Xiaomi Phone review

Any seasoned Android enthusiast would haven’t any doubt come upon Xiaomi Corporation’s MIUI at some point soon. If you haven’t, here is a quick intro: MIUI is a heavily customizable Android ROM in line with the works of CyanogenMod (in any case at the driver level, so we’ve been told), and currently the Chinese startup is officially offering its free software for 12 well-known Android handsets, including the HTC Desire, Samsung Captivate and Motorola Droid. Needless to say, we’ll even have the Xiaomi Phone at the list when it launches in China next month.

Using Foxconn’s tooling and Inventec’s manufacturing resources, the aptly named Xiaomi Phone is the company’s first attempt at developing its own hardware, and boy, it’s done one helluva job here with the specs: a 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm MSM8260 SoC (note that this is not just an overclocked 1.2GHz chip), 1GB RAM, 4GB ROM, eight megapixel camera and the standard wireless bundle including WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS (plus the rare GLONASS ). By now you have to be thinking: surely there ought to be a tradeoff somewhere for that tempting price of ¥1,999 ($310)? Read directly to discover if that is so.

Hardware

Once we first received our review unit, it was actually the packaging that caught our attention. Unlike most other phones, the Xiaomi Phone is available in a thick, pale brown box that’s both eco-friendly and exceptionally rigid (you can recall a photograph from the launch event showing someone 1 standing on one such box 1 ), and the box art makes a speciality of the phone’s internal components (you are able to tell that Xiaomi’s emphasis is at the specs in preference to the arrival here, but more on that later). A number of you’re disappointed to benefit that there aren’t that many accessories in the box: you will only discover a USB cable and an influence adapter (for China, for sure). To be honest, we do not see this as a problem for phone nerds — the shortage of headset, for example, is probably going because Xiaomi assumes its users will pick their very own headphones anyway. Also, this keeps the price down besides. There is no point in wasting money on making mediocre headsets that include many phones nowadays, right?

It is time to get to the beef. While Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun famously said his phone has adopted the “no design” design, we couldn’t help but reflect on an analogous-looking device — no, not an iPhone, however the LG 2 Optimus Black 2 . The 149g phone isn’t particularly slim, however the body width and rounded edges give us a pleasing grip. There are just three touch buttons below the display: menu, home and back. Wait, no search button? Thankfully, there is a fix if you want to accomplish that — it’s actually both-stage camera button at the right hand side, towards the underside of the telephone. Xiaomi calls this the MI button, and it is usually customised to accomplish other tasks akin to prompting the hunt tool, take a screenshot, launch an app, toggle WiFi, et cetera. As a camera button, we dig the sensation when it’s pressed half way for focusing, however the full press could use a more apparent click feedback.

The simplest remaining buttons are the flexibility button on the top right and the quantity rocker at the right hand side — all are within a simple reach with our fingers. Flip to the back and you may see there is not much taking place around the cover (which is composed of graphite for better heat dissipation) with the exception of the openings for the camera module. We’d say the total build quality matches those from other leading brands, that is a surprise for this price point. Our only complaint here’s that usually it’s hard to come to a decision whether the quilt is snapped into place when putting it back in, so hopefully Xiaomi can provide this a tweak for the retail version.

Interface and settings

We’ve already mentioned earlier thon the Xiaomi Phone is powered by the company’s self-developed MIUI Android (2.3.5) system. Glancing at the home screen alone, it’d appear that MIUI has merged a number of iOS’ features into Android; in other words, there is no app tray, so all of the apps are spread around the home screens. In many ways it is less complicated, but for people who aren’t knowledgeable about this layout it could become cumbersome. As an example, while rearranging the icons, we forgot that there has been no app tray and had therefore managed to incidentally deleted some apps. Without a doubt , people who transition from iOS to MIUI do not have a similar issue.

In relation to homescreen customization, the Xiaomi Phone uses an analogous method for editing widgets as seen at the Galaxy S II: each are displayed within the kind of icons on the bottom, and when dragged across the home screen the quantity of space required is highlighted; otherwise you can just check out the dots displayed under each icon for an concept on how much grid space is required. Moving directly to the notification tray, MIUI offers two layouts: one is far like HTC Sense’s where the overall notifications and the fast settings are split into two tabs. The opposite mode merges both together, with the short setting buttons aligned along the base scrollable bar. If you are often frustrated by the inability of certain shortcut keys for, say, changing the screen brightness or toggling WiFi tethering, then you’ll definitely love these highly customizable trays.

Bundled apps

Besides the tweaks within the OS, MIUI’s also fiddled with the various bundled apps in addition throwing in some handy tools. Let us take a look at the bundled apps first: the dialing pad does smart dialing and likewise supports quick dialing to your favorite buddies; whereas in texting the conversations are displayed in threads with customizable themes. If you care, another special feature lies within the calendar app where you too can see the lunar calendar. Hey, it’s a Chinese phone, in spite of everything.

Now, we do not normally be conscious of file management apps in Android, but we totally dig MIUI’s offering: here the files may be browsed by file type (music, videos, pics, docs, etc.), and it even supports FTP! Another noteworthy tool is the decision blocker app, which helps you to set a white list, black list and SMS text filter, all of which may even be toggled automatically at a suite time to boot.

