Smart Android And Trik-Commenting on Andorid indeed never endless, because smart devices this one is often updated every certain amount of time. So that the market can always be garapnya menerinya with pleasure. And it is not denied if this device has become the lifestyle of each society. To not wonder if the 6th business information and many are turning to mobail smartphone. With Android which thoroughly dominated the mobile industry, choosing the best Android smartphone is almost identical to choose the best smartphone, period. But while Android phones have few real opponents on other platforms, internal competition is intense.
Introduction
The Redmi series is Xiaomi's bread and butter; the company sells a boatload of these every year because these are by far some of the most affordable smartphones on the market while at the same time offering reasonable features and performance.
This year, Xiaomi has released the new Redmi 6 and Redmi 6A models, which are updates for last year's Redmi 5 and 5A. Launched at the same great prices as last year, the new models feature an updated design, larger displays, newer 12nm chipsets and a few other bells and whistles.
Xiaomi Redmi 6 specs
- Design: Polycarbonate body
- Display: 18:9, 5.45-inch, 1440x720 IPS LCD, 295 PPI, 1000:1 contrast ratio
- Chipset: MediaTek Helio P22, 8x Cortex-A53 at 2.0GHz, PowerVR Rogue GE8320
- Memory: 32/64GB storage (expandable up to 256GB), 3GB LPDDR3 RAM
- Rear Camera: 12MP + 5MP, f2.2, PDAF, LED flash, 1080p30 video
- Front Camera: 5MP, f2.2, 1080p30 video
- Connectivity: Dual SIM, LTE, Wi-Fi 802.11n, Bluetooth 4.2, A-GPS/GLONASS/BeiDou, microUSB, 3.5mm audio
- Battery: 3000mAh, 5W charging
- Software: Android 8.1, MIUI 10
- Misc: Fingerprint sensor, face unlock, FM radio
Xiaomi Redmi 6A specs
- Design: Polycarbonate body
- Display: 18:9, 5.45-inch, 1440x720 IPS LCD, 295 PPI, 1000:1 contrast ratio
- Chipset: MediaTek Helio A22, 4x Cortex-A53 at 2.0GHz, PowerVR Rogue GE8300
- Memory: 16GB storage (expandable up to 256GB), 2GB LPDDR3 RAM
- Rear Camera: 13MP, f2.2, PDAF, LED flash, 1080p30 video
- Front Camera: 5MP, f2.2, 1080p30 video
- Connectivity: Dual SIM, LTE, Wi-Fi 802.11n, Bluetooth 4.2, A-GPS/GLONASS/BeiDou, microUSB, 3.5mm audio
- Battery: 3000mAh, 5W charging
- Software: Android 8.1, MIUI 10
- Misc: Face unlock, FM radio
If the names weren't a hint already, the two phones are actually very similar, with the Redmi 6A being the cheaper of the two and featuring some key cutbacks to achieve the more aggressive pricing.
We'll be taking a look at both of these simultaneously today, pointing out the similarities and, more importantly, the differences, as we go along.
Design
The basic body of the Redmi 6 and the Redmi 6A is actually the same. The two phones look nearly identical and have nearly identical dimensions. The difference comes from the presence of a second camera and the fingerprint sensor on the back of the more expensive Redmi 6, which is also 1g heavier.
Compared to last year's models, both phones feature a more modern design with an 18:9 aspect ratio but thankfully no notch (not yet, anyway).
Our review units were in Gold for the Redmi 6 and Black for the Redmi 6A, which allowed us to see the bezel differences on the front. The bezels are, of course, identical in size but because the Gold model, along with the Rose Gold and Blue, have white bezels, they tend to look far bigger in practice and are significantly more distracting.
Not only are they noticeable when the screen is off, it looks like your content has a frame when the display is on. In comparison, the black bezels blend perfectly with the display when it's off and even when it's on they don't attract much attention to themselves. You can see in the pictures how the Redmi 6A actually looks smaller than the Redmi 6 despite the two being the same size.
