this is the ideal me according to
the image professionals at xiaomi i'm
not sure quite how this happened but ahead of the launch of the upcoming
galaxy s21 which is going to be featuring snapdragon's
new sd 888 chipset
i have gotten my hands on the xiaomi me
11 which is also featuring that same
chipset so even though that other phone is under nda
i am apparently at liberty to just crack this thing open
try it out run any programs i want on it so i was
not gonna say no to that opportunity we've got a
crummy plastic case really nobody cares about that right now let's
get this phone cracked open on the back
it comes with a vegan leather uh backing material it's
apparently slightly thicker than the regular i believe it's a glass backed
one and it actually feels pretty good a little
plasticky like it's clearly not regular leather but i'd say it's at least on par
with what was it the note 2 interesting idea definitely an
interesting idea it's got a 108 megapixel main shooter along with a 13
megapixel ultra wide and an 8 megapixel telemacro
whatever that means i consulted my photography expert here
and brandon said i don't know maybe a macro lens with a long throw is that
what you said do something like that so we'll have to have a look at that it's got an OLED
display that has typical maximum brightness of 900 nits and
peak brightness of 1500 nits so i'm expecting that to look pretty good
for your HDR contents and all of that and more importantly it's got a 120
hertz refresh rate for that smoothness and 480 hertz touch pulling
so that's one of the things that affects the sort of
responsive feeling-ness of the device a lot it doesn't look like it's actually
running at 120 hertz right now though so let's go ahead and
play around with that here yeah it's running at 60hz
interestingly it does have support for variable refresh rate
although i don't know what does or doesn't trigger that because i
there's no settings in here for what you can do with it
uh ai image enhancement
super resolution there's gonna be all
kinds of ai features phone manufacturers are gonna be building into this thing so
let's go through some of the basics of the snapdragon 888 this model right here
is available with either eight or 12 gigabytes of lpddr5 memory running at
3 200 megahertz so the RAM in this thing is probably faster than what you're
running in your desktop pc it's got integrated support for 5g now
you guys might recall that last generation you actually had to get the 765g chipset
in order to have 5g connectivity integrated into the device without the
need for an external chip so the flagship chip actually had fewer
features than that mid-range chip in a certain
manner of thinking the snapdragon 888 does away with that
completely so you've got a next-gen octa-core design
so that's four high power four low power cores you've got 5g
connectivity built in a new ai engine new GPU and of course
it's built on a five nanometer manufacturing process from tsmc
just like apple's a14 chips that they launched with the iphone 12 series what
we want to know is initial impressions of speed now back
in the old days we could make significant observations
about the performance of a new soc just based on
how the Android interface you know navigated like how smooth it was
nowadays that doesn't really fly because it's already
so freaking smooth from generation to generation that's just not where you're
going to notice the difference but people also have much much more
demanding use cases for their phones these days than they used to
so let's start with gaming
all right here we go for comparison we've gone with the rog phone
is this two or three whatever the one with the snapdragon 865 plus
processor this so this is kind of like a binned 865.
wait a minute this thing not have Android 10
much time has passed we did not find the rg phone 3 but that's okay because we
did find a note 20 ultra so this is snapdragon 865 rather than 865 plus
but that's okay we can live with that why don't we kick things off with a good
old-fashioned geekbench 5. to be clear i'm not
expecting this to be like a night and day performance difference
mobile socs have already gotten to the point that desktop cpus did like
10 years ago where it's like yeah we're getting improvements but don't expect
them to be total game changers from generation to generation
it's gonna finish the whole test like a solid
five percent faster wow including absolutely
blowing through the machine learning benchmark okay
so single core performance improvement in excess of 10
like getting dangerously close like 15
and multi-core performance improvement of well over 20
wow this is actually this is actually pretty huge
speech recognition and machine learning both saw enormous improvements i mean
that's like 40 45 better on the snapdragon 888
and then i would expect the same is probably true in
uh multi-core performance actually that does kind of make sense because it's not
like each core has its own machine learning
optimized you know chunk of it there's actual dedicated machine learning like
ai silicon on the die obviously a lot of the way manufacturers utilize these
improvements in performance though is not in ways that you the end user
will necessarily notice like swiping around like i said
before so you might see more advanced you know image
processing algorithms for example it's not the kind
of thing that you can benchmark but you know you'll have a
still a responsive phone that is able to take better pictures with more heavy
processing on them so this is our ultra wide angle
that is pretty wide it's specked at 135
degrees brandon you look so far away
xiaomi claims that their that their
video mode will put hollywood on notice so i don't know it's uh built-in support
for HDR video capture the difference between the blue of your
shirt and the blue of those tiles and videos not very much okay thank you this is a funny
one the sound system is apparently tuned by harman kardon
which if you guys don't know was acquired by
samsung a little while back so that's just kind
of a weird one to me yeah right whoa hey colin can you pop your head
around the corner again for a second there actually sounds pretty good no the
jutter that i was seeing in the viewfinder was not present in the recorded video so uh
here i can show you guys what i mean as i was panning the camera around you you can
probably see it now it's like really choppy can you can you
tell yeah so that is not in the recordings so
it's not great from like a user experience perspective
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time there's a few more things i did want to run through on this puppy starting with
of course it's wireless charging capability so it can do 55 watt fast wired charging
50 watt wireless charging and then 10 watt reverse charging if you want to
throw your wireless earphones or whatever on the
back of it in terms of i o something else i didn't cover at all yet
usb type c for charging obviously there's your sim slot
it does not have any expandable storage over on the left there's a whole lot of
not much over on the top there's a whole lot of not much else is that
no way i think it is it looks like an ir
blaster on the top that is freaking cool and then finally
over on the right you got your lock button as well as volume up and down what a good question brandon
there is no charger included curse you
apple for normalizing this stuff wow
good job qualcomm for making a you know
here i was saying incremental blah blah blah that GPU is
a mess ton faster that is crazy
it's like well over 20 faster love it
so bottom line from these first impressions whether you are into this
particular device or not snapdragon 888 looks extremely
promising a couple things i didn't mention before that's a dual sim tray so
it does support putting two sim cards in there and then
finally i think i just didn't really comment on the display much
uh it's basically borderless i think it looks absolutely fantastic
this included beautification is just oh
man what is it with chinese phones and like completely smoothing out people's faces
by default i don't need to look that smooth this is
the ideal me according to the image
professionals at xiaomi and i think
that's wow i look like a doll
isn't that scary look at that skin that's not in my
skin at all thank you guys for watching
subscribe to ShortCircuit all that good stuff hopefully we'll have more coverage
of other devices with the snapdragon 888 processor over on the Linus tech tips
channel and here coming shortly so make sure you're subscribed to Linus tech
tips as well