Xiaomi’s Redmi smartphones have been one of the most successful budget devices out there. The Redmi 4 is one of the latest offerings and it costs just $130 but it has a premium design and great specs. But is it worth the price? Learn more in the full review.
Thanks to Oppomart for sending the Xiaomi Redmi 4 for a review.
Xiaomi Redmi 4 Review: VIDEO REVIEW
Xiaomi Redmi 4 Review: UNBOXING
The phone ships with all the usual stuff that comes with most of the phones. No extras included.
Xiaomi Redmi 4 Review: DESIGN and DISPLAY
When it comes to the design, the Redmi 4 is definitely one of the best-looking and the most premium budget phones you can get.
It’s made of metal, it sits nicely in the hand and its buttons are nice and tactile.
The phone is compact due to its 5” 720p display, which is not of the highest resolution but it is still plenty sharp for everyday use.
We have a 5MP shooter and notification LED light, which can be highly customizable. Unfortunately, the capacitive buttons are not backlit.
On the back, we have a 13MP shooter with f/2.2 aperture and a dual-LED flash.
As usual to Xiaomi phones, the fingerprint scanner is fast, accurate and it allows you to unlock the device straight from the standby mode.
It’s great that we have the IR blaster to control devices like TVs.
The loudspeaker quality is very good for a cheap phone like this.
Xiaomi Redmi 4 Review: HARDWARE and PERFORMANCE
I have the lower-end Redmi 4 that has an octa-core Snapdragon 430 chip, 2GB of RAM and 16GB of expandable storage.
You can also opt in for the slightly more expensive Redmi 4 Prime model that has a Snapdragon 625 chip, 32GB of storage and 3GB of RAM.
Even the lower-end model can handle the 3D games pretty well. I played a few games on the highest graphics and there were just some minor skipped frames. Also, the phone did not overheat.
Xiaomi Redmi 4 Review: BENCHMARKS
Xiaomi Redmi 4 Review: USER INTERFACE
The Xiaomi Redmi 4 ships with the Android 6.0-based MIUI 8 Global ROM that has Google services pre-installed and Chinese bloatware removed. As usual, we have a ton of customization options, various settings, tweaks and little features to make the phone look your own.
Some of the cool features include a baked-in theming engine, where you can choose from a lot of themes, fonts, wallpapers and so on.
Also, you can go to the so-called second space, which is as Xiaomi says “like having two devices” at the same time. In other words, it is like having two accounts on the same phone.
Finally, the phone is pretty fast and fluid on the daily basis and I didn’t see any lag of stutter.
Xiaomi Redmi 4 Review: IMAGE QUALITY
IT IS HIGHLY-RECOMMENDED TO DOWNLOAD FULL RESOLUTION CAMERA SAMPLES TO SEE THE ACTUAL IMAGE QUALITY. THE PICTURES UPLOADED ON THE WEBSITE ARE 50% SMALLER IN RESOLUTION.
When it comes to the image quality it is good yet not great. The Redmi 4 can take some good-looking daylight photos with a decent amount of detail, nice colour reproduction and sharpness. The dynamic range adjustment is not always perfect but the HDR does an okay job bringing the detail back to the shadows.
The image quality is not as good in lower-lit situations. Most of the shots look soft, there is a low amount of detail and the colours look washed out.
The night image quality is even worse. I don’t really want to say that “we may see a software update to improve the quality” but as of now, the photos don’t look good.
The selfie images will look okay on social media but in general, they could have more detail and sharpness.
The 1080p video looks pretty good for a cheap phone. A few complaints would be that the continuous auto-focus is a little jumpy and the footage may look a little shaky as there is no video stabilization built-in.
Download full resolution camera samples
Xiaomi Redmi 4 Review: CONNECTIVITY
As most of the Xiaomi phones, the Redmi 4 ships with a dual SIM card tray that also doubles as a microSD card slot.
The call quality is okay, GPS is very accurate but I found that the Wifi download speeds are a lot slower than usual. I hope Xiaomi will address this issue with the software update.
Xiaomi Redmi 4 Review: BATTERY LIFE
The battery life can be summarized in a few words – one of the best on the market.
The 4100mAh unit will easily get you 2 days of heavy usage or even 4 days of lighter use, which is just an insane result. Seriously, it is very hard to kill this battery!
In case you need to recharge it, the phone supports fast battery charging feature but it does not ship with the fast charger. I was able to fully charge the phone in about 2 hours with the supplied charger.
Xiaomi Redmi 4 Review: CONCLUSIONS
The Xiaomi Redmi 4 is yet another great budget device on the market. In fact, it is one of the best you can get at this price point but it doesn’t mean it is a perfect phone.
The device has a top-notch built quality and nice design, the internal hardware components assure a good UI and gaming performance and the camera can take decent daylight pictures. Also, the battery life is just insanely good.
However, even at this price point, we want to see the backlit capacitive keys and a better low-light camera performance. Also, the Wifi download speeds were pretty low every time I wanted to download an app from the Play Store.
At the end of the day, the Xiaomi Redmi 4 is still one of the best budget phones you can buy at the moment but make sure to consider if the previously mentioned shortcomings are important to you or not.
