After a long string of leaks and teasers, the successor to Ultra-budget Redmi A1 landed in the Kenyan smartphone market about a week ago. Branded as Xiaomi Redmi A1 Plus, the phone has a bonus security feature, a semi-premium design, a powerful MediaTek Chip, and a large battery.
Now, the brand’s super-budget entry is on its way to the subcontinent. Based on the company’s typical debut cycle, the Plus edition of the Xiaomi Redmi A1 might also land on Pakistani shores shortly after its Indian debut, set for October 14th. Here’s a detailed overview of its features.
You can judge from the images that the Redmi A1 Plus is just a re-design of the base A1 with an added fingerprint scanner on the back. The phone has soft black, blue, and green shades on a leather texture backplate to give it a premium appearance.
Despite its low price tag, the phone feels well-built and bares several decent specs. Probably the central selling point of this device is its large 5000mAh battery, which the company claims will last for 30 hours of video playback and up to 30 days on standby.
In second place comes the display setup; a flat 6.52-inch IPS panel bearing HD+ resolution, 400nits max brightness, 120Hz touch sampling rate, and 70% NTSC color gamut. The black bars on each side of the screen are a bit chunky. The upper bezel has a notch housing a 5MP selfie snapper. Overall, the new addition to the Xiaomi price list packs good value for money.
With a capable enough MediaTek Helio A22 processor, the Redmi A1 Plus comes pre-equipped with fast 3GB of LPDDR4X memory, 32GB of eMMC 5.1 storage, and PowerVR GPU to handle visual graphics and gaming.
The camera setup is a bit underwhelming here. The system uses a primary 8MP sensor and a secondary 0.3MP depth sensor to record 1080p videos at 30FPS. But it might compensate for photography using AI features baked into its lightweight Android 12 GO UI. Its 3GB plus 32GB variant expectedly costs around 19,000 PKR.