Xiaomi Mi A1 review

Telephony

The Xiaomi Mi A1 has the generic phonebook/dialer app with the list of favorites, the call log and the contacts are all tabs within the same app. The dialer is summoned with a tap on a button. Smart dial is supported too.

Favorites • Call log • Contacts • Dialer

Loudspeaker test

The speaker on the Xiaomi Mi A1 scored an Excellent mark in our loudness test, the same as the Mi 5X and Mi Max 2. The sound is rich and crisp, with good bass and clean high notes.

Google's Photos is your multimedia hub

There are no custom apps for handling multimedia content on the Mi A1. For gallery, you get Google Photos, which isn't half bad, though for most of its functionality you need to have cloud upload enabled. If you do, you'd be able to search for photos with words: "beach", "selfies" and even people by name.

The AI assistance goes on - Google will automatically take photos (or videos) it finds interesting and spruce them up. It will create collages, panoramas, filter-heavy images and short animations.

You can, of course, stay offline, and then the album, GIF, and collage creation can be done manually.

Google Photos

Photos has a built-in editor too, which offers filters, light and color correction and basic cropping and rotation. There's no option for doodling on the images, or for slapping overlays and such - but that's hardly a great loss, really.

Photos editor

There's no dedicated video player, Google Photos also takes care of that. Its feature set is basic at best - the most it can do is loop a video, and there is no subtitle support. You can, however, edit videos - trimming, 90-degree rotation, and stabilization are the available options.

Photos as video player

Google Music

Google Play Music is loaded on by default and it has come a long way. Even if you don't intend to subscribe to Google's streaming service, it still offers bells and whistles like album art, powerful searching algorithms and also the neat ability to upload your own tracks to the cloud and stream them for free.

Google Play Music

Audio output impresses

The Xiaomi Mi A1 audio output was absolutely identical to that of its MIUI-driven 5X sibling. The output was perfectly clean when attached to an active external amplifier and its loudness was among the highest we’ve seen in that case.

Volume remained just as impressive with headphones and the degradation was minimal too, so we were in for another excellent showing here. Stereo quality was the only notably affected reading and even that was above average for the occasion.

Xiaomi Mi 51 frequency response

You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.