my first xiaomi phone was the mix 2 a cutting-edge nearly full display phone
that gearbest.com helped me get my hands on last year
and that i abandoned reviewing after spending four hours fighting with
bootloader unlocking crap in an attempt to load the english rom on it
only to find out that xiaomi had
a bloody english version coming a couple weeks later
anyway the me mix 2s so called for its
speedier snapdragon 845 processor
presumably is better across the board anyway
including the out-of-the-box support for
english yes but i still can't figure out why
anybody in this hemisphere is buying premium phones from brands like xiaomi
is there something on the surface that i am missing here
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it's really easy to fall in love with the mix 2s it manages to have the sex
appeal of a nearly bezel-less design coming just one percent shy of the
screen ratio of the iphone 10 and that's without resorting to an unsightly notch
and the work that they've put into their ceramic coated back has paid off in
spades glass-backed phones are back in vogue
now to enable wireless charging but
as hard as you might try a glass back will never feel as premium
nor be as durable as this and after a similar amount of time in my
pocket my oneplus 6 is noticeably more
scuffed up and it's packed full of all the right
hardware sporting the latest generation snapdragon 845 processor up to eight
gigs of RAM up to 256 gigs of non-expandable storage blah blah blah
blah blah so it's super fast like you guys get the point and the price is
right too lining up right across the oneplus 6 as a flagship grade phone for
hundreds of dollars less than you would pay a tier one like apple or samsung
and it's got lightning fast fingerprint unlocking the ability to choose between
button-based or gesture-based navigation and even wireless charging which as we
outlined in our video recently has the potential when used properly to improve
the lifespan of your non-removable but respectably sized 3 400 milliamp hour
battery so uh
wait why was i so down on this thing a couple of minutes ago
i still can't figure out why anybody in this hemisphere is buying premium phones
from brands like xiaomi that seems kind of unfair doesn't it i
mean even the dual rear camera absolutely blows away previous
generation efforts from chinese phone makers like this low light shot here
does have more noise than any other camera that i tested but it avoids the
over sharpening of the mate 10 pro and the undesirable flaring of the
galaxy s9 so i mean at least xiaomi
isn't actively processing the image to make it worse
and then in this challenging situation the me mix 2s ends up noisier than
samsung and with less true-to-life colors than the oneplus 6 but it looks
better than both the iphone 10 and the pixel 2 xl and under ideal conditions
you can get some really nice images out of it so let's talk about some of the
weaknesses of the me mix 2s the earpiece
speaker isn't amplified for stereo sound
there's no water resistance at least nothing officially ip rated
1080p slo-mo only goes to 120 FPS rather
than 240 the display is ips rather than
OLED which means almost no potential for burn-in
but at the cost of ambient or always-on
technology and there is no headphone jack so you
will need to pull out an adapter every time you want to watch my little pony at
the back of the bus without anybody finding out
so all that is kind of a drag
but again it's hundreds of dollars less for top
spec hardware and it's got no display
notch so i can accept that stuff even if i don't
like all of it the part that is unforgivable is the
software miui is like going back in time to when
samsung still thought that having a bunch of bloat in there okay well hold
on samsung still has a lot of bloat in there so
um okay whatever in xiaomi's defense
some of the stuff that they include is legitimately useful like a screen
recorder app and a quick link to my downloads
but there were just so many annoying things that i ran into that ground my
gears from having in my pocket for two weeks
let's take google hangouts if i got a message an hour ago but left
it unread because i wanted to deal with it later every new message that i get or even
opening up another conversation sometimes will make it pop up again
why when i create a folder on the home
screen it doesn't pull up the keyboard automatically for me to start typing
why the included weather app wants access to
my phone for some reason when all it
should need is my location not to mention that it cannot be removed
or even hidden so you have to create a
useless crap folder iOS style there's no
obvious way to expand a notification from the lock screen and reply to it
which is good for security but i would like to at least have the option for my
convenience i can't install netflix off the app store the workaround seems to be to
track down the apk and install it manually
it wakes the screen for notifications which is nice but not when you lift the
phone something that i've come to take for granted these days and there is no
hardware button to launch the camera yuck now taken
individually every one of those things would seem
like a pretty insignificant little gripe
and there are things that their software does reasonably well so their screenshot
management something that i use a lot blows one pluses out of the water
and a separate account for another user is super handy if i want to give the
phone to my kids but i don't want them accessing all my stuff
the bottom line though is that this device was annoying to use for me
and not just compared to a flagship one like the s9 plus compared to other
devices that cost the same xiaomi would do well to take a page out
of oneplus book on the software side of things
there isn't really such a thing as stock Android anymore i mean even
google's own pixel lineup customizes stock Android
but they would do well to try to get a
lot closer because the hardware and the design are already really
impressive so i'm looking forward to seeing continued improvement
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