Chinese company Xiaomi is looking at a number it’s not normally fond of — four. But the last thing it’s doing at its colourful and lively office in Bengaluru is complaining. Budget phone Redmi 3s has sold no less than four million units, according to the company, and that too in a period of nine months. That makes it the most popular smartphone to have sold online in India.

Small mercies Xiaomi now has a successor to the Redmi 3s nice and ready — that too, in three variants. Would you say they’re pushing their luck? Or refining a formula that has worked? Let’s see how it pans out over the next few months, but meanwhile, the Redmi 4 is here and it’s a solid little device. I say little because it’s a five-inch form, not the more typical 5.5 inches. And that makes a world of a difference to the phone’s ‘holdability’. People are now hard put to find a smartphone that isn’t huge and that can be used one-handed. The Redmi 4 is in that rare underpopulated category, but there is one problem — it’s slippery. The smooth metal and the rounded edges combine with a big weighty battery to make the device more than willing to drag downwards. A case is recommended immediately, though the Redmi 4 looks sturdy enough to take several falls, should you end up dropping it. If you’ve seen the Redmi Note 4, the Redmi 4 looks just like it, only smaller. Particularly nice in black over the silver and gold, it looks sedate and understated. All you see on the back are the antenna lines, a fingerprint sensor that wakes the phone up the moment you touch it (even before registering a fingerprint) and the small camera lens. It’s a clean looking phone — if you don’t work hard to put smudges on it. The buttons on the right edge are well-made as is the rest of the device’s solid body.

Many flavours Instead of getting confusing with the s’s and Pro’s and Primes, Xiaomi has decided to put out variants with 2GB RAM with 16GB storage, 3GB with 32GB and 4GB with 64GB. Xiaomi earlier launched the Redmi 4A, which apparently is not the successor to the Redmi 3s. And there’s the larger Redmi Note 4. The company should go about de-cluttering their line-up to make it easier for customers to figure out what they need to buy. The Redmi 4 variants are the same in every way except the RAM and storage figures. They all work on Android 6.0.1, disappointingly not the newer Nougat. On top of that, they have Xiaomi’s famous interface, MiUi8 with its intense customisation offering features like ‘Second Space’ where you can clone apps to use two versions, separating one profile from another.

Healthy specs There was a time when a budget phone would have been sluggish and visibly low powered in its performance. That era has passed with affordable phones now being able to work very well — as the Redmi 4 does. It works on a 1.4GHz octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 435 chipset and performs smoothly enough though you can’t expect it to be blazingly fast. It handles long sessions of video recording and YouTube watching without a fuss and doesn’t heat up particularly.

The display is only a 720p but it’s perfectly good with strong colours and clarity. In fact, you have quite some control over how the screen will look because you can adjust the warmth in the tone and can increase or decrease the text size more than is typical. It’s a comfortable display overall. Sound too is far from tinny and thin and pretty good for a little phone.

The healthiest of all the specs on this phone is the 4,100mAh battery. That’s more than enough to take you through two days if you’re a light user and a day if you use it more intensively.

Say cheese The 13-megapixel and 5-megapixel cameras on the Redmi 4 are at best average. You do, as is usual, get noise and softness in low light pictures, but if all you want are casual photos (and you can’t expect much more at this price) you’ve got them with the full complement of scenes, modes, settings and filters. Some of these don’t make an enormous difference to the image unfortunately while others let you play around with pictures for fun effects that will amuse your friends. Possibly. Selfies are not bad and you can even use voice control for both cameras, which is a good useful feature that people don’t nearly use enough. Better light pictures and videos are adequate but the camera did go unresponsive on me a couple of times.

Price: ₹6,999 (2GB+16GB), ₹8,999 (3GB+32GB), ₹10,999 (4GB+64GB)

Pros: Value for money, solid build, stable performance, useful customisations

Cons: Annoying flash sales

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW