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Review: Xiaomi Redmi A5 - How good is the phone for 1300 kronor

In its cheapest version, the Redmi A5 costs 1290 kronor. Depending on how you use the phone, it may still be fully sufficient.

Elias Nordling
Published

The best mobile phones from Samsung and Apple today cost well over 10,000 kronor. We often recommend mobiles at half that price as excellent choices. Even at a quarter of the price, you can find fully adequate mobile phones. But what about a tenth of the price? Enter the Xiaomi Redmi A5. It is sold in its cheapest version for 1,290 kronor, but with 3 gigabytes of RAM and 64 gigabytes of storage. We have tested the variant with 4 gigabytes of RAM and 128 gigabytes of storage. The extra gigabyte of RAM may potentially make a difference in performance.

Because it is not a fast phone. The Unisoc processors that drive the phones seem to be from a bygone era, and only Doro saves it from being the slowest mobile we've tested this year in our performance tests. You never forget that it is a budget model, it is noticeable in every swipe and tap you make. And yet... it feels quite okay.

The system in the phone is Android 15 Go Edition. This is Google's Android version for mobiles with slightly more limited specifications. They have removed features like the ability to have more than one user on the mobile, and reduced the nice animations in the system. In other words, it sometimes feels a bit rough, but it benefits the limited performance, as the phone works and handles everything I try to do with it. Even games I run on the mobile work surprisingly well once they get going. Once I regretted it when a game started loading and I pressed the back button. Then the entire user interface crashed and the phone had to be restarted. But that is also the only time I have had any real problem in usage.

Xiaomi's user interface is roughly the same as in their more expensive phones but again with slightly fewer animations. And with fewer settings options, so you have to accept, for example, that there is no app drawer and all apps land on the home screens. This includes a larger number of third-party apps and games that come pre-installed but can be removed.

Large but not heavy

The phone's design is as simple as possible, straight plastic sides and a plastic back, where the only distinctive design element is a rather stylish camera island. It is a large phone, the screen is 6.88 inches, and the black edges around it are not particularly thin, but not so heavy for its size.

The large screen is of the LCD type and shifts somewhat in brightness when you angle it. It does not have full HD resolution, but it is less of a handicap than the maximum brightness being 450 nits. It's nowhere near enough to use in sunlight, but a transflective layer in the screen makes the sun's rays reflect behind the liquid crystals, and you don't have to grope completely blindly when using the phone outdoors. The automatic brightness constantly wants to turn the screen brightness down too low, so in the end, I give up, turn it off, and run constantly at maximum brightness.

The fact that the screen has a 120 Hz refresh rate feels like an unexpected luxury, the iPhone 16, which costs six times as much, has yet to receive it. The refresh rate is not dynamically adjusted, so you have to go into the settings and select 120 Hz if you want it. It actually makes a difference, the screen becomes clearer and with less lag when you scroll.

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A dim screen and limited performance at least provide one advantage, the phone does not consume much battery. This means we get excellent battery life in our screen time test, and I hardly need to charge the phone every day.

The fingerprint reader is located in the phone's power button on the side and it works well, but a feature you probably expect in a modern mobile is the ability to pay. You can of course run BankID and Swish on the phone, but NFC is missing in the Redmi A5, and thus also the ability to tap payments with the phone.

Weak speaker

Another feature that falls below the threshold on the phone is the speaker sound. There is a single speaker with quite low maximum volume. You don't really want to watch movies with the phone's speaker as the sound source and even for speakerphone mode, the sound is a bit weak.

When was the last time you saw a phone that didn't have at least 48 megapixels in its camera? Here you have it, the camera on the back of the Redmi A5 is 32 megapixels. There is a second camera too, with an unclear function, a “helper camera”. The essential thing is that there is no wide-angle or telephoto camera.

The images from the camera come out at 8 megapixels, but interestingly enough, they have the same resolution as the 12 megapixels most other mobile cameras deliver. That is to say, if you take a picture of a person, the person will be in the same number of pixels, but you capture less of the surroundings. This makes it easier when I compare the camera, although it's not particularly difficult. It becomes immediately apparent that this is not a good camera.

The best results I get are in sunlight in the middle of the day. Then the colours are quite okay, but you notice when you zoom into the picture afterwards that the sharpness is not the best. The camera allows you to take telephoto images with up to 10 times zoom, but I wouldn't even recommend taking photos with two times magnification.

As soon as it gets a bit cloudy, the image quality suffers, and pictures in the dark don't go well at all. I know that many mobile users rarely or never use the camera, and if you care the slightest about taking good pictures with your mobile, this is not the phone for you.

But if you just want a very cheap mobile to make calls, use Swish, and browse, then the Redmi A5 performs surprisingly well.

Questions and Answers

What accessories are included? Only the charging cable. So there is no charger and not even a plastic case, which Xiaomi usually includes. 

Will the phone receive any system updates? Xiaomi has promised two major system updates for the Redmi A5.

Anything else missing? The phone lacks 5G. I sometimes notice this, for example, data transfer is slower when I use the phone as a hotspot for the computer.

An alternative

We haven't tested any phone at the same price, but on paper, the Moto G15 fills a similar niche at a comparable price.

Camera example

In good light, the pictures are quite okay if you don't enlarge them.

phone android product reviews xiaomi product tests xiaomi redmi a5

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