Xiaomi mi 8 review in Spanish (complete analysis)

Xiaomi announced less than a month ago on the occasion of its eighth anniversary, the Xiaomi Mi 8. The company's new flagship. It is already available in China, and according to recent leaks, it is very possible that it will reach the European market in a few months. In Spain it has already been possible to see a list in some web stores.

Rivers of ink have flowed with respect to the exaggerated similarity of this Xiaomi Mi 8 with the standard-bearer iPhone X from Apple. Despite this, we find a terminal with many qualities together with a very competent price, as is usual in this company. Ready to see our analysis? Do not miss it! Let's start!

We appreciate the trust in the Infofreak store for the transfer of the product for its analysis:

Technical characteristics Xiaomi Mi 8

Unboxing

In this version for the Asian market, in addition to the minimalist design to which we are accustomed, black has been chosen as the predominant color for the packaging. A design similar to that seen previously in some versions of the Xiaomi Mi. The distinction lies in the number eight in silver that stands out enormously on the front. When opening the box we find:

Xiaomi Mi 8. Type-C microUSB charging cable. Power adapter. Audio jack to Type-C microUSB adapter. Clear gel case. SIM slot extractor. Quick guide and warranty.

Design

At first, describing the design of the Mi8, as we discussed in the introduction, is really simple. It is a shameless copy of iPhone X. That means, for better or for worse, that the Xiaomi smartphone has lines very similar to those of Cupertino. With pronounced curves on each of the edges. The same goes for the notch or eyebrow. A feature implemented in both terminals to house the sensors that make Face ID technology possible. A final simile can be found in the used manufacturing materials. Crystals on both sides of the Mi 8 joined by an aluminum alloy on the side edges.

Not everything is similarities, of course, the Xiaomi Mi 8 brings some appreciable differences. Despite trying to maximize the screen size with the notch, the screen is not used as much as that of its rival. Since the lower area of the front still houses a border of about 7 mm. Despite being released months later, it fails to innovate in terms of the technology needed to reduce frames.

Speaking of measurements, the Mi 8 has slightly larger dimensions. By including a screen with more inches, its final measurements are 154.9 x 74.8 x 7.6 mm. The weight, on the other hand, is light with its 175 grams.

As for the back, the position and design of the lenses bears a great resemblance to those of the Iphone X. Both are in an upright position just in the upper left corner, with the LED flash in between. However, Xiaomi stands out by keeping the fingerprint sensor in the central rear area. A very wise decision since it is not possible to always trust Face ID, no matter how good it is as we will see later.

At the side edges, not many differences are found with respect to other terminals. At the top is the noise canceling microphone, and on the left edge is the slot for nanoSIMs.

The right edge has, very well integrated with the aluminum alloy, the volume buttons in the upper area and the on / off button just below.

Finally, on the bottom edge is the microphone for calls, the microUSB type-C connector and the multimedia speaker.

As you can see and unfortunately. They have decided to remove various features available on previous models. I am referring to the absence of the microSD card compartment, the 3.5mm audio jack and the infrared sensor. There may be people who do not miss those exclusions, but a large majority continue to use them in one way or another. To connect wired headphones it will be necessary to use the DAC adapter that is included in the box.

screen

The Xiaomi Mi 8 mounts a 6.21-inch screen that occupies 88.5% of the front with its Super AMOLED panel and resolution of 2280 x 1080 pixels. This gives us a density of 402 pixels per inch. With the increase in the percentage of the screens, we are seeing how the aspect ratio is changing from last year's 18: 9 to the longest 18: 7: 9.

This panel features 24-bit color depth , 60000: 1 contrast ratio, and supports HDR10. Taken together, all this offers us a really good image quality with fairly realistic colors, although somewhat oversaturated. The contrast is a point that stands out, as is normal in this type of panel. The same goes for viewing angles. They are good and no color variation is seen.

In the screen settings, you can find a section to modify both the display of colors and contrast. For colors, we can choose a predominant color manually or a range of colors ranging from quality to cold. The contrast can be automatically optimized according to the moment (This is the preselected option), force it to be shown increased or choose a standard contrast that will be fixed at all times.

Although it is not activated by default, it is possible to activate the Always On option in settings. This allows us, like other terminals, to view the time and other notifications while the screen is off.

The maximum brightness of the screen is 600 nits and after our tests, we have been able to verify that it is more than enough to be able to use the Mi 8 outdoors. Even under the radiant sun of the Andalusian coast.

