The Xiaomi Mi 11 Review: A Gorgeous Screen and Design
by Andrei Frumusanu on March 10, 2021 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Mobile
- Smartphones
- Xiaomi
- Snapdragon 888
- Mi 11
Battery Life - The Bad News
When it comes to battery life, the Mi 11 sports a 4600mAh battery, and comes with the newer Snapdragon 888 SoC. We’ve already seen that the new chip isn’t quite as power-efficient as its predecessor, requiring more energy to achieve its higher performance levels.
However, the biggest issue for the Mi 11 is its idle power consumption, which is just terrible. Under all situations, even under 60Hz, the device will consume in excess of 700mW when displaying a black screen, and this figure goes up to the 900’s mW’s when under 120Hz mode. These are pretty horrible figures and bad news for the device, as it’s a constant power drain that happens no matter what you’re doing with the phone, especially dominant for battery life at lower brightness levels.
I don’t know exactly why this is happening to the phone, but’s the lack of VRR makes the situation even worse.
Edit March 12th: The Mi 11 does have a coarse software-based refresh rate switching mechanism, however it does not function below 110 nits screen brightness (around 70% on the brightness slider). The battery tests below should have had the feature functioning given we test at 200 nits.
Due to the high base power consumption, the phone doesn’t do all to well in the web browsing test. The most interesting device to compare things to is the OnePlus 8 Pro, which also features a QHD 120Hz screen of a similar generation, and both devices end up towards the bottom part of our battery life results here. It’s interesting to see that the 60Hz to 120Hz delta is smaller than that of the OnePlus 8 Pro. At 60Hz, the Mi 11 also does worse than the Mi 10 Pro.
In PCMark, the Mi 11 does averagely at 60Hz, but at 120Hz it’s really falling behind by a lot and bottoms our chart again, near the Exynos S21.
When it comes to weaknesses of the Mi 11, battery life is probably its biggest one. While performance and screen quality are great on the phone, the SoC remains very power hungry, and the screen is as well. The situation is exacerbated by the very high and unusual base power consumption of the device. I don’t know where the problem lies here, but given Xiaomi hasn’t fixed it in a firmware update yet signifies it’s some hardware mis-design that’s unlikely to get changed by software.
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ZoZo - Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - link
Curved edge screen? Next.yankeeDDL - Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - link
Really? Why? I have an S8 (yes, Samsung S8, 4 years old and counting) with edge screen. It still works perfectly, it is a pleasure to hold and it has some decent edge effects that are actually useful.I'd definitely consider another phone with curved edges.
I look forward to something a tad smaller than this though: 6" for example.
I hate the fact that on Android if you want the top of the line HW you get it only on huge phones.
Wereweeb - Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - link
Because it's terrible to use and distorts images. It's stupid and should stop existing. I say this as a former S6 Edge user (I didn't buy it, it was handed down to me)theblitz707 - Friday, March 26, 2021 - link
thats your opinion. i never had a problem with my curves s10+ and quite like it, it makes the screen look more premium and i never felt a distortion problem when watching videos. in fact compared to 11 pro max, that looks like a phone from years ago.inighthawki - Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - link
Am I the only one who prefers a phone with a flat rectangle for a screen with no curves, notches, or rounded corners cutting off or warping various parts of the display?Wereweeb - Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - link
Eh, rounded corners makes it easier to hold, and doesn't really compromise images that much. I'll take notches over hidden cameras, but otherwise I also dislike them, and prefer pop-up cameras or a camera between the housing and the display.inighthawki - Thursday, March 11, 2021 - link
I guess I mean that I'm fine with having a bezel on the top/bottom for that kind of thing. The phone itself can still have some roundedness on the corners. For example right now I use a pixel 2 and love it. I think they could shrink the bezels without sacrificing the screen being a rectangle.And while the corners dont really compromise much, it's something that forces software developers to work around. For example, if you're right a game, you now have to query APIs to know how rounded the corners are to ensure you aren't putting text or status icons somewhere the user can't see. Like imagine if your desktop's monitor had rounded corners and it forced Microsoft to update the taskbar so that the start button wasn't flush against the edge. It serves no purpose. You're quite literally just losing functionality. And on a phone it's done for no other reason than the bragging rights of claiming the display is 0.2" larger than the previous generation with zero bezels.
inighthawki - Thursday, March 11, 2021 - link
If you're writing a game*Stupid no edit button :(
hanselltc - Thursday, March 11, 2021 - link
minor curved corners are acceptable if it truly helps the phone keep a more handleable shape. if it has a chin and/or a forehead, then it is stupid. other cutouts are all absolutely asinine.MetaCube - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link
Rounded corners are great, stop smoking glue