Front side
The glass on the front is a standard affair with no curve edges. It is scratch-resistant although we don't know the brand name. The glass also has adequate oleophobic coating.
Along the side are the power and volume control buttons on the right, headphone jack on the top, a SIM and microSD card slot along with a separate slot for the second SIM on the left and the microUSB connector on the bottom.
Left • Top • Right • Bottom
The back of both phones seems to be made out of one piece of plastic with lines running along the top and bottom. Near the top is the camera bump, which extrudes a fair bit from the back. The Redmi 6 has dual camera system with a flash on the side and the Redmi 6A has a single camera with the flash replacing the second camera lens. The glass doesn't cover the LED to avoid refractions while firing the flash.
The back of both phones is painted plastic that seem to mimic the look of metal but not convincingly enough on the light-colored models. The black does look quite good, though, and is visually indistinguishable from metal until you actually feel it.
Both phones have their single loudspeaker placed on the back, which is a rather unfortunate position all things considered. The fingerprint sensor on the back of the Redmi 6 falls perfectly under the index finger if you rest the phone in your palm but a bit of a stretch if you rest the phone on your pinky finger. A slightly lower position could have worked out for both.
Back side
Both phones are pretty compact and lightweight. They are plasticky and don't feel especially premium in hand but they are still well put together and nothing creaks or rattles. We wouldn't even bother putting these in a case and there isn't one provided in the box, either.
Display
Both the Redmi 6 and the Redmi 6A have identical displays. It's a 5.45-inch IPS LCD panel with a resolution of 1440x720 in 18:9 aspect ratio. At 295 PPI, the pixel density is just shy of the 300 PPI mark we generally look for in smartphones these days for an adequate viewing experience.
Display settings
And adequate, it is. The overall display quality is perfectly acceptable for phones in this price range. The resolution is mostly fine, provided you don't stare at the screen too closely. The color accuracy at the Standard picture setting seemed really good to the eye. The displays also get reasonably bright outdoors and also have good viewing angles.
Overall, not much to complain about. For the price, most users will be happy with the display on offer here.
Battery Life
Again, both phones here have the same 3000mAh battery. The battery life is also similar between the two, with about 4-5 hours of display time and over 20 hours of overall battery life, which should last about a day for most users. It's not the best battery life in the segment - for that you'll have to consider a Redmi Note - but it's not unreasonable, either.
Battery options
Software
Both devices shipped to us with MIUI 9. However, during the course of our testing, both received the MIUI 10 update, which is the latest iteration of Xiaomi's skin. MIUI 10 comes with a handful of new features, mostly notably a new design and improved app performance.
The UI is the most obvious change in the new version, with several parts of the UI getting a fresh coat of paint while other mostly remaining the same.
The launcher is one of those things that has mostly remained the same. You still can't press and hold on app icons to access app shortcuts. Third party app icons still have an ugly square border around them, even though Xiaomi's own apps no longer have a border anymore in the new default theme. You still can't choose to enable a standard app drawer. The launcher remains one of the weakest aspects of MIUI.
MIUI 10 Launcher
One random issue on both of our units was that most of the built-in wallpapers were extremely blurry and unusable.
The notification shade has been improved. It slides down with a new animation and immediately you'll notice the new brightness control, which is much bigger and easier to access. Another swipe down expands the toggles. You can arrange them and add more but you still can't have fewer than eleven of them at any time for some reason, even if you don't intend to use all of them.
Notifications • Multitasking
The biggest change is to the overview or multitasking menu. The apps now tile across the screen in a grid that makes better use of the screen space. No longer do you have just one and a half app window wasting your viewable area, requiring you to constantly scroll even to access the third or fourth app in the list. The new arrangement shows the recent four apps at the top, making switching easy.
We also noticed Xiaomi finally added support for the notification channel feature introduced in Android 8.0. This gives you more fine-grained control over an app's notifications should the developer choose to enable such additional options.
