Xiaomi Mi A2 long-term review

Design

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.

On the bottom side of the phone there are two grilles, but only one actually has a speaker behind it. The other is there just to house the microphone, and for the sake of symmetry.

Up top you'll notice something that isn't a staple on every smartphone out there - an IR blaster. You can use this to control your electronic devices at home, such as TVs, air con units, DVDs, set top boxes, and pretty much anything that accepts IR input. That's pretty cool and everything works very well with the included Mi Remote app.

Overall, the Mi A2's design isn't revolutionary by any stretch of the imagination but it looks nice and it works. The black model has an understated elegance to it that will feel right at home in any office setting. It also comes with a slightly grippier texture on the back compared to the gold one, and because of that it feels much nicer to touch. However, it does show more fingerprints - though not as bad as glass back phones do.

The build is very solid, with no creaks whatsoever. It's a very slim device and in the hand, it actually seems to be even thinner than it is because of the way the back tapers into the sides.

Display

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.

The panel is very good but not the best we've seen, by a long shot. Indoors it offers plenty of brightness and punchy blacks despite being an LCD, but sunlight legibility isn't its strong suit, to put it mildly. Squinting will be required. Also note that with polarized sunglasses on, the screen is only visible when you hold the phone in landscape orientation - baffling but true, given that most people use their phones in portrait orientation most times.

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.

Two additional things to keep in mind: first, at the moment the auto brightness doesn't learn from your manual adjustments, but that should be coming with the Android 9 Pie update.

Second, the oleophobic coating on top of the screen glass either isn't very good or it isn't there at all. You'll definitely see more oil accumulate faster on it than with other phones. Of course, that's a moot point if you use a screen protector of any kind.

Camera app

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.

Also in Settings you can toggle the viewfinder gridlines and choose whether to have low light photos automatically enhanced. Though the latter sounds good in theory, we really weren't able to figure out what it does.

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.

The viewfinder in the app doesn't offer you a 2x zoom toggle even though the secondary rear camera is reminiscent of the one in the OnePlus 6/6T, which does give you that option. Truth be told, it is perhaps better that this was left out since the secondary cam isn't a telephoto unit anyway. As it is, it seems like its role is simply to capture depth information for portrait mode shots and enhance low-light photos... allegedly.

The camera app has been fast and reliable every single time throughout this long-term review process. We've used it for weeks on end and never saw it crashing, freezing, not starting, or anything like that. So while the shots it creates may not be the best in the smartphone world today, at least you know it's always at your disposal to quickly snap something.

Camera samples

The Mi A2 uses the same 12MP main camera sensor as the Mi 8 and Mi Mix 2s (and Mi Mix 3), and this sensor is starting to become the Snapdragon 625 of camera modules in Xiaomi land (if you remember those memes).

The hardware is really only half the story because in this day and age software processing is at least as important in the mobile world. It's become even more so after Google launched its Pixel line of devices that showed the world what can be achieved by focusing more on camera software than hardware, and now every single manufacturer out there is busy improving its processing.

The Mi A2 churns out some nice looking shots during the daytime, which really shouldn't be a surprise. After all, this is a pretty good sensor and we've rarely seen any modern phone camera at this level that struggles with well-lit frames. You can toggle HDR on or off or set it to Auto in which case the phone will decide when it's needed and employ it. For all of our samples, HDR was on Auto.

Xiaomi Mi A2 daytime camera samples

While the A2's color rendition isn't 100% accurate, it does result in pleasing images though the images don't always have the pop and vividness we expected of the scene.

Detail is good and noise levels are generally low. Dynamic range is okay, but could have been better.

Switching to low light scenes, the Mi A2 does a decent job, but the quality does go down compared to very well lit shots, as you'd expect. Still, there are good amounts of detail in these pictures and no big loss of color or saturation. Photos are generally well exposed, but OIS would have been nice to have in order for blur not to become an issue even with a bit of camera shaking while capturing.

Xiaomi Mi A2 nighttime camera samples

The Portrait mode produces quite convincing bokeh scenes with both humans and non-humans at a variety of distances.

Xiaomi Mi A2 portrait mode samples

Selfies are good in daytime, and for night shots there's an LED flash on the front that you can turn on for some additional lighting - which you probably should as the flash-less pictures don't come out great, as our samples below can attest (all taken with flash off).

Xiaomi Mi A2 daytime selfies, Portrait mode off and on

Xiaomi does portrait mode with one sensor on the front camera, and the output is... usable, but perhaps only for social media sharing. If you zoom in at all you will quickly notice that edge detection isn't that good, and that results in some blurriness around the contour of the face.

Xiaomi Mi A2 nighttime selfies, Portrait mode off and on

Overallр the cameras on the Mi A2 are definitely very good for its price point, with selfie portraits being the only really disappointing part of the package. We've seen slightly better camera performance from phones such as the Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 AI Dual Camera and Redmi Note 6 Pro.