Friends+Design
- Nice, simple, understated design - feels quite solid
- Comfortably compact with a tall 5.45-inch display
- The curved edges render a good grip, and combined with the compact dimensions, make it easy to use one handed
- No fingerprint sensor (instead the Redmi 6A relies on face unlock and traditional PIN-based unlock)
Display
- Decent, tall 18:9 display with good brightness levels which make the panel sufficiently legible while indoors
Software
- MIUI is one of the better Android UIs - the new MIUI 9.6 comes with new features like picture-in-picture and improved notifications
Performance
- The Helio A22 is good enough for basic use, and arguably a bit better than the Snapdragon 425 used in the Redmi 5A, but still this is a phone only meant for basic messaging, browsing, and social media - push it more, or run too many apps, and you will find the phone struggling with the limited 2GB of RAM
Camera
- Decent rear camera for the price - the quality of photos is good enough when there’s ample light - it’s low on dynamic range and colours get lost in the shadows, but it shoots well exposed photos otherwise - indoors too, the camera algorithms work to enhance the saturation and contrast and that results in decent shots
- Decent front camera too - capable of taking good selfies in favourable lighting conditions
- The camera app is a bit sluggish though - it takes some time to focus and there’s a noticeable lag after you’ve shot the photo
Audio
- The speakers are placed at the back and sound gets muffled if you’re watching something holding the phone in the landscape format
Battery
- Good battery life, with a 3000mAh capacity, and helped by an efficient chipset - with moderate use, the phone should give you around one and a half days of usage
- No support for fast charging (though charging speed is still decent - about 2 hours from 0 to 100%)
More
- Dual 4G, Dual VoLTE support
- On the whole, the Redmi 6A is another good ultra-budget option from the Xiaomi camp, that does the basics quite well - it’s reasonably good for keeping in touch with your friends and family, surfing the web and even the occasional casual games - but of course, if you are looking for a more powerful phone, you will need to look at higher budgets
- 16GB of storage will quickly get limiting too, once you start storing any big apps/games/videos on your phone (and with time as app data accumulates) - so you will need to use the microSD storage, which will further hamper performance