Apart from that, several of the built-in apps also got a redesign. There is a new Clock app, along with new Calculator, Weather, Security, and Browser apps. Many of the others also received a nip and tuck here and there.
New app design in MIUI 10
The volume adjustment UI has also been overhauled. You get a larger slider when you press the volume button that not by default adjusts the media volume. You can also choose to quickly put the phone in silent mode. Another button shows all three volume bars so you can adjust the ringtone or alarm volume as well from within any app. It's pretty cool.
Redesigned volume UI in MIUI 10
Apart from that, there's not much else new we noticed. Several of the other apps are either the same or so slightly changed they look the same.
While Xiaomi's yearly Botox injections are nice and appreciated, it seems the company rarely ever chooses to address the major issues with the UI. The launcher as we mentioned before is absolutely abysmal. The Settings app is still a confusing mess to anyone who isn't a long-time Xiaomi user.
There's also the whole app situation. Xiaomi seems okay to seemingly have a duplicate app for every Google app. It makes sense in China where Google apps aren't available but there is no reason to ship the MIUI version of the Google apps in other markets, yet, here we are.
There are two browsers, two music players, two photo galleries, two keyboards, and even two app stores. The only purpose Xiaomi's own app store serves is updating its own apps, which, as we've seen on LG phones, can be done in other ways.
If the built-in apps weren't bad enough, the phones also come loaded with third-party apps. If you count the UC Browser that's also installed, the phones actually come with three web browsers out of the box. The only good thing about this situation is that you can uninstall most of them and Xiaomi makes it very easy to install multiple apps all at once. However, some apps cannot be uninstalled.
One of these apps is the new default keyboard Facemoji, which is a third-party app also available on the Play Store. You are made to agree to the keyboard's terms and conditions of collecting user data when you set up the phone and you have little choice in the matter as without accepting you can't go any further in the setup process. There's also Gboard, which comes pre-installed, but you have to switch to it manually and even after that you can't actually uninstall or disable Facemoji from your phone.
But including third-party apps isn't the only source of revenue for Xiaomi. Unfortunately, many of the phone's built-in apps also have ads and promotional content baked in, none of which can be removed. The web browser will also routinely push notifications that include ads. It feels like you bought a trial version of a phone with ads instead of the real thing for the full price.
Ads, promotional content and bloatware in MIUI
Speaking of notifications, many of Xiaomi's stock apps constantly harass you with notifications. Most apps will push a notification every now and then to tell you to enable some feature or the other. Xiaomi's app store will constantly keep telling you to install their promoted apps.
As someone now completely aware of this, the first thing we ever do with any new Xiaomi phone now is disable the notification for every app that comes built-in. However, this cannot be done for some apps, which don't let you adjust their notification settings. Still, you can pretty much turn off 99% of them and get a much more peaceful experience, something we greatly recommend if
Unfortunately, most users will never do any of this and will just suffer through the constant bombardment of notifications and advertisements among all the bloatware filled mess that is MIUI.
Performance
The main difference between the Redmi 6 and the Redmi 6 is the chipset and memory situation. The Redmi 6 has a more powerful MediaTek Helio P22 while the cheaper Redmi 6A has a MediaTek Helio A22. The Redmi 6 also comes with 3GB memory while the Redmi 6A is limited to just 2GB.
The difference in performance between the two phones is more than we'd like to see. The Redmi 6 actually works reasonably well and for day to day use is actually quite usable. It's not a perfectly smooth, stutter-free experience but even when it does stutter, it picks itself up with grace and continues working. For most users, performance on offer here should be satisfactory for the price.
The Redmi 6A, on the other hand, performs rather poorly. It's consistently slow through the UI, with constant stuttering and slowdowns. This makes using the phone an absolute chore, even in its brand new, out of the box form. Pretty much everything you do on this phone is met with some amount of slowdown and stuttering. The performance is simply not acceptable, even for the price.