Sound

The sound is not among the highlights of the Xiaomi Mi 8. The speaker at the bottom can be heard quite well and clearly. However, during tests playing music or videos, we have noticed that a little more sound power is missing.

Just like for the screen, there are some extra settings if you use headphones. On the one hand, it will be possible to assign an action to buttons that include some cables. On the other hand, Xiaomi adds a sound enhancer that will vary according to the type of headphones or helmets that we select. Certainly, the sound achieved by this means is more powerful than that offered by other smartphones.

performance

On a high-end smartphone like this, it's normal to come across the most powerful processor of 2018, the 8-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 845. 4 Kryo 385 cores at 2.8 GHz and another 4 at 1.8 GHz along with the Adreno 630 GPU. To these components, we must add the LPDDR4x RAM. Which is designed to achieve great performance, while maintaining greater energy savings. We have tested the 6 GB of RAM model, and it is possible to get another superior model that incorporates 8 GB instead .

Much was expected of the performance that the Mi 8 would perform. Even Xiaomi argued that it could reach a score close to 300, 000 in AnTuTu. However, surprisingly, our benchmark returned a result of 238, 315 on AnTuTu. Quite below expectations. That does not mean that, obviously, it continues to perform really well with the operating system and with any game or app that demands power.

Depending on the model purchased, we can choose between 64GB, 128GB or 256GB storage. The tests carried out on the UFS2.1 storage show read and write speeds that are very consistent with what this version is capable of offering.

Admittedly, the fingerprint sensor works very very well. Finger recognition is accurate and unlocking the terminal is really fast. The same taste in the mouth leaves us unlocking using Face ID technology.

Face detection has managed to quickly unlock the terminal almost 100% of the time. Sometimes it may take a little more time in low light, such as at night. But even so, its execution is very good. All of the above makes mention of its use with the face uncovered. In case of using any accessory, such as sunglasses, Face ID technology is still able to recognize the face, but again, somewhat more slowly. Needing a few extra seconds for it.

OS

It is not surprising at this point to find the Android 8.1 Oreo version already installed in the terminal. Neither does the MIUI customization layer in version 9.5. Since MIUI version 10 is still in beta, we will focus on the default 9.5.

As usual in the latest versions of MIUI and for those who have never used this layer, we will not have an application drawer. As in iOS, we will have the application icons spread across the main screen or grouped in folders.

In general the system performs excellently and smoothly. At no time have we noticed any slowdown or failure during use. In this regard, we appreciate the good optimization that the system has.

One of the biggest problems with this version of MIUI, in my opinion, lies in how the notch influences the display of pending notifications. Making these not visible to the naked eye and having to slide your finger if we want to see them. Only the time, battery, and data signal level and Wi-Fi are displayed on both sides of the notch. You can use an option to hide the notch, but it only adds a black bar at the top of the screen to hide it, nothing more. It only remains to pray that they do something with it in MIUI version 10.

With respect to other elements of the system, we must highlight the number of options that this layer always offers us. Among them we have the option to configure the operating system to use it with the digital buttons or through gestures and thus have the full screen. We can also add a floating ball to show notifications, choose how the notification bar is displayed, minimize the inches on the screen to use the Mi 8 with one hand, have a second desktop space, clone applications and there is even a voice assistant similar to Google's. The latter, although interesting, we could not prove it by only having the Chinese language for now.

Camera

In the back of the Mi 8 are the two main cameras of 12 megapixels each. The first has a Sony IMX363 Exmor RS sensor with f / 1.8 aperture and 1.4 micron pixel size with autofocus, optical zoom, digital zoom and image stabilizer. The second camera, meanwhile, mounts a Samsung S5K3M3 sensor with 2.4 focal aperture and 1 micron pixel size. This dual camera continues to bet on the use of AI recognition of scenes that could already be seen on the Mi MIX 2S. It works aytomatically both when taking photos and when recording short videos.

The quality of the snapshots taken in good light is really good and very sharp. Offering a rich and realistic range of colors that are enhanced by AI. It is possible to find some noise in the images but only if you search carefully. Generally it is not appreciable or abundant in this type of scenes. As far as the dynamic range is concerned, you can see the good work of the company at the software level, although it still needs to polish the contrast of the photos. The use of HDR largely alleviates this. On the contrary, sometimes in scenes with a lot of movement and with the AI activated it is necessary to keep the terminal stable for a few seconds to avoid unfocused captures.

Indoors the camera continues to capture much of the detail and borders on a high level with respect to the exposure and colors displayed. In night scenes or with low lighting is where despite showing good definition, and some noise, the colors sometimes appear somewhat saturated. One of the flaws of AI. In these cases it is almost preferable to use manual mode.

