Xiaomi Redmi 1S

On a budget handset, we don’t usually peg our hopes on build quality, but Xiaomi has managed to impress us from the get-go. The Redmi 1s is solidly built, and doesn’t feel cheap or flimsy like many budget devices are wont to do.

The Redmi 1s features a 4.7-inch IPS display, which hits the sweet spot for size, in our opinion. The display bears HD resolution, resulting in a sharp pixel density of 312ppi. The display was sharp and vibrant, and you can further adjust settings to tweak colour temperature (warm, standard or cool) and saturation (brilliant or standard).

Handing the photography department on the Redmi 1s is an 8-megapixel primary shooter with LED flash, and a 1.6MP camera in the front. The camera app is quite straightforward, and can be used in either simple or advanced Mode. In the camera app, you can enable modes such as handheld twilight, HDR and panorama. There's also Audio Capture, which activates the shutter when it detects any sound that’s louder than the current ambient noise levels. Plus, there are various filters which can be applied in real time.

The Redmi 1s runs MIUI 5, Xiaomi’s custom ROM, with Android 4.3 Jelly Bean as a base. MIUI is baked deep into Android, offering a plethora of useful tweaks that we’re still discovering along the way. MIUI 6 is incoming, and brings even more features that we’re looking forward to trying out.

The innards of the Redmi 1s consist of a 1.6GHz quad-core Snapdragon 400 chipset, paired with 1GB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage. An Adreno 305 GPU takes care of graphics. The storage is expandable via microSD up to 64GB, and the phone also supports USB OTG to attach a flash drive. Out of the 8GB, a little over 4.5GB is available to the user.