Xiaomi Mi A2 long-term review

Frustrations, niggles, annoyances

We'll start off this section by mentioning the obvious - it's a metal phone so it's slippery. There's no getting around this. The glass front is obviously slippery too, but nowhere near as much as the back. The black model is less slippery than the gold one because of its texture, but you'll still want to be careful not to accidentally have it slide out of your hand.

The fingerprint sensor is accurate if you make sure you press all the sides of your finger against it when you enroll it. However, while it is generally fast, sometimes it can take about a second to see the home screen, even 1.5 seconds at the worst of times. We've definitely used faster and more reliably speedy fingerprint sensors recently, but this one is by no means slow - it's just not up there with the quickest ones in the business. Then again maybe it isn't the sensor itself that's slow, but the software - we'll never know unless this gets radically improved after a software update. Again, this review is based on Android 8.1 Oreo.

The Mi A2 has one very odd design choice - it's very thin but with a huge camera bump that isn't even centered on the back. Typing while the phone is lying on a flat surface is not something that should be attempted, unless you enjoy the sound of wobble. And wobble it does, a lot. We can't remember another recent handset with a similar amount of wobble. There's a slim transparent case included in the box, and if you use that then the situation becomes slightly more bearable, but even that doesn't fully get rid of the hump.

This brings us to a rather obvious question - why couldn't Xiaomi just have made the phone thicker? That would've allowed it to incorporate a higher capacity battery and the camera island would've been flush with the rest of the back. Win-win, right? It's not like it already has ample milliamperage - 3,000 mAh isn't all that much and Xiaomi itself uses 4,000 mAh cells in other smartphones without them being too thick.

Next, we need to talk about the proximity sensor. Depending on how you use your phone, this might be anywhere from a minor annoyance to a huge design flaw, because it's placed quite far from the earpiece. From the edge of the sensor to the left edge of the earpiece we measured almost 1.5cm, and from the center of the sensor to the center of the earpiece it's 2cm. In your average smartphone this is more like 0.5cm to 1cm. Why is this important? Two words: phone calls. The whole point of the proximity sensor is to turn the screen off when you're in a call - so that your face or ears don't inadvertently trigger touch events on the display.

Depending on how you hold the phone to your ear, how well you want to hear the person you're talking to, and possibly even the shape of your ears and face, the experience of using the Mi A2 for phone calls might be the most frustrating one you've had in a very long time. This happened to us a lot: the screen turned on at random points while on a call and then the fun began. Once we ended a call, we'd often find the blue light filter or the flashlight activated (we had them as quick settings), the notification area pulled down, random apps started, and so on. All of this occurred because of those inadvertent touch actions triggered by the ear or the face.

It definitely doesn't help that the software is pretty slow to respond to the sensor's output, with every change of state it takes a bit for the OS to actually do what it's supposed to, which is turn the screen on or off. You can see just how slowly the switching occurs by covering the sensor with your finger while on a call, when the phone isn't to your face. The sensor is the leftmost, easier to spot on the color versions that are white on the front. If you have one with a black front, know that the position of the sensor is identical, you just can't see it.

If you don't take many calls and you prefer texting, this will not impact you to such a degree. Or maybe you are willing to put in the time and rehearse holding the phone in a mirror - towards the end of the long-term review period we realized that if we pressed on the back of the phone in the area corresponding to where the proximity sensor is on the front, we'd get way less screen turn-ons and random touches while on calls. But be advised - there's little tolerance here. Move the phone even by a few millimeters during the call, or press less hard on it, and you're back to inadvertent screen touch hell.

Next, here's a quick nitpick that's Google's fault and not Xiaomi's: the Mi A2 has rounded screen corners, but most of the time you'll only see the upper ones, because the navigation bar at the bottom has a black background. For the love of all OCD sufferers, it would've been nice if the upper part of that bar would be curved so as to emulate having curved screen corners right above it. Symmetry can be cool, but you're not getting that here.

Now let's move on to the notification LED. It's located in the top bezel of the screen, toward the right. The LED is white and can be quite annoying because it doesn't just have two modes of operation when it blinks - on and off. Instead, it does a crescendo blink thing, where it slowly grows its intensity through 4-5 different light levels.

That would be better if it was a smooth transition from one to the next, but it isn't. Oh, and you can't turn off the LED notification for low battery, so you're going to see this every time you go below 15%. It might not bother you at all, but we find it very distracting, and its maximum lighting level is a bit high for our taste. A notification LED should be seen, yes, but this one goes past that and can be too bright.

Finally, let's address the elephant in the room. Well, one of two actually, but the lack of a 3.5mm headset jack was covered in the Design section. Another thing that's missing from the Mi A2 is NFC. This is quite a big omission if you live in a country where mobile payments are a thing - and they're definitely starting to pick up some steam worldwide, so it's no longer just a bunch of territories where that's available.

NFC is missing

Whether you want to use Google Pay (if that is working in your country) or your bank's mobile app (if it enables mobile payments), you're simply out of luck with the Mi A2. This is clearly a cost-cutting measure on Xiaomi's part, and it may not be a huge issue in some places (like India where you can use UPI without NFC), but for other markets like pretty much the entirety of Europe it's an odd thing to leave out.