The secondary camera has the telephoto function to capture a wider range of scenes. This camera has a quality of details, colors and dynamic range very similar to the main one. Optical zoom naturally works very effectively. Not so much the digital zoom, where the noise begins to be seen clearly.

Portrait or bokéh mode is one of the features in which Xiaomi has put the most interest. In good light scenes most photos in this mode really isolate the background from the foreground focus. Creating a nice blur along the way. A minimum distance is necessary for this to take this type of photography. Something that is not required by other terminals. In low-light scenes, the portrait mode result may vary from good results to others other than dimmer.

We find other modes such as panoramic, short video, square, slow motion at 120 or 240 fps, time-lapse and manual mode.

Algorithms designed for AI are capable of recognizing 206 scenes. This helps to recognize if you are focusing on a landscape, if HDR is required or not, if we are facing a night scene, etc. In this aspect it works really well in general, being constantly automatically analyzing what is on the other side of the lens and almost instantly recognizing these types of scenes.

Only occasionally, the enhancement or adjustments the AI makes interfere rather than help. Like in the night scenes I was commenting on above.

The front camera for selfies has a 20 megapixel sensor with 2.0 focal aperture and a pixel size of 1.8 microns. With good lighting conditions you get really good selfies that have a surprising level of detail and color. Even with a single camera very effective bokéh effects are achieved. The beauty mode is another one available in the front camera and unless you want to see something unreal it is better to run away from it and disable it.

The Xiaomi Mi 8 is capable of recording videos at 1080p and 4K but only at 30 fps, nothing at 60 fps as is increasingly common in other high-end. Videos in both one resolution and another show a good level of detail, vivid colors, and truly accomplished contrast. However, it is in 1080p recording that a greater fluidity of frames is intuited.

The camera interface is simple but effective, hiding most of the settings in its options panel. In manual mode, it is possible to adjust the white balance, exposure, shooting speed, Focus level and the angle type.

Battery

According to the other specifications , Xiaomi has provided the Mi 8 with a 3400 mAh battery. It is certainly a good capacity today and the company often creates good software that optimizes it, but this time they have not done so well. Although it is true that the battery has lasted a little more than a day and a half, the screen consumption has almost never reached 6 hours.

Obviously they are not bad figures, but when compared to the Redmi 5 plus, the Mi 8 is quite disadvantaged in this regard. And is that mounting a more powerful processor, inevitably has its drawbacks.

Quick Charge Quick Charge 4+ works wonders, managing to charge half the terminal in just over half an hour. Instead, to fully charge, it takes around 1 hour and 20 minutes. If there is a section that you do not have, it is with wireless charging.

Connectivity

Among the connectivity options there are not many surprises: Bluetooth 5.0 LE, Wi-Fi 802.11 a, b, g, n, ac, Wi-Fi Direct, Wi-Fi Display, MIMO 2 × 2, NFC, GPS, A-GPS, GLONASS and Beidou. Sometimes you miss having an FM radio.

Conclusion and final words of the Xiaomi Mi 8

Having tried to copy the Iphone X can benefit the end consumer both in its careful design and in the use of Face ID. It must be recognized that they are outstanding characteristics, although the notch still does not really contribute anything to this industry. On the other hand, Face ID is a great success, especially combined with the efficient fingerprint reader. In the other sections Xiaomi goes on her own without paying much attention to Apple . There are very careful aspects such as the quality of the screen and the performance in general. Both the operating system and the processor. It is somewhat disappointing that a theoretical power was announced that in the end was not.

We recommend reading our guide to the best high-end smartphones

There is still a need to optimize the battery, which, although it has enough stamina, could have been used more. Photo cameras do a very good job, but one notch lower than you might expect from them. In general, they take good photos, but some snapshots can be improved. Finally, it is a pity to have lost the audio jack, the infrared sensor and the microSD card compartment.

Without a doubt , the best thing is to be able to have all this technology at a reasonable price. It is a terminal, which, despite its small defects, does not disappoint at all during the day to day. In Spain you can find it soon on infofreak with its two-year warranty.

ADVANTAGE	DISADVANTAGES
+ GREAT PERFORMANCE.	- IMPROVABLE BATTERY.
+ QUICK FACE ID.	- NO SLOT FOR MICROSD.
+ DISPLAY QUALITY.	- NO AUDIO JACK.
+ PRICE.	- AI SOMETIMES HARD.
+ CAMERAS.