Back in the last month, Xiaomi’s Redmi introduced the Redmi 9A and Redmi 9C as two of its most affordable smartphones for 2020. The Redmi 9A, however, was the most affordable variant with modest specifications and aggressive pricing. Today, the company is unveiling the Redmi 9A in China. It’s the second smartphone from the Redmi 9 series to reach the country. The original Redmi 9 retails for 799 Yuan in the country, which is $115. The Redmi 9A becomes the most entry-level Redmi smartphone with a pricing tag of just 599 Yuan, or $85. That’s a really good smartphone for this pricing point, outperforming most of Android Go phones in the market.
The Chinese variant of the Redmi 9A comes with 2GB of LPDDR4X RAM and 32GB of eMMC 5.1 storage. The handset will be available in three color options – Clear Sky, Lake Green, and Sand Black. Its design quite resembles the last year’s Redmi 8A.
Redmi 9A specifications
Under the hood, the Redmi 9A boasts an Helio G25 chipset. It’s an entry-level SoC from MediaTek, but it’s most than enough to give a satisfactory performance. After all, for this price point, you’ll be getting a device with an Octa-Core chipset featuring eight Cortex-A53 cores. It delivers a massive performance increase in comparison with the last year’s Redmi 8A / 7A that came with Snapdragon 439, it’s even better than the Redmi 8 that came with the very same SD439.
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The Redmi 9A flaunts a 6.53-inch IPS LCD display with a waterdrop notch at the top housing a 5MP selfie shooter. This camera may sound weak but supports HDR, gesture photo and face recognition. Moving on to the rear side, we have a single 13MP camera coupled with a LED flash. It offers features like HDR, portrait mode, AI scene recognition, time-lapse photography. Finally, this camera can output 1080@30fps videos.
The phone is a dual-SIM handset featuring a triple slot for two SIMs + microSD card. If the 32GB amount isn’t enough for you, you can simply insert a good microSD card. Other features include a 1217 speaker, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 5.0, GPS, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. Unfortunately, the Redmi 9A won’t be marked as the device that brought a fingerprint scanner to this price point.
The handset keeps Redmi tradition of battery endurance thanks to a massive 5,000mAh battery. Unfortunately, you’ll be limited to slow charging since this phone comes with a micro-USB port. This is a controversial choice, after all, the last year’s Redmi 8A came with a USB-C port. Unfortunately, this massive battery will take a while to charge due to the 10W limit.
The Chinese variant comes with MIUI 12 straight out of the box. It runs on top of Android 10 OS.