCD panel with a resolution of 720×1280 respectively. The Samsung Galaxy On7 also has a 5.5-inch TFT LCD panel, with the same resolution. Both the Xiaomi devices come with a layer of Corning Gorilla Glass, something which is absent in the Galaxy On7. The Redmi 4 is the better here too.
All three devices ship with a 13-megapixel primary camera and a 5-megapixel secondary camera. Coincidence? I think not. The differences lie in the minor details such as lens aperture. The Redmi Y1 Lite has a f/2.2 lens, the Galaxy On7 a f/2.1 lens and the Redmi 4 a f/2.0 lens for the primary camera and a f/2.0, a f/2.2 and a f/2.0 lens respectively, for the secondary camera. A lower value of ‘f’ means that the aperture is wider, allowing more light to pass through the lens, greatly aiding in low light photography. The Galaxy On7 is at an inherent disadvantage here, as it is a two-year-old phone. Once again, the Redmi 4 is the winner, as it only marginally outperforms the Redmi Y1 Lite owing to the identical camera sensors used in both devices.
The Redmi Y1 Lite uses a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 425 chip clocked at 1.2 GHz, the Galaxy On7 a Snapdragon 410 clocked at 1.2GHz and the Redmi 4 a Snapdragon 435 clocked at 1.4GHz. The Snapdragon 425 and 435 are nearly identical in performance, but the latter is marginally better. Also, the Adreno 505 GPU in the Redmi 4 is significantly better for gaming compared to the Adreno 308 and the Adreno 306 on the Redmi Y1 Lite and Galaxy On7 respectively.
Again, the Redmi 4 trumps the other two devices, with its 4,10mAh battery and rear-mounted fingerprint scanner. The Redmi Y1 Lite and Galaxy On7 lack a fingerprint scanner altogether and come with a 3,080mAh and 3,000mAh batteries respectively.
The Xiaomi Redmi 4 outperforms the other two devices across all segments and is clearly the better device here. The Redmi Y1 Lite is more on par with the Redmi 4A, a slightly scaled down version of the Redmi 4. Also worth noting is the fact that the Galaxy On7 has a newer variant that is priced significantly higher and packs better hardware. Devices such as the Redmi 4 and the Redmi note 4 are the reasons why Xiaomi is so well received in the Indian market.
