Xiaomi Mi 11 Hands-On: Snapdragon 888 Benchmarks, Camera & Speaker Test By ben's gadget reviews

Hey everybody happy new year. I hope you guys are healthy and safe, so we're only four days into 2021, but I already have 2021's very first flagship phone. So this is the Xiaomi mi 11, it's the first phone in the world to run on the Qualcomm snapdragon 888. Now I've only used the phone for a couple of hours. So I can't tell you if the AAA does indeed bring super amazing mind-blowing real-world performance, but I can tell you that if you just go by benchmarks on geek bench, it does beat the snapdragon 865, plus pretty handily, now you'll notice that this package is a little slim. That's because Xiaomi has gone the route of apple, and it's basically not including a charging brick with the phone anymore, but, unlike apple Xiaomi, is still giving customers an option to get a charging brake if they want, at least in China.

When you're buying this phone in China, you have the option to get a charging brake completely free of charge. So Xiaomi is not not charging you extra to get the charging brake they're, not including in here, because they're hoping some people will be um conscious enough to know that hey, I only have like six or seven charging bricks at home, so I don't need to get another one I'll try to do my part to help reduce e-waste, because e-waste electronic waste is a big deal. So I've used this phone for two hours so far. If I have to summarize the phone in one sentence, it would be like this is like a Xiaomi mi 10 ultra except it's running, snapdragon 888. So it's like a Xiaomi mi 10 ultra in that this screen is absolutely stunning.

It's an OLED panel, 6.8, inches quad HD resolution, so 1440 by 3200, and it refreshes at 120 hertz and, unlike Samsung, you can actually turn on both quad HD resolution with 120 hertz refresh rate, so everything just looks buttery smooth. Now I don't know how this is going to impact battery life, because I've only had the phone for a couple of hours. But you know you can always dial resolution down to 1080p to save battery life. There's a 4 600 William battery in here so relatively large, and you know, Xiaomi's fast. Charging tech is quite good, so even if you're running low on battery just plug in for like 10 minutes, and you're, probably good for the rest of the night.

Now what else is new? With this phone? The 6.8-inch screen it's curved on four sides, so you have curvature on the left and right side, but also the top and bottom. So, just like the Huawei p40 pro now, if you've handled the Huawei p40 pro you'll know that having curves on all four sides of the screen, it sounds gimmicky but actually gives the phone an even superior in hand feel particularly because you know nowadays we're always swiping up to go home. So when you're swiping up on a screen, that's curved. It just feels better for your fingers, because you're rubbing your finger across a rounded edge instead of a sharp edge so between the curves, the screen resolution and the refresh rate. This is absolutely one of the best panels around, and you got to keep in mind this phone Xiaomi is not selling this at, like 1 000 Xiaomi selling this for 3999 Chinese yuan that comes out to 615 dollars.

Now, overall, construction is very nice. You have glass on the front and back so on the back. It's gorilla, glass victim. So this is the believe, the newest version of gorilla glass. So it should be more drop resistance, shadow resistance- if you drop the phone, although in-hand feel, is very nice because of all the curvature.

Now the camera system right here you see that it's only a triple camera system. You have a 108 megapixel camera, a 13, megapixel ultra-wide angle, camera and a 5 megapixel macro lens. So there is no telephoto zoom lens. That means any zoom you do with digital zoom, but spoiler alert. The camera system is quite good I'll get into that a little more later.

Now what else is new with this phone now the Xiaomi mi 10 pro. If you use that phone, you might remember that I had one of the best speaker systems around, because Xiaomi had speaker grills at the top and bottom of the phone. The Xiaomi mi 11 takes that up. Another level you have speakers here that are fine-tuned might be easier to show the box that are fine-tuned by Harman Kardon. Now, I'm not an audiophile, but Harman Kardon is a relatively reputable audio brand, so they partnered with Xiaomi to fine-tune the speakers on this thing, and it's absolutely one of the best speakers.

I've heard on a small slab smartphone. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to put my wireless mic next to the speaker. Grille just go up to quickly, even at max volume, you're not getting distortion whatsoever, it's actually a full sound because it comes out to your left and right side, and you hear pretty noticeable bass. That's not overbearing! It doesn't drown out the mid and the heights, and this screen just looks so great. I mean right now it's a little reflective, but when you're watching this same video on the screen indoors, man looks so damn good.

Okay, you may be wondering was that YouTube I just showed on the phone. Yes, that was YouTube now, even though this is a china version of the phone, you can install google apps on this easily. So out of the box, there is no google apps, but Xiaomi has makes it very easy for you. There's this app store called get apps just tap into it. Search for Google, google apps pop up right away, just install Google Play Store and that's it.

So really it takes you 30 seconds and two clicks. You have the Google Play Store on your phone and from there you can install anything, Instagram everything works and even once you've installed the Google apps google frameworks install automatically and everything works as if this is a global device. That's for the camera, so the main camera is a 108 megapixel sensor. This is Xiaomi's. I believe third attempt at the camera and Xiaomi's basically mastered it, because when you use a 108 megapixel camera, it can be a little tricky, as Samsung showed, with the galaxy s21 which have focusing issues.

