Dual SIM 4G LTE Android Smart Phone Note 5A Prime Global Version

Design and Construction

Just like its other phones before it, the Note 5A boasts a remarkable design and build quality. It feels solid thanks to its metal unibody design, though it doesn’t feel particularly tough. The back of the phone, which is bare aluminum, has a very smooth matte finish, which is nice to the touch. The front bezels come in pleasing white, and the panel is covered in Corning Gorilla Glass 3. It’s fairly thin at 7.6mm and is comfortable to hold.

Up front is the 5.5-inch HD IPS display, the notification LED, call speaker, 16MP front camera, and LED flash above it, and non-LED capacitive navigation buttons down below.

The back meanwhile, has the 13MP rear camera, LED flash, the fingerprint scanner, and two visible antenna bands. The unit we have has the Champagne Gold color, which I must say, is simply gorgeous.

The right side houses the volume and power buttons, while the left side houses the hybrid SIM tray.

The load-out up top and at the bottom are fairly standard, with the former including a noise-canceling microphone and 3.5mm headphone jack, and the latter including a micro-USB port and a pair of audio grills. There was a minor problem with the micro-USB port at first, as it took quite a lot of pressure to slide in the included cable.

The device definitely looks and feels great, despite its simple design. Build quality is one trait phones are often praised for, and the Note 5A is definitely no exception.

Display and Multimedia

The  Note 5A packs a 5.5-inch IPS display with a resolution of 1280 x 720, a step down from the Full HD displays of the  Note 4 and 4X. Regardless, I don’t see this as a dealbreaker, as it still looks quite nice with punchy colors, and it gets very bright that you don’t even need to crank it up to 100% when outdoors. The only aspect it underperforms in is contrast, which could be a result of the step down in resolution.

The speaker is just about average, being a smartphone speaker. Bass is lacking, the highs clip when the volume is maxed out, but the mids are clear all throughout. It performs best at around 75% volume and will suffice for casual listening, or watching dialogue-heavy content.

OS, Apps, and UI

Running the software department is Android 7.1.2 Nougat skinned with MIUI. Our unit didn’t come with MIUI 9 just yet, but MIUI 8.5.6 instead. Updating is not available by the conventional means of the update utility, and we opted not to flash the ROM. The reason being, the only major difference we’re missing out on is the split-screen mode.

Moving on, if you’re fond of clean and pretty interfaces that are snappy, and where apps launch quickly, then you should have no problem using MIUI. It has some useful proprietary apps from Xiaomi including the Security app, which handles device optimization. The standard Google suite of apps also comes pre-installed.

Out of the 32GB of total storage, 24.43GB is usable out of the box. That’s a pretty sizeable chunk taken up by system resources, and 24GB might not be enough for some. You may expand this with a micro SD card if you wish.

Camera

Going back to the secret punch I mentioned in the introduction, this phone has something that may come as a surprise. With its 16MP front camera, it’s touted as a selfie-centric smartphone, which it is, but this fact can easily cause you to overlook the 13MP rear camera. The front camera is very good and there’s no question about that, but the rear camera definitely keeps up — an attribute some selfie-centric smartphones do not have.

The simplicity of the stock camera app is a bit of a bummer for photography nuts, as there aren’t many modes available, and the manual mode is only limited to white balance and ISO. The automatic mode works fairly well nonetheless, and we were definitely very impressed with the photos we got with this phone.

Performance and Benchmarks

The Snapdragon 435 chipset on the Redmi Note 5A is a step down from the Note 4 and 4X’s Snapdragon 625. With its Adreno 505 GPU and 3GB of RAM, it’s still a capable phone in heavy use cases like gaming or multitasking. We used Injustice: Gods Among Us to test gaming, and framerates were very smooth.