Xiaomi Redmi Y1

The first thing you ever take notice of in a smartphone is its design, followed by the feel of the device in your hands. The two are more or less synonymous with each other, with a poor design resulting in a sub-par handling experience. With the Xiaomi Redmi Y1, things are a little bit of a mixed bag. The Xiaomi Remi Y1 is unmistakably made of plastic, and not that super sturdy polycarbonate kind. The design is fairly generic, with a soft gold smooth finish on the back and a white bezel on the front. The only break in the design language is the singular 13-megapixel sensor on the back and a fingerprint sensor. The front, on the other hand, has the front-facing camera, an ambient light sensor and a soft LED flash, all in the form of three black circles. They do tend to stand out a little bit, but it’s not a deal breaker.

The Xiaomi Redmi Y1 is the company’s first selfie-centric phone. It has a fairly standard 13-megapixel rear camera with PDAF and a single LED flash, but the front camera is a 16-megapixel shooter accompanied by a soft light LED. The primary camera shoots images that are average at best, with the weakest point being dynamic range. Don’t expect a perfect exposure if you’re shooting a subject in harsh light, however, if you are in more forgiving illumination such as indoors or outdoors during a cloudy day (or even shooting in shade) you should able to get good looking photos. One thing you shouldn’t expect out of these photos is a great level of detail as Xiaomi uses some very aggressive JPG compression algorithms. It was a little disappointing to take a photo of a beautiful flower and find very little detail in the texture of the leaves and petals.

Our review unit of the Xiaomi Remi Y1 came preloaded with a beta build of MIUI 9, which is a result of Xiaomi’s own layer running on top of Android Nougat. MIUI 9 was announced the same day as the Redmi Y1, but it seems that the final version is yet to be rolled out. We did face minor hiccups on the Redmi Y1 in terms of performance, all of which could easily be attributed to the fact that our unit was running a beta build. Among the few things that worked well was the split-screen feature which didn’t stutter at all. The newly redesigned notification pane is also nice, but that would be a personal preference more than anything else. While most of the aspects of MIUI 9 worked smooth, there were some minor issues that can be attributed to the beta build of the OS. For starters, we occasionally faced issues with the keyboard not popping up for a few seconds. This problem was only intermittent and only presented itself arbitrarily. Occasionally the camera app would lock us out too, but it was again arbitrary and it is possible that all of this would go away once the final build of MIUI 9 is released for the Y1.

Powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 435 processor and 3GB of RAM, the Xiaomi Redmi Y1 isn’t the smartphone to offer the most cutting-edge specifications for the price bracket. The similarly-priced Xiaomi Redmi 4 (review) has the same specs as the Y1 or the most part as well, although, for a little more money, you could get yourself the Redmi Note 4 with the Snapdragon 625 processor. 

The Xiaomi Redmi Y1 is powered by a 3,080mAh battery, a pretty standard number for most smartphones today. What you don’t get, however, is fast charging, which is a feature missing from this entire price bracket for the most part anyway. The phone ends up taking a little over two hours to charge from zero to 100, so the best time to charge the phone would most likely be while going to bed, or like me, you can charge it at work, with the small caveat that you’re going to be glued to your seat till the battery reaches 100 percent.