Xiaomi Mi Mix Alpha - Day in the Life! By Mrwhosetheboss

Do, you think this is the future, no welcome to a smartphone with no boundaries. This is the Xiaomi mimics alpha we're talking a device with a 360 degree, wraparound display 108, megapixel, camera and materials straight out of a spaceship. So you might be wondering what on earth would it be like to use well I spent a full day trying to push this limitless phone to its limits, and I've got some answers. First, though, as you might have guessed for something so ridiculous, the unboxing experience is just nuts inside the outer cardboard there's an inner layer made of what feels like incredibly soft touch. Plastic. The very first thing you see is a card embossed with alpha written in Greek and right under that the mimics' alpha itself and Wow.

Is this a heavy phone there's a little cardboard cutout and then right at the bottom? Is the final package containing all the accessories, and this whole thing is literally boxes inside boxes like some sort of Russian doll situation, there's a USB cable, a 40 watt power, brick for pretty fast charging and then finally, an envelope. It's just got this card in it, and I'm not actually sure what it says, but overall, this is at least nine out of ten packaging for a smartphone, but now it's time to use it. So let's get a few things out the way this is the coolest looking phone I've ever used putting practicality aside for a second, the feeling of holding a phone that is almost entirely screen is a genuine novelty. It feels definitively new in a market where a lot of people complain about a lack of differentiation anyways. Quite a few things became clear, even in just my first 20 minutes of using it.

The whole thing is one continuous display, but the way the software has been designed, you can kind of treat it as having four separate displays, the primary one on the front, what you're used to on a smartphone but then flip to the left, and you get the things that you want to check quickly and often so time date and notifications and then on the right. You've got what would usually be in your status bar battery life, Wi-Fi and signal, and plus further down virtual power and volume keys. And finally, if you turn the whole thing, it's a rear display with all sorts of quick access, widgets, but I'm going to come back to this. The total screen size comes to 7.92 inches, which sounds colossal, but that's actually the size of the longest diagonal going all the way round. So when you're just dealing with the front, it's bigger than average, but still kind of manageable.

Now, because at all times, you're touching some part of the display going into this I was initially worried that I'd be triggering applications left right and center. But actually this was a non-issue. A combination of sensors mean that when you're using the phone from the front, the rear can be prevented from registering touches and vice versa. So anyways. These were the kinds of thoughts that were going through my head on first impression, but I was also curious.

What other people thought, so I asked them and their responses could be roughly split into three categories. The first was just that this is really cool. It looks different, I think the curve aspect of it makes it quite appealing. Well, how much is it that is circle? Yeah, it's impressed. It's interesting.

Do you think it's revolutionary yeah? Maybe the second type of comment was that actually, more than anything else, this design is just a little inconvenient, so you'd be constantly worried about dropping it yeah I've, broken a few I would probably break that within a day yeah as well. Okay, you don't see the appeal at all. Dunno I mean it's heavy to some extent, I'd agree with the impracticality, the Alpha it's heavy, and it's chunky and people are rightly worried about the fragility the phone is coated in strengthened, Gorilla Glass, five untold, but the way it's been put together is using two large curved glass sheets that meet on each side. So the worry is that this creates a sort of seam going down the middle, which is an obvious point of vulnerability. To my surprise, there actually is a working case for the Alpha is just not hugely protective and not to mention the other concern about battery life.

A 360-degree display is naturally going to suck more battery than a flat one, so I get it. The practicality of the whole thing is questionable, but that's not really. The purpose here which leads us on to the third set of responses, which was essentially a whole load of people asking this question. What is the purpose your normal apps here, and then you could turn it over, and can have a whole load of like separate apps, but truly it's easy to just want to black. Maybe I mean it's just like.

Why do you need stuff on the back? So what's the difference between this side and the other side? Oh yeah, it's way too much ski yeah yeah, it's quite closely. I, don't think I'd ever use the back of it, though I think it's pretty cool, but I, don't just don't see the use of the back part yeah. When are you ever going to put your phone around all the security, so the consensus seems to be that, yes, the phone is cool, but there are some serious inconveniences and because the benefits of the design aren't particularly clear people can't see why they should put themselves through those inconveniences. I should remind you, though, that the mimics' alpha is a concept phone. This isn't Jeremy, saying oh look coming by our ultra high-end flagship phone for $2000.

This is them saying: here's a cool experiment, let's see if it has any potential and having spent an entire day with it, I generally think it does it's just that the concept of this phone almost feels like it's ahead of what our current technology can actually make. This will hopefully make more sense towards the end of the video so anyways the display, although remarkable, is actually only one of the things that I wanted to look at here. I actually wanted to take this phone to the top of the shard a night. That's the tallest building in the entire country, with the goal of taking a 108 megapixel night photo across London and to get there we had a pretty unconventional form of transport. The only thing was we were kind of late, so we were just pacing it to this pier where we were going to board, and I was trying to call the boat company and I noticed something else see because this phone is almost entirely screen, there's no room for a physical earpiece.

It's the display glass itself that vibrates to send sound waves into your ears. To be honest, though, it wasn't great to my experience, because the whole display is vibrating. The psalm tends to be more scattered versus a normal earpiece that fires sound directly into your ear anyways. When it came down to. We had like three minutes to leg it to our boat, so you could probably imagine when we made it.

