Xiaomi may be the champion of phone teasing, as it came all the way to London to show me the Mi A2: a solid all-round phone with a highly affordable price tag.
The downside for me? This phone won’t be coming to the UK, the US or Australia.
You may be in one of those countries and you may like the look of its metal, gold coloured body, you may like the big 5.99-inch display and you may appreciate how sharp text looks with the full HD plus resolution.
You may also like the reasonable 250 euro price tag — that’s about $290, £220 or AU$395.
But too bad! This phone’s not for you.
So you won’t care that it has Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 660 processor that handles gaming and photo editing without hesitation. And speaking of photos, you won’t care one bit that the dual camera setup on the back takes pretty decent outdoor shots and has a portrait mode for those neat portraits with out-of-focus backgrounds.
If you’re in a country where Xiaomi is selling the Mi A2 — the company says it’ll be on sale in “40 territories” but couldn’t say exactly which at the time of writing — then this phone is well worth taking a glance at. It really does pack some great tech for a super reasonable price.
If you’re not, then you have the choice of trying to order it through the various resellers and importers that will inevitably sell it unofficially through Amazon , or simply look towards other affordable brands like Huawei’s Honor or OnePlus.
Or maybe you could get some friends together to start a letter-writing campaign to Xiaomi to launch this phone officially wherever you are.
The Mi A2 starts at 250 euros with 4GB RAM and 32GB storage, rising to 349 euros for the top-spec model with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. It will be joined by the Mi A2 Lite, which is slightly smaller and has a lesser set of specs all round, and starts at 179 euros with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage.
Xiaomi Mi A2 key specs:
- 5.99-inch display
- 2,160×1,080-pixel resolution
- Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 processor
- 4,000-mAh battery, with fast charging
- Fingerprint scanner on rear
- Dual rear camera, with portrait mode (12- and 20-megapixel resolutions)
- 20-megapixel front-facing camera, with software-enabled portrait mode
