Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Xiaomi Redmi Note 5A Review – The Next Generation?”.
Today, I am super excited today, we’re talking about the brand new xiaomi redmi note 5 a and this could be a very important release for the company, and the first thing you might notice here is that the packaging is very small, very compact and very simple internally. We just have the smartphone on top followed by an instruction manual, micro, USB cable charging, adapter and a sim ejector tool, and that’s not really what we normally expect from a redmi note smartphone, but there’s a reason for that. While xiaomi has called this, the redmi note. 5, a it is not a replacement for the redmi note 4 as seen here.
So whilst this phone does have note in its name now, it’s not really a note phone in anything but its size and it’s actually a replacement for the more budget oriented redmi. For a now, let’s start by talking about that display, because at 5.5 inches and with a resolution of 1280 by 720, it was definitely raising some eyebrows, but i have to say after using it, i don’t think it’s as bad as you might expect it to be. Whilst text and images don’t have quite the same definition that they would on full HD or quad HD panels, where it really doesn’t look bad, in fact, even up close to the untrained eye, people really can’t tell much of a difference on first inspection.
It also looks pretty dim when it comes to color reproduction, but actually that’s more of the effect the company was trying to create if he or she changed the wallpaper to something a little bit more vibrant and punchy. Then the screen adjusts accordingly, it’s actually capable of a fair bit of contrast, but actually it’s a stylistic choice for them to have gone with low contrast. On top of that, something I really do like is that built into the settings you can control not only the contrast, but also the color temperature of the display, so because I tend to prefer cooler colors as opposed to warmer. It actually allows me to do that. It’S not a hugely bright display, so you may have a little bit of problem in broad daylight and also it does have some rather chunky bezels. What I do like there is how seamlessly they blend with the actual display.
So, especially when the screen is off, it does look like quite a nice uniform piece of glass, something else you’re, probably going to notice pretty quickly is that for the backplate Xiaomi has gone with a plastic material. Now they have coated the whole thing with a metallic spray paint. So for the most part visually speaking, you really can’t tell the only difference you will notice is it just doesn’t have that cold to the touch feeling that actual metal does now being a plastic body? It does have a little bit of flex to it applying pressure in any direction.
You do feel it give way a little bit, but not in a concerning way, not as if it’s just about to break but more a case that it’s just not quite as firm as a metal counterpart. A thoughtful inclusion here are the chrome accents on the top and the bottom of the smartphone. To be honest, they make a rather dull body, really a lot more interesting. They bring it to life. One real plus point from the use of these slightly cheaper materials is the fact that the device is completely unobtrusive, weighing just 150 grams and with a thickness of seven point, six millimeters combined with that pebble light design means it fits very seamlessly in the hands. It feels comfortable, you can pretty much forget it’s there, so there are actually two models for the redmi note: 5.
A we’ve got the lower end, one here with the snapdragon 425 and two gigs of ram, and whilst it would be very easy to read the spec sheet and think holy cow, this phone only has 2 gigs of ram. It must be really slow. That’S not necessarily the right way to look at it.
We’Ve been somewhat spoiled by phones which have 4 gigs of ram and 6 gigs of ram, even at a fairly entry-level price point, but truth be told a lot of the time. This doesn’t really add anything to performance, pairing loads of ram with a mid-range cpu you’re, still only really going to get mid-range performance. So what xiaomi is really done here is created a lower mid-range spec, but a balanced one.
So that essentially means you can’t still play more or less every game you want to. You might lose a few frames and some of the more demanding 3d ones. You might lose a lot of frames on the really demanding 3d ones, but more or less you will be able to do everything.
We’Ve got an unto T score of 36 thousand, which is suitably not very high, and you can sometimes feel this lack of power when it comes to opening applications. Sometimes there is a little bit of a delay. Sometimes when you’re multitasking you will have to reload, even rather recent applications, but even then the overall experience does feel quite snappy and very smooth. So even though it’s not the most powerful phone, it’s not a slow phone. The camera on the phone seems to be a pretty similar deal.
Talk we had on the redmi for a, which is to say it’s. A 13 megapixel sensor catches a fair bit of detail in quite a fast shutter time now, due to some quite noticeable software upgrades. Since the ribbon before a released shutter time has been improved quite significantly so you’ll find you can take some pretty vibrant, pretty blur-free and detailed photos and contrast, isn’t too bad either zooming in you can still detect a fair bit of detail on the shots, but sometimes They do come out a tad overexposed and also it’s tough, to actually find focus on finer objects. The video, on the other hand, really isn’t very even as far as 1080p goes, it’s quite a noisy image. You end up getting now, even though the redmi note 5.
It was announced at the exact same time as MIUI 9. Unfortunately, this model is stuck with MIUI 8. For now, which is to say, you get a nice colorful operating system with lots of customisation options, but also, at the same time, lots of bloatware to the default. Apps, like the contacts messaging and calendar, all work as they should, and if you want from the home screen, you can now swipe left and you’ve got access to a card based layout.
So you can attach cards that tell you the weather or directions to your home. Address and lots more so taking a look at the chin of the phone you can see, we’ve got three capacitive buttons: we’ve got a back a home and a menu and between these buttons you’ve pretty much got every command. You want on your Android phone now. A lot of people, though, do prefer the versatility of having on-screen buttons, and the other trade-off of this is on the base model of the 5a there’s.
Actually, no fingerprint scanner on the phone with a battery capacity of just over 3000 milliamp hours. It actually lasted a surprisingly long time with the screen set to maximum brightness and using Wi-Fi to do a lot of downloading benchmarking testing applications. I was still able to get just over a day’s use, so that’s considered heavy usage, so it’s fairly impressive, considering its battery capacity in terms of storage, let’s just say when not exactly endowed with too much of it. The base model comes with 16 gigs internally and once you factored in Android as well as MIUI. On top of that, what you end up with is closer to 10 gigabytes, which, for all your photos, music and media and applications, isn’t really a lot. The saving grace is, of course, that we do have capacity for a microSD card up to two five six, so there we go. That is the redmi note, 5 a and, to be honest as convoluted as this naming convention is, there is one message that stands out that this is a polished, solid and respectable device from an our well established company. It will offer you decent performance, decent, build quality and a decent camera. In no way is it going to inspire or amaze you, but at its price point very few phones do thanks for watching I’m snooze, the boss and I’ll catch you in the next one. .