It felt like literally something out of a like a low-budget Mission Impossible movie. This was fun, things started, slow, the boat, just kind of sailed along I got some nice footage from the phone, and it became apparent very quickly that the camera here is beastly. I was actually only recording this at 1080p resolution. Well pretend that was on purpose, but even then the footage looks so clean. The dynamic range is good.

You can see clear details in the bright sky and the dark buildings, but probably the most notable improvement here versus most phones who are used to is that the camera sensor is quite literally multiple times the size. So when you're focusing on closer objects, it means you get a strong at DSLR like background blur effect. Then the boat picked up some pace. It started moving at around 55 kilometers, an hour which, when you're on choppy water, you feel it's considering. We were getting tossed around like noodles in a stir-fry at this point, I was quite impressed with the inbuilt optical image stabilization -.

It turned the shudder jumpiness of the boat into an almost glide. Like experience, one of the few obvious advantages of having a 360-degree display like this is that you can use your main set of cameras for the front ?, so just by turning the surrounding phone could now use my ultra-wide camera to get wide selfie video, and its good footage. We also got around 50 portrait mode selfies. The people on this boat must have thought I really liked myself now, I'm, just probably headed up to the shard for our 108 megapixel nighttime photo. We had to kill some time.

It wasn't quite dark enough. Yet so I decided to have a real good, ? think, but the back of this phone for starters in terms of the materials shall we have spared little expense, you're, looking at a titanium, alloy frame supposedly three times stronger than stainless steel, which is in itself stronger than aluminum there are some pieces of ceramic and a sapphire glass coating to protect the cameras. So when you turn the phone over Xiaomi has put a whole number of widgets on the back things like a music player, a step counter a voice recorder, and this I think is Sharma's biggest misfire. Think back to what those people we interviewed earlier was saying that you don't need a rear display, because you can only look at one display at once and there's some truth to that. The biggest benefit of having a display that goes all the way around the phone is nothing to do with apps or widgets that you can only use on the back, there's nothing.

You can run on the back of your phone that you couldn't just pull up on the front, but this concept still has merit. I, just think that the company needs to do a better job of communicating the possibilities. You've got the obvious perk. We talked about earlier of being able to turn your phone around and use your main rear set of cameras as your selfie cameras, but there's so much more. So here are some ideas that I literally thought of in the last 20 minutes dual profiles.

What if you could have one set of accounts that have permanently logged in on the front of your phone and another set for the back one for work, one for home, for example, and add to that this is a dual SIM phone, so you could even configure it so that calls made from the front use one of the sims, and then we flip it over calls made from the back might use the other SIM. It's just a random example, but that effectively gives one phone the functionality of having two phones. What about multitasking say there was a game that you wanted to keep open and keep checking every now again, you could just pin it to your rear display and then flick back to your front and work on that you've got gestures. You could be using the front of your phone, but also set up the back to respond to gestures like double tapping for screenshots or notifications. Whichever side of your phone you set on a table facing upwards, can flash when you get an incoming call or a message versus normally having to put your phone facing up only because nothing's gonna pop up on the back, what about virtual buttons? Admittedly, the implementation of them here is still very prototype II, but when it gets better, I've got no doubt that virtual buttons will replace physical ones they're just far more practical, for the same reason that virtual keyboards replaced physical keyboards there's also just the fact that this screen can show more information.

You can watch a full screen, video on the front, while still being able to see the time in notifications on the sides. This is all stuff that Xiaomi hasn't really talked about, instead choosing to focus on specific applications that could be shown on the back, there's also an optical fingerprint scanner built into the display. But that's a pretty standard affair nowadays and a single speaker on the bottom anyways reflection period overnight was coming, and it was time to head to that final location and as someone who doesn't actually live in London, it is genuinely shocking how many people they can fit into one underground station. Anyway, we arrived at the shot where you take a combination of stairs and lifts to get you to the 72nd floor from here. Of course, London is little more than a blur.

The view is absolutely spectacular, but so dark that even my main camera was struggling, so I took the phone out snapped a full resolution photo, and this is what we got completely unedited and if we zoom in obviously it's not daytime level crisp, but you can see the features of each and every building and landmark I, probably sat there for 10 minutes just zooming in and around that photo seeing what I could find. It really is something, and now a couple of final things before I bring this all together. I wanted to see if you could apply a normal desktop wallpaper to this 360 degree screen. So I popped over to Google Images downloaded one and yeah yeah you can and finally, the phone is powered by a Snapdragon 855 plus chip, 12 gigs of ram and 512 gigs of fast ugh, s3 storage. So the performance is a little behind phones with the latest Snapdragon 805 chipset, but it's still bordering on that cutting edge with a 5g modem inside.

So if that was the mimics' alpha, and my current conclusion is that I think it's almost a little ahead of its time, the idea of everything being a display, that's what we're moving towards, but the manufacturing methods and the software solutions needed for it. They aren't good enough to make it viable yet like right at this moment in time. I think a form factor like this create more problems than it fixes, but looking forwards, I think it gets a lot of right and as a concept for the sake of leading the way guiding the market in a sense, I'm glad the Alpha exists, and you've got to applaud a company. That's willing to experiment like this. If nothing else, it's exciting thanks for watching my name is Erin, and this is Mr.

who's. The boss, I, don't catch you in the next one.

Source : Mrwhosetheboss