For those having to maintain a watch on data usage, the Xiaomi Phone comes with its own monitoring app which may provide you with a warning if you happen to hit a hard and fast limit, and you may even configure it to only bring to an end the knowledge connection to save lots of your piggy bank. Oh, and there is also a firewall so as to fiddle with while you are at it.

Multimedia and perusing

In comparison with most other native Android music players, MIUI’s own take offers a little bit more oomph: you may stream music from an internet chart (presumably only available within China), edit ID tags while playing tracks, and download lyrics plus album art. Speaking of which, we were surprised that besides the fact that iTunes had already set the album art for probably the most tracks, the Xiaomi Phone did not recognize them and needed us to download new ones.

As for picture browsing, the gallery app’s image loading time isn’t bad in any respect attributable to the speedy processor, and pinch-to-zoom is also very slick. Most significantly though is the screen: the Xiaomi Phone incorporates a vibrant 4-inch 850 x 480 transflective LCD, and while it is not exactly a new display technology (remember the PDA days?), its outdoor performance fares much better than AMOLED panels and other common LCDs. Truth learn, we had a little bit “wow” moment during our first outing with the Xiaomi Phone under strong sunlight, as we were acquainted with not using our Galaxy S II when the sun’s out. Now, it might be even better if MIUI lets us switch off the backlight entirely to avoid wasting battery — in the end, we were capable of do that on PDAs. Good times.

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So how concerning the eight megapixel camera, then? Well, there is definitely a heavy taste of iOS within the app but with plenty more functionality, including anti-shake, continuous shooting, self-timer, filters (inclusive of black and white, sepia and negative), scenes (night, theater, beach, snow and lots of more), skin enhancement and lots of more. The final focus speed (both auto and manual) didn’t disappoint, and also with the image quality — fine detail, nice colors without over-saturation; though sometimes the white balance was just a little off and needed manual adjustment.

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As for video recording, the Xiaomi Phone currently only supports as much as 720p MPEG-4 format, with a video bit rate of as much as around 6,260kbps. In a well-lit environment we obtained some nice footage, but at night, the frame rate dropped dramatically to make up for the exposure — here’s a similar bug that’s seen on many HTC phones, that is a genuine shame. Anyhow, below is one in every of our sample movies:

Last but not least, we wish to quickly speak about the web browsing experience: the Xiaomi Phone’s native browser supports tabbed browsing in addition to full-screen browsing, and it even predicts the URLs as you type. Take into account that, Flash is supported and it loaded quickly for us, but we noticed that while scrolling up and down, the Flash content would overlap the browser’s interface. This could be easily rectified in a future software update anyway.

Performance

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Being among the few devices sporting a 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm MSM8260 SoC, we’d be silly not to do any benchmarking with the Xiaomi Phone. Accompanied by an Adreno 220 graphics processor, 1GB RAM and 4GB ROM, a slick performance is a given — finally, Xiaomi did start out as a 3rd-party ROM developer, so system optimization ought to be a bit of cake for it. From the scores we obtained, we’d say the Xiaomi Phone is on par with the Galaxy S II despite the upper clock speed: on Quadrant the previous got 3,040, that’s just a bit behind the Galaxy S II’s 3,396. However, the graphical performance showed mixed outcomes:

Benchmark	Xiaomi Phone	Galaxy S II
Quadrant (higher is best)	3,040	3,396
Linpack (higher is healthier)	86	85
NenaMark1 (higher is healthier)	48.9	59.8
NenaMark2 (higher is healthier)	31.4	45
Neocore (higher is best)	61.4	59.8
Sunspider (lower is best)	4,040	4,280

While the scores aren’t that exciting in comparison side by side, the Xiaomi Phone does have a different trick up its sleeve: the large 1,930mAh battery. From our normal usage (internet browsing, gaming, taking photos for half an hour each) plus the standard phone calls and texting, our phone easily made it over 12 hours; or even with a piece more web usage (like jumping on Facebook and Whatsapp) we still got a minimum of 10 hours of juice. For a dual-core phone this is not bad in any respect.

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Wrap-up

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Having used the Xiaomi Phone for over every week, it’s definitely left us an excellent impression: nice build quality and notable specs for a $310 device. Our new favorite phone from the Far East also differentiates itself from other Android devices with nifty and unique features, though the enthusiasts are greater than welcome to flash other ROMs to boot. However, good luck with finding this phone — Xiaomi is purely selling its baby online and doesn’t plan on distributing it outside China (although it’ll play well with AT&T’s 850MHz 3G); though on account that 300,000 units have already been pre-ordered, we wouldn’t be surprised if some of them slip during the Great Wall.

More notably, we’re surprised by how far a Chinese startup can get to those days — 3 our tour around Meizu’s headquarters 3 had already dazzled us, but Xiaomi’s ambition took it to the following level, trying to prove that powerful phones generally is a lot more cost-effective and much more intuitive. It’ll sure be interesting to peer how the market will react to Meizu’s much anticipated but costlier dual-core and 4 quad-core MX 4 smartphones towards the tip of the year.

Engadget Chinese Mobile Editor Danny Mak contributed to this review.

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This post is tagged: helluva job, internal components, launch event, manufacturing resources, megapixel camera, power adapter