Xiaomi’s latest budget Android smartphone is an excellent buy, and today only is just £129.99. Find out more in our full review of the Xiaomi Mi A2 Lite.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Xiaomi’s Mi A2 Lite, because in China it’s better known as the Redmi 6 Pro. But the Mi A2 Lite is more appealing to a UK audience thanks to its easier ( now official UK) availability and more familiar operating system, running Android One rather than MIUI.
The pictures within this article are in fact of the Redmi 6 Pro, which was announced before the Android One version. It was sent to us by GearVita, where it costs £131.38. But the design and features are identical.
The Mi A2 Lite may be more expensive with a retail price of £179, but you don’t have any of the fuss importing goods from China might entail, such as factoring in import duty. It runs all Google services out of the box, and supports all UK 4G bands (not always a given with Xiaomi China ROM devices).
Right now Amazon has a special Black Friday discount on the Mi A2 Lite, bringing the price down to just £129.99. At this price it offers phenomenal value, with a 19:9 Full-HD+ display, dual rear cameras, an appealing design and decent performance. There’s loads of storage too, and space for more. ( See more Black Friday deals.)
It bests the Honor 9 Lite – the previous leader of our budget phones chart – in a number of ways, yet it comes in at a cheaper price. And that makes this phone well worth a second look.
Xiaomi’s budget line can be rather confusing. As well as this Redmi 6 Pro there’s the standard Redmi 6 and cheaper still Redmi 6A (the latter two are now both officially available in the UK). The 6 Pro or Mi A2 Lite has very little in common with either of those phones, as we’ll outline below. It looks a lot more like the mid-range 6X (which is confusingly the MIUI variant of the Android One-powered Mi A2), but the hardware is very different.
(Xiaomi also sells budget phablets in its Redmi line, but we won’t confuse the situation any further here – see best Xiaomi phones for more details.)
Also see: Best Xiaomi Deals
The Mi A2 Lite or Redmi 6 Pro is almost unrecognisable from its cheaper Redmi 6 and 6A brothers, instead looking a lot more like the Mi A2 – here the most notable difference is the lack of a screen notch on the Mi A2.
Even before you turn it on you’ll notice it has a metal body, whereas the cheaper models are plastic. It’s not a unibody design, and there’s a noticeable ridge between the screen’s plastic bezel and the metal frame. There are also plastic top and bottom end caps at the rear, which should improve cellular signal, but even despite this the overall feeling in the hand is much more premium.
At the back the A2 Lite has the same centrally mounted fingerprint scanner as the Redmi 6 and Mi A2, and like the latter its dual-camera sits vertically with the LED flash in the middle of the arrangement. The Redmi 6’s flash instead sits to the side looking more like an afterthought.
You’ll also spot the speaker grille that is rear-facing on the 6 and 6A has been moved to the bottom edge, with drilled holes sitting either side of the Micro-USB port – perhaps the biggest giveaway of this phone’s budget roots.
There is just one speaker here, with the other row of holes concealing one of the phone’s two mics – you’ll find the other on the top edge, where it also offers an IR blaster.
If we can’t have our phone’s speakers at the front then the next best place is at the bottom – on the rear as they appear on the two cheaper models they tend to fire sound directly into your palm. While we’re on the subject of audio, the three cheapest Redmi 6 phones offer a 3.5mm headphone jack at the top but the Mi A2 does not.
Unique to this phone in the Redmi 6 series is an enlarged slot-loading SIM tray that can accept both two SIMs (Nano) and a microSD card up to 256GB in capacity. Given that it already offers 64GB internally, storage is very generous, but we’re impressed that it doesn’t force us to choose between two SIMs and storage expansion.
The Mi A2 Lite or Redmi 6 Pro is a fraction taller than its cheaper siblings, but you wouldn’t expect Xiaomi to have been able to achieve so much with the extra room. Not only is there a 4,000mAh battery inside, which is 1,000mAh more than you get with the 6 or 6A, but Xiaomi has also been able to fit a larger screen – 5.84in up from 5.45in. The Mi A2 is fractionally larger still at 5.99in, and without the notch.
And here’s where we get to the major aesthetic difference within the Redmi 6 family. Whereas the 6 and 6A are fitted with HD panels, this model has a 19:9 full-HD+ display. There’s a notch at the top, as seen on the Mi 8, which includes the front-facing camera, earpiece and sensors.
The screen is fantastic quality for a budget phone, with its IPS display tech offering realistic colours, excellent clarity, and a maximum brightness of 456cd/m2 in our tests. More than anything else, though, its 19:9 aspect ratio and notch just make it look a lot more special.
The Mi A2 Lite/Redmi 6 Pro still has a fairly chunky bottom bezel, despite the fact its navigational buttons are onscreen (or not, if you opt for full-screen gestures within MIUI 9). But it’s smaller than you see on the Redmi 6 and 6A, and the side- and top bezels are pleasingly slim.
Overall it looks and feels great in the hand – not like a flagship, but also nothing like a budget phone.
We’ve already touched on the increased battery capacity, but numbers on a spec sheet don’t mean much when you also consider the fact this phone has a larger, higher-resolution screen and a faster Qualcomm processor than the 6 and 6A, which are both fitted with MediaTek chips.
We ran Geekbench 4’s battery test, in which it bested the Redmi 6 by a full 2 hours with a 10 hour 36 minute result. That’s a very good score in this test, and in the real world it’s not going to stumble getting you through dusk till dawn. Xiaomi claims this is a two-day battery, but in reality that’s going to depend on how much you use your phone.
None of the Redmi 6 models support wireless charging, but the Mi A2 Lite is supplied with a fast (not Quick Charge-fast) 10W adaptor in the box while the Mi A2 has Quick Charge support.
Xiaomi has fitted the Redmi 6 with a MediaTek Helio P22, and the Redmi 6 with a MediaTek A22. This Mi A2 Lite or 6 Pro comes with a mid-range Qualcomm Snapdragon 625, clocked at 2GHz and integrated with 650MHz Adreno 506 graphics. There’s 4GB of RAM, too, but 3GB of memory in the 6 and just 2GB in the 6A.
(In fact, the Redmi 6A’s core hardware really isn’t anything to get excited about with a meagre 16GB of storage. This phone’s 64GB looks colossal by comparison.)
So we probably don’t need to tell you that it outclasses the 6 and 6A in our benchmarks. The others got a lot closer in GFXBench, with the Redmi 6 actually taking the lead by a few frames, but that’s only because the Mi A2 Lite has a higher-resolution screen and therefore more pixels to push. We’d much rather play games and watch movies on its larger, Full-HD+ screen.