The problem is because, when you have so many pixels, you need a larger image sensor and when you have a larger image sensor, the focus area becomes shallower. It's like a shallower depth of field. So that means, if you don't have good software, that to optimize all that you might lose focus really easily. That was the case with the s20 ultra. That is not the case with the Xiaomi mi 11.

Focusing on this is superfast. I'm doing a screen recording right now so right now the focus is on the camera. I'm going to put my hand in front focus on my hand, focus on camera focus on hand, focus on my camera focus on the box, focus on camera, barely a hiccup whatsoever, despite the fact that this image sensor size is one over 1.33 inch. So it's not quite as large as the note 20 ultra and the Huawei p40 pro's image sensor, but it's still among one of the largest, it's the second largest, I believe in the industry by quite some distance, like the iPhone 12 image sensor compared to the mi 11 sensors, it's tiny, so the main camera, as you can see from these photo samples, no issue whatsoever. It's going to get you excellent, dynamic range, excellent colors, just it's just one of the best cameras around it's absolutely flagship quality.

Now, as I mentioned, despite the fact, there is no dedicated zoom lens on this phone. You can still zoom quite well because of that 108 megapixel camera. So you can go up to 10x, zoom and 10x. Zoom is still respectable. Even if you jump up a little more like 20, it's still, okay, you can max out at 30, but now 30, it's a little blurry, but you know just stick to 10x 8x, 5x and you're, actually getting a pretty serviceable shot.

That compares quite well with the iPhone 12 pros 10x, despite the fact that the iPhone 12 Pro has a dedicated telephoto camera. Now the ultra-wide angle camera it's solid, I'm not going to say it's the greatest, because the Huawei p and mate 40 pro has the best ultra-wide angle camera around in that it doesn't really lose details even when you're shooting wider. That's not the case here. If you go wider, you definitely get a shot that isn't as sharp as the 108 megapixel camera, particularly when you zoom in to the leaves right here on the left side. But for the most part this is still a really respectable shot.

Dynamic range is excellent. Okay, it just got dark. So now, let's test out the mi 11's nighttime camera wow. So as expected, the mi 11 seems to be a beast. Look at how much brighter the scenery is on my viewfinder compared to how it's looking on my Sony zv1.

So we'll take a picture. Okay, so it turns out. I guess that's night mode kicking in automatically wow look at how vibrant the shot looks compared to how the scene looks right now. Now, video performance is perfect too. As you can see here, stabilization is excellent, even when I'm basically running at almost full speed um, the fluidity of the video is still respectable.

It's not quite as good as the iPhone 12 Pro, but definitely one of the better video stabilization system around now stabilization for ultra-wide angle, camera is also very good. So that means, if you jump into the ultra-wide angle, camera, and then you point the camera yourself. You can shoot basically like a vlog style video you can walk around like this film yourself and stabilization will be pretty respectable. Now, unfortunately, you cannot see what you're shooting when you're holding the phone like this, but you know that because of the ultra lighting on camera, you're getting a pretty respectable field of view, so you're always going to have your head, your hair and your chest in focus two wide angles, camera pointed of the camera pointing at me, so I can't see what I'm filming right now, but now, if you want to record with the front facing camera, it does a relatively good job too. So, okay.

So this is footage. Now, with the front-facing camera of the Xiaomi mi 11, I see it's a little softer than the main camera. Obviously, but still not bad dynamite range looks pretty good. You see it's not really blowing out the light that badly a little now, as I mentioned, I haven't used the phone long enough to tell you about battery life, yet, but there's a 4 600 millimeter battery in here. So it should, you know, be pretty good battery life, and on top of that, you can fast charge this phone relatively easily, and this phone also supports wireless charging and reverse wireless charging.

But my early impressions of the mi 11 is I'm quite impressed because you have to remember this is not Xiaomi's highest level of the mi 11 series, there's a me 11 pro or ultra that's coming. This is just the middle of the pack version. This phone is selling for 615 us dollars and for 615 us dollars. You get a stunning almost bezel-less, 120 hertz display you get gorilla, glass front and back premium construction. You get a really great excellent flagship level, main camera, with a pretty good, solid, ultra lighting on camera, and I guess average zooming capabilities so for 615.

That's not bad! So that's about it! For this video. This is not a review. Just a hands-on. I'm probably not going to have a follow-up video on this particular phone, because this is a loaner unit. I actually borrowed this from my friend in Hong Kong.

He runs a shop in Hong Kong he's basically Hong Kong's best importer, like he always gets phones from China from Korea from Japan before everybody. This phone just went on sale in China like two days ago. He already had it in Hong Kong since yesterday, so if you're ever in Hong Kong, you actually want to check out the import phone scene or just get your hands on the newest things you might want to check out my friend shop. His store is called trinity, electronics and his store is in Bangkok I'll have to address in the description below. But thank you to Simon for loaning me this phone, I'm not going to do a review on this, because I have to give this back to Simon later tonight, but I'm pretty sure when the global version of this device comes out I'll, get a review unit from Xiaomi, so I'll dig deeper, then and have a full video.

Then this is just kind of like a teaser, the Xiaomi mi 11, the world's first snapdragon 888 phones. So that's it for now. Thank you for watching this video. Please subscribe to my channel. If you haven't already and follow me on Instagram at Ben's, gadget reviews and stay healthy, stay safe thanks for watching.

Source : ben's gadget reviews