Cheap smartphones are a competitive market, and there are plenty of great affordable smartphones for less than £200 you can pick up if you don’t want to spend a lot. However, there are few for £100 that are much good – but Xiaomi has just made a concerted effort to corner that super-budget slice of the market.
Xiaomi’s new release is the Redmi 7A, the affordable alternative to the Redmi 7, and it costs a mere £99.99. That’s a price that will fit in with almost any budget, but you get some pretty impressive specs for this low price.
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What are the Redmi 7A specs?
The Redmi 7A has a 5.45-inch screen – that’s roughly the same size as the iPhone 8 Plus, so it’s a decent amount of display real estate – and it’s HDR+, which isn’t exactly incredible quality, but it’s still pretty good for a budget phone like this.
There’s a 12MP camera on the rear, and a 5MP front-facing snapper – Xiaomi states this front-facing camera works for face recognition unlocking, which is a pretty impressive feature for budget smartphones.
There’s no fingerprint scanner though, so if you don’t want to have to manually type in your password each time, you’re going to have to use this face unlocking.
The Redmi 7A’s budget nature is also shown through the micro USB port, which is a little outdated now that nearly all smartphones use USB-C, but there is a selection of budget phones that haven’t made that leap yet, like the Honor 20 Lite and Realme 3 Pro, so the Redmi 7A isn’t alone.
Inside the Redmi 7A, you’ll find a Snapdragon 439 chipset – that’s a pretty standard processor for affordable smartphones, but the phone’s performance will depend just as much on the software as the hardware, so we’ll have to check out how well the device runs games and intensive apps when we test it out.
Lastly, the battery pack in the device has a 4,000mAh capacity – that would be impressive for a mid-range or high-end smartphone packed with a big, sharp screen and advanced processor, but thanks to the middling specs in a few areas, it should last for ages here. Xiaomi itself states the phone’s battery life will last around two days.
The Redmi 7A is out now, and you can pick it up from Xiaomi’s website as well as its physical shop in London. As noted above it will set you back £99.99, which is the same price as the Redmi 6A goes for, so it’s definitely an affordable smartphone.
TechRadar has got the Redmi 7A in to test now, and we’ll let you know how it runs soon, once our full review goes live.