GeekBench 4.1 (multi-core)
Higher is better
- Realme 1
5741 - Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 AI Dual Camera
4918 - Xiaomi Redmi 5
4018 - Realme 2
3881 - Xiaomi Redmi 6
3639 - Xiaomi Redmi 6A
2450 - ASUS ZenFone Max (M1) (ZB556KL)
2434
GeekBench 4.1 (single-core)
Higher is better
- Realme 1
1511 - Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 AI Dual Camera
1329 - Xiaomi Redmi 6
820 - Xiaomi Redmi 6A
819 - Realme 2
790 - Xiaomi Redmi 5
766 - ASUS ZenFone Max (M1) (ZB556KL)
667
AnTuTu 7
Higher is better
- Realme 1
138524 - Nokia 5.1 Plus
119428 - Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 AI Dual Camera
115195 - Realme 2
75434 - Xiaomi Redmi 6
75182 - Xiaomi Redmi 6A
61660 - ASUS ZenFone Max (M1) (ZB556KL)
57845
GFX 3.0 Manhattan (1080p offscreen)
Higher is better
- Realme 1
20 - Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 AI Dual Camera
16 - Nokia 5.1 Plus
16 - Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 (S625)
9.9 - Xiaomi Redmi 6
9.6 - Xiaomi Redmi 5
9.4 - Realme 2
9.3 - ASUS ZenFone Max (M1) (ZB556KL)
7 - Xiaomi Redmi 6A
6.3
GFX 3.0 Manhattan (onscreen)
Higher is better
- Nokia 5.1 Plus
29 - Realme 1
20 - Xiaomi Redmi 5
18 - Xiaomi Redmi 6
17 - Realme 2
16 - Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 AI Dual Camera
15 - ASUS ZenFone Max (M1) (ZB556KL)
14 - Xiaomi Redmi 6A
12 - Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 (S625)
9.7
Basemark X
Higher is better
- Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 AI Dual Camera
14799 - Nokia 5.1 Plus
13873 - Realme 1
10880 - Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 (S625)
10446 - Xiaomi Redmi 5
9953 - Xiaomi Redmi 6
8036 - ASUS ZenFone Max (M1) (ZB556KL)
7606 - Realme 2
6703 - Xiaomi Redmi 6A
5193
Basemark OS 2.0
Higher is better
- Realme 1
1940 - Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 AI Dual Camera
1925 - Nokia 5.1 Plus
1868 - Xiaomi Redmi 5
1222 - Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 (S625)
1050 - Realme 2
1039 - Xiaomi Redmi 6
957 - ASUS ZenFone Max (M1) (ZB556KL)
895 - Xiaomi Redmi 6A
837
Camera
The camera is the other point of difference between the two phones. The Redmi 6 has a dual camera system on the back comprising of a 12MP primary camera and a 5MP depth sensor. The Redmi 6A has a single 13MP camera on the back. Both phones have identical 5MP cameras on the front.
The camera app is also identical on the two phones and have the same feature set. The app was redesigned recently but does not have any new design or features for MIUI 10.
Camera app
You can change the camera mode from the slider at the bottom like on iOS. At the top are controls for the flash, HDR, color filters and additional options such as timer, tilt-shift, night mode, scene setting, Beautify and Xiaomi's Straighten option that corrects camera tilt by cropping the frame using accelerometer.
The camera app also has a basic manual mode that consists of manual white balance, manual focus, shutter speed, and ISO control.
In terms of image quality, we were surprised to see that the cheaper Redmi 6A had the better camera. The 13MP camera on the Redmi 6A had more detail and less noise level in the images. In some cases, the Redmi 6A camera also had better colors and white balance. Between the two, the Redmi 6A definitely took better images.
Redmi 6A camera samples
Apart from the differences, both cameras captured decent looking images with good color, contrast and white balance. The level of detail was good and the dynamic range was mostly okay. The images did get a bit noisy in the shadows but we prefer that to overly aggressive noise reduction.
