Introduction
Second time's the charm, right? That's certainly what Xiaomi would have you believe. The second coming of its Android One line is here, but is it any good? You still might not be very used to the concept of pairing Xiaomi hardware with unadulterated Google software - after all, the company's MIUI is one of the heaviest Android skins you can find. But there's no trace of that in the Mi A2, and this device is definitely as intriguing as its predecessor, which was Xiaomi's debut album in the Android One collection.
So we have a handset that is unashamedly borrowing looks from other Xiaomi mid-rangers (and is obviously "inspired" in the design of its rear camera island by a company with a fruity name), but it eschews the meme-worthy Snapdragon 625 chipset to go with the more modern and more potent SD660. That seems like a winning combo on paper, especially at this price point. Sometimes though, things that sound good in theory turn out to be letdowns in practice.
That's where this long-term review comes in - to tell you whether Xiaomi has a winner on its hands or not. Despite how obvious the answer to that question may seem, there are always things that can show up when you live with a device for a long period of time, things that can't be anticipated by a spec sheet or that don't come up in our normal, lab test-driven review process.
The Mi A2 is a mid-range Xiaomi smartphone, and these have all looked quite similar for a while now. It's clear that the same general design language is used throughout the roster, which might help speed up development of new models and cut on some costs. We're not here to argue with that concept, but we will note that there's nothing incredibly impressive about the way the phone looks.
That's not to say it has a bad design. The metal unibody is still used by many devices at this price point, which can't afford to go with the more expensive and heavier glass backs that are so very trendy at the high-end of the market at the moment. Since you get a metal back there's no wireless charging support as these two don't go well together.
If you're looking for a 3.5mm headset jack, here's some bad news - it's nowhere to be found. We aren't going to debate how much sense that makes, but device makers' penchant for removing the port is slowly but surely making its way to mid-range handsets too. You do get a dongle in the box, for what it's worth, and it... works. Of course, if you're a die-hard peruser of wired headsets the sheer inconvenience of not being able to listen and charge the phone at the same time might drive you away from this device, unfortunately.
The Mi A2 manages to be just a tad narrower than the Mi A1 while packing a larger screen. Don't judge the size difference by the diagonal as the Mi A2 has jumped onto the tall 18:9 aspect ratio bandwagon, which is fitting for 2018 but doesn't make it easy to compare to phones with 16:9 screens. The screen surface area numbers paint the more accurate picture: 82.6 cm2 for the Mi A1, 92.6 cm2 for the Mi A2.
Somehow we were spared the notch, and that's something to be praised right now since even cheap(er) phones are starting to sport that 'feature'. On the other hand, the Mi A2's bezels are looking pretty retro even though they've been substantially reduced compared to its predecessor.
The mobile world is currently working to eradicate as much of the bezels as possible at a breakneck pace, and only a few months after its release the Mi A2 already looks a bit dated from this point of view. The fingerprint scanner is on the back, and it's well placed but we can't help wonder why it wasn't built into the bottom screen bezel instead since it's definitely large enough to accommodate such a sensor with no issue.
Xiaomi's Android One phone for 2018 goes with 1080x2160px resolution. That gives you plenty of pixels, especially considering how much the Mi A2 costs. The display has rounded corners because that's trendy.
Long story short: it's a mid-range LCD on a mid-range phone. It's fine but won't win any awards. Its pixel density is high enough that you're unlikely to be bothered by seeing individual pixels, and it gets the job done. Unless you have a device with a top of the line panel right next to your Mi A2, you won't be able to tell the difference.
Camera
The Mi A2's camera app will look quite familiar if you've used any recent smartphone. Camera app design seems to have become very similar regardless of which manufacturer made it. So you get the viewfinder with swipe-able modes, the last of which is Manual if you want to tweak every possible setting before your shot.
You can double tap the power button to quickly launch the camera app. The camera settings aren't that many. If you shoot in anything but the Manual mode you won't even have direct control over the resolution - you can just pick between High, Standard, and Low for Picture quality, and whether you want the frame's aspect ratio to be 4:3, 16:9, or 18:9.
Conversely, in the 'More' hamburger menu in the viewfinder you can enable the HHT mode which will take multiple photos in low light and then create a shot with minimal noise by stitching those together - we've seen that feature on many Xiaomi phones already. However, even with this setting manually turned on for every single one of our nighttime camera samples (which you can see below), HHT never actually triggered on our Mi A2 for some reason.
Battery life
The Mi A2's battery endurance seems to have improved by quite a lot after the October 2018 security update - and that's yet another reason why you should install these as soon as you get them, sometimes they pack in other optimizations too. With this in mind, we'll only discuss our experience after we applied said update.
Putting just a 3,000 mAh battery in this phone to make it this thin is one of those decisions we really can't wrap our heads around, especially since it left the Mi A2 with the biggest camera hump we've ever seen. But the small cell does do an admirable job of keeping the lights on, and the phone's numbers may positively surprise you.
In our use - with 12-16 hours off the charger in any day, while being connected to Wi-Fi for most of that and an hour or two of 4G, Bluetooth always on with an hour or two of streaming music, and location services always on - we've constantly seen at least 4 hours of screen on time. The record was 5 hours and 27 minutes with 35% battery left. Had we let it go all the way down to 0, that means we could've achieved over 7 hours of screen on time, and this is right up there with the best performers in the Android world.
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