To dip its toes in the mid-range entry-level market, Xiaomi has brought yet another device with a not-so-hefty price tag: Redmi 7. Compared to its previous iteration, Redmi 7 is a huge upgrade in terms of design and quality. The performance, however, got a proportional upgrade instead of an exponential one; unlike the design. Let's find out what else the device has to offer:

Design wise, Redmi 7 is a stunner. The departure from all aluminium chassis might disappoint a few but to us, the new reflective coated all plastic body felt really good. Our review unit came in 'Eclipse Black' but we loved the other two-colour gradient schemes: Lunar Red and Comet Blue. The 6.26-inch IPS LCD display of the phone on the front houses a tiny notch for the front-facing camera. The dual camera setup is housed on the back along with the fingerprint sensor. The charging port on the bottom and the 3.5mm jack on the top.

The display of the phone isn't going to offer you the sharpest resolution but for a 720 X 1520 HD screen with a price-tag under BDT 15k is certainly a bargain deal. The display is properly lit even in Dhaka's glaring sunshine. I have the adaptive feature on, so didn't really find it hard to operate the phone in outdoors.

Redmi 7, very much like its predecessor, delivers sub-par performance. As a daily drive, the phone was able to perform smoothly while I constantly juggled between YouTube, Facebook, and several other messaging apps. The phone started to lag a bit when I had more than 20 tabs opened in the browser. The lag becomes even more prominent when you start playing GPU intensive games such as PUBG or Fortnite. I had to restart the phone once when I was playing PUBG in low-graphics settings; probably it was a bit too much for the Adreno 506 to process.

Redmi 7 comes in two memory variants: 2GB RAM with 16GB ROM and 3GB RAM with 32GB ROM. Our review unit was the latter version, so this is the best you can get out of your phone.

The phone runs MIUI interface on top of Android 9 operating system. This means you have many bloatware. On the other hand, you also have some useful tools and tweaks at your disposal including clone apps. Xiaomi provides security patches and upgrades time to time which is also great to keep your phone optimised all the time.

Redmi 7 comes with a 12-megapixel f/2.2 primary back camera tied with a 2-megapixel depth sensor. The camera app of the phone has some stabilisation and AI-based scenes detection. The modes include Pro, portrait, group selfie, time-lapse, beautification, etc. Probably the best feature of the phone is Google Lens. The snaps that we took came out decent. Colour contrast was a bit off and some photos came out way too saturated. In case of the front camera, the selfies turned out great. The shocking part was the above average quality of photos in low light in both of the cameras.

Battery life is the best feature of the phone. The phone can endure day long abuse without any issues. Be it streaming, be it Facebooking, be it listening to music… you will have enough juice to last the entire day. The fast charging with the wall-charger was impressive too.

VERDICT

Undoubtedly this is one of the best 'value buy' smartphones of the market right now. It offers best in class features with superb battery life for just BDT 14K. The competition might have devices with a bit better camera, but certainly doesn't outweigh Redmi 7's design and functionality.  All in all, this is a great smartphone if you don't have a deep pocket.

specs

Display: IPS LCD capacitive 6.26 inches
OS: Android 9.0 (Pie); MIUI 9
CPU: Qualcomm Snapdragon 632
GPU: Adreno 506
RAM: 3 GB
ROM: 32 GB
Camera: 
-Back: 12 MP, f/2.2, 1.25µm, PDAF & 2 MP, depth sensor
-Front: 8 MP, f/2.0, 1.12µm
Battery: 4000 mAh Li-ion Battery
Price: Tk. 13,999/-