After Samsung and OnePlus, Xiaomi has a red version of its smartphone. The only thing special about the Mi A1 Special Edition is the red color it comes in. That being said, the shade of red looks much less like Samsung’s Burgundy Red and more like OnePlus’ Lava Red, with the color choice meant to stand out than be more subtle.
The Mi A1 Special Edition remains identical to the normal Mi A1. In other words, you’ll find a 5.5-inch Full HD display, with a 5 MP camera up front and dual 12 MP cameras around back. Under the hood, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 625 chipset and 4 GB of RAM power the phone, and while the processor might be a bit long in the tooth at this point, it allows for greater battery efficiency.
That efficiency is what helps give the Mi A1 very good battery life in our testing, regardless of the modest 3,080 mAh battery. If the 64 GB of internal storage is not enough for your needs, the microSD card slot allows for up to 128 GB of additional storage.
Finally, the Mi A1’s story revolves around its status as one of the handful of Android One devices out there, which means that the phone runs stock Android 7.1.2 Nougat. That makes the phone the only Xiaomi smartphone that runs stock Android out of the box, something that slightly disoriented us at first but that we eventually got used to.
