I’d been wanting to move away from iOS for a while and finally decided to take the plunge with the Redmi 4. I figured that it was inexpensive enough that if I didn’t like it, it wouldn’t break the bank, and if my clumsy nature kicked in and I destroyed it, I could also replace it without having to sell a kidney.
I’ve got to tell you – this was the best tech purchase I’ve made in quite a while. I’ve had it for a little over a month now. Here are my thoughts.
The phone itself is boxed in a manner reminiscent of Apple’s offerings – clean and simple.
Setup was a snap – I just tossed my Sim card in and was ready to go.
I was surprised at the build quality of the phone – it’s very solid. No creaks, no loose seals, no signs that this phone is Rs. 9,499.
The screen is bright and the colors are consistently vivid. Videos play smoothly and pictures really pop.
The phone itself is comfortable in the hand. It’s not so thin that I’m afraid that I’m going to drop it, but it’s not so thick that I’m reminded of the early 80s.
This thing is beautiful! I work at a large tech company surrounded by folks with Samsung's and Apples – I frequently get compliments about the attractiveness of the Redmi 4 and people often express surprise at its low cost.
It’s very responsive – much speedier than my iPhone 6. The finger print reader is nearly instantaneous and is exceptionally accurate. The same could not be said for my former device.
To be honest, and this is a purely subjective statement, it feels snappier than the Galaxy S8’s I play with on occasion.
I didn’t like the ROM that it shipped with so I unlocked it and installed Lineage OS. I’m currently running a beta of version 15 which is based on Oreo and I have had no problems with stability or performance. The unlocking process is weird – you have to associate your phone with your xiaomi account and leave it there for 72 hours before they’ll let you unlock. You have to wait the entire 72 hours. No exceptions. Once the time passed, however, the process to unlock was a couple of mouse clicks on Xiaomi’s software and I was ready to enter the brave new world of custom ROMs. Since it is cheap I don't mind to experiment with it, honestly no hand burn to try something new.
The phone works well on my Airtel 4G. The network support is significantly better than the 4G LTE I was getting on my iPhone 6.
The battery on this thing is a monster. I have this love of gimmicky stuff and have installed the Paperland live wallpaper. Some friends and co-workers advised me that this would eat my battery for lunch, but I haven’t experienced that. In a typical day of moderate usage I get to about 75% from waking up to going to bed. The standby battery time is great – it estimates about 9 days when I’m doing nothing.
It has a headphone jack, which is a real selling point for me.
The 32 gigs of internal storage is plenty.
The WiFi is stable and doesn’t lose connection ever which is a new experience for me.
All of my different accounts play nice with Android – which is pleasing.
Every “must have” app has an Android version – so there was no real downside software wise.
The camera is great – I haven’t taken any low-light pictures so I can’t really comment on that, but videos and pics in average lighting are clear and artifact free.
The gripes I have are minor.
The headphone jack placement on the top of the phone makes pulling it out of my pocket and using the phone awkward.
My palm at the lower part of my thumb (there’s probably a word for that) touches the screen when I’m reaching for far away icons, this essentially kills the screen for any other taps. That’s taken some getting used to.
There is no “double tap” on the home button to drop the top-most icons to a more reachable area.
The speaker sucks – but I use headphones so that’s not a super big issue.
It doesn’t have wireless charging, which I kind of want now. For the price I can’t really expect that feature, though.
I still haven’t found the perfect keyboard.
In conclusion – this is an excellent phone at an excellent price. I was worried about compatibility with the services that I use but that hasn’t turned out to be a problem. The phone is cheap enough that if I lose it or drop it in a pool I can easily replace it without having to sell a kidney. It’s immensely customizable – that honestly wasn’t something I realized I wanted until I had the option (now I’ve got live wall papers and a custom icon set.) I was worried about updates, but custom roms fixed that.
I would highly recommend this phone to anyone wanting to try out Android on a device that’s not going to break the bank. It’s far exceeded my expectations in terms of quality and responsiveness – I feel no need to upgrade to a “flagship” phone to make up for the very few shortcomings of the device.
Xaiomi has made a fantastic phone at a very reasonable price and I’m going to be buying more of their stuff.
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