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Battery life
- 4,000mAh battery
- Two days of life
Great battery life, oddly, is a preserve mainly of budget phones. Those at the high end tend to have a focus on premium fit and finish, on highly powerful internals, and not so much on longevity.
The Redmi 7A doesn’t quite come packing the same enormous power pack as the likes of the Lenovo P2 from years past, however its 4,000mAh unit is ample, and coupled with the efficient low-power chipset and low resolution, small screen makes for some truly outstanding battery life.
On an average work day, in an area with notoriously poor signal, with a 45-minute commute, messages, calls and reading throughout the day, along with a little game playing, we finished with 79% in the tank.
Indeed, we then didn’t need to charge that night and were able to boldly stride into a second day with no issue. This is one of the fabled ‘two-day’ phones, which will last, at the very least, through a full day of usage with no issue. On our best showing, across two days, the device had dropped to 11% by the end of the second day with over 7 hours of screen-on time to show for it.
The TechRadar battery test mostly backed up these claims, with the device dropping only 11% of its battery across the course of a video streamed over local Wi-Fi, at full brightness and resolution, for 90 minutes. A great showing indeed.
Xiaomi also packs a 10W charger in the box, which doesn’t exactly beat the likes of Warp Charge on the OnePlus 7 Pro but gets the job done. For those of you who really need something which can last and last, the Redmi 7A is a highly solid pick, a true battery champion.
Camera
- 13MP rear lens and 5MP selfie snapper
- Performance isn't great, especially in low light
- Uncluttered camera app
In most segments of the smartphone market, the quality of the camera experience has had a generally positive progression over time - as the years go by the cameras on phones of all types have improved at least a little.
The most dramatic changes have typically been reserved for the most expensive phones though, and those at the bottom of the pricing ladder, such as the Redmi 7A, are often left out of any positive developments.
On paper, this story bears out once more - the Xiaomi Redmi 7A has a 13MP f/2.2 single rear snapper, alone but for a flash, and a basic 5MP selfie camera. But a camera is more than just a list of specifications, so what is this one like to use and does it take good photos?
The phone uses the standard Xiaomi camera app, which is to say it is a near carbon copy of the app produced by Apple for the iPhone. Saying this, it lacks some of the options of its more expensive peers also produced by Xiaomi. For example, there is no portrait mode or panorama mode.
Swiping up and down allows changes between different photo modes, and on the left can be seen toggle for various modes, the dubious ‘AI’ (best activated if you enjoy nuclear colors), an HDR toggle, and a ‘beautify’ feature.
If this latter feature was capable of producing some modicum of beauty, it would be interesting, however it is best activated only if you feel that ‘horrifying ungodly waxwork’ is somehow an image worth achieving.
The camera experience is uncluttered, and there are options to alter saturation and more to your liking, which are nice additions. More importantly the app is quick in operation, never getting in the way of picture-taking.
With regards to photo quality however, unfortunately that old nugget about camera performance in the budget segment holds true.
In perfect lighting, detail is mostly good with little sign of over-sharpening, though the dynamic range is narrower than we’d like. Especially without HDR active, the sky tends to blow out significantly.
Colors are well-balanced too in their out-of-the-box form, though with the ‘AI’ mode active you will be fighting to keep saturation at an acceptable level. In Xiaomi’s world, the only shade of green allowed is radioactive.
When the lights go down and things become a little more challenging, then the camera begins to struggle even more. As it has a narrow aperture and no way to stabilize the image, the results produced have little detail, poor color and are very noisy. This phone isn’t a miracle worker, however Xiaomi makes no great claims in this area.
For casual snaps, and certainly for the likes of Instagram, the shots produced by the Redmi 7A are of sufficient quality, however they will not challenge the results of devices even only slightly more expensive.