Redmi 6 camera samples
Both cameras also delivered decent image quality indoors and in low light situations. The night mode automatically enables itself in low light but can be disabled or enabled manually.
The camera app also has a fairly strong HDR mode. It tends to aggressively lift shadow detail, which gives the final image an over processed look. In most cases, you can get by without having to use the feature, however, as the cameras have decent dynamic range on their own.
HDR Off • HDR On
Where the Redmi 6 trumps over its cheaper sibling is in having a secondary camera for portrait mode. The portrait mode performance was surprisingly good on the Redmi 6, with good subject detection and the background blur wasn't too aggressive.
Portrait mode on Redmi 6
Xiaomi's software is definitely better than many of its rivals when it comes to processing background depth information and the end results were always satisfactory. We still wish, however, that Xiaomi had included the clearly superior 13MP sensor from the Redmi 6A instead of the 12MP unit that they did on the Redmi 6.
Both phones record 1080p video at 30fps. The videos from both phones look decent overall. The Redmi 6A videos were ever so slightly sharper while the Redmi 6 videos looked like they were shot at a lower resolution. The Redmi 6A were also warmer at times. Both phones claimed to have software image stabilization, which incurred a heavy crop but didn't do a good job as even steady handheld videos had shake in them.
Verdict
Both the Redmi 6 and the Redmi 6A are Xiaomi's entry-level smartphones in markets like India. The Redmi 6A is the cheapest phone the company sells and is one of the cheapest smartphones you can buy today.
While looking at the spec sheet it's easy to feel like you are getting a great deal for the price, in reality, that may not be the case.
In case of the Redmi 6A, the phone is very affordable but Xiaomi has cut corner in key areas such as chipset and memory, which results in rather poor everyday performance. The phone just feels ponderous to use and that's today. A year or two down the line it will likely be insufferable.
That's a shame because some of the other aspects of the phone, such as the design, the display, and even the camera are actually pretty good. Had it been armed with a faster chipset, this would have been a good entry-level smartphone.
As for the Redmi 6, the higher price does get you better performance and fixes some of our complaints with the Redmi 6A. For us, this is the ideal starting point in the current Xiaomi lineup as the Redmi 6A is just too slow for us to recommend to anyone. The Redmi 6 walks like line between affordability and usability much better without any significant compromises.
But it wouldn't be a crime to talk about these devices without bringing forth the many issues with MIUI. Setting aside the differences from stock Android or the slow updates to major version of Android, there is now a growing concern and that is with the amount of advertising and promotional content that is now being stuffed into every MIUI device.
If you've ever wondered why Xiaomi is able to price its phones as well as it does, this here is the answer. Many of the stock apps now have advertisement built-in. Others have promotional content from various sites and services. And on top of that, there is a bevy of pre-installed third-party apps and services from other brands.
This is no different than what Amazon does with the Kindle, where there is a version available at a lower price provided you see an ad on the screen when it's not in use. Except that's explicit while Xiaomi is much more subtle. Or sneaky, depending upon how you want to look at it.
It's like having a billboard in your pocket, constantly telling you to buy things or use something or the other from so and so brand. It wears you down and almost amounts to harassment as some of these apps are not at all considerate about how often they will notify you to check them out.
This is absolutely a key aspect to consider when buying any MIUI device henceforth and it seems especially bad on these budget phones. It also seems to be getting worse with time.
With that in mind, you may just want to check out some other devices on the market. Unless you are fine with all of that, in which case you may want to go with the Redmi 6.
Xiaomi Redmi 6 Pros
- Low price
- Compact design
- Decent performance
- Decent camera quality
Xiaomi Redmi 6 Cons
- Software riddled with ads and bloatware
Xiaomi Redmi 6A Pros
- Extremely low price
- Compact design
- Good camera quality
Xiaomi Redmi 6A Cons
- Poor performance
- Software riddled with ads and bloatware
- No fingerprint reader
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