Xiaomi Mi 8 long-term review

Introduction

The Xiaomi Mi 8 was launched to mark the company's eight-year anniversary and named accordingly. Still, while a ten-year anniversary may hold more significance in the western world (see Apple's iPhone X), for the Chinese 8 seems to be it.

The number 8 is quite interesting. It's perceived to be the luckiest number in Chinese culture. It's because saying it in Chinese sounds really similar to the word that means "to generate wealth", as a Wikipedia article would readily tell you. Hence, people are used to paying skyrocketing amounts of money for anything from car license plates that feature at least one 8, to phone numbers that get progressively more expensive the more eights they incorporate.

So is the Mi 8 worthy of proudly wearing the lucky number on its sleeve? It was the company's top of the line offering when it launched in the first half of last year (2018, what a nice coincidence), but it's still very interesting to take a look at because thanks to a bunch of price drops it is now one of the most affordable smartphones you can buy with a Snapdragon 845 inside - still Qualcomm's latest and greatest for at least a few more weeks.

As with every other Xiaomi phone that isn't part of the Android One program, the Mi 8 runs MIUI, but it has been updated to MIUI 10 and Android 9 Pie since its release. We wanted to take an in-depth look at what it's like to actually use the Mi 8 as our one and only smartphone for an extended period of time. Is it still a good buy in early 2019, with the onslaught of new, Snapdragon 855-powered flagships fast approaching?

Is this Xiaomi's best achievement so far, as the number 8 in its name implies? Let's take a look.

Join us over the next few pages of this long-term review to find out everything there is to know about living with the Mi 8 day in and day out. As usual, we'll tell you what's great but also where it comes short, and in the end you can hopefully make a more informed decision if you were considering buying one at this point in time.

Design, build, handling

Oh look, it's got glass on both sides! How surprising! Okay, not really. Jokes aside, there's nothing exceptional about the way the Mi 8 looks and feels. You get two sheets of glass with an aluminum frame in between. The glass curves towards the frame, both on the front and on the back.

If you take a look at the phone with the screen on, you'll notice a not-insignificant display chin, but we'll admit we actually quite like it for one specific reason: it gives you somewhere to rest your fingers when you hold it. That said, from a purely aesthetic standpoint, focusing on symmetry, it's quite an eyesore. The notch is very reminiscent of Apple's, in width and height.

That theme continues on the back with the dual camera island which, if you aren't doing an up-close inspection, seems to be lifted straight from Apple's component farm. As Xiaomi's brand recognition and reputation are on the rise, we think it's high time that they finally decide to do their own thing in the design department and stop being so confined to whatever Apple prefers.

Anyway, there's a camera hump. Not the worst we've ever seen, but the phone will still wobble if you place it on a flat surface on its back. The fingerprint scanner works very well. It's always fast and among the most accurate we've ever used - this seems to be a theme with Xiaomi phones. Then again, right now more and more devices are making the jump to in-display sensors, so from this point of view what the Mi 8 brings to the table is already pretty retro. Such is the pace the mobile world moves at.

Build quality is amazing, as one should expect from a phone that was its maker's proper flagship when it launched. No creaks whatsoever, everything feels solid and the handset is easy to use with one hand, which it owes in part to its size. While it's not small by any stretch of the imagination, it won't be unwieldy either except for those with the smallest of hands.

Of course since this is a glass sandwich you're holding, it is slippery. Not as much as the ceramic back makes the Mi Mix 3, but still - the Mi 8 has a tendency of falling off couches by itself, if left unsupervised for a couple of minutes. It might also slip from your hand while you're on a call, although the aforementioned size somewhat alleviates this.

Regardless, if you want to be sure you won't break it within a few days of receiving it, it's probably best to just slap a case on it. That will also ensure that the back glass doesn't develop a bunch of micro-scratches from normal day to day use like our review unit.

Looking at the bottom side, there's some nice symmetry with the centered USB-C port, the identical speaker grilles to its sides, and even the two antenna bands that are close to the edges. That's good for people who suffer from OCD, but keep in mind that one of those grilles is simply there in order to achieve this effect - only one actually hides a speaker.

The power button and volume rocker are pretty close together on the right side, which means that you might confuse the volume down key for the power one at times. We wish the power button had a different texture to make it easier to tell that's the one you're pressing.

We can't end this section without mentioning the text that sits right below the Mi branding on the lower back of the handset. This tells you the name of the company that made the phone - Xiaomi Communications Co., Ltd. But then there's another line right underneath, which says "Designed by Xiaomi" - you know, just to make it clear.

It all just feels a bit redundant and frankly done in order to have something similar to "Designed by Apple in California" somewhere. Is this really necessary?

Display

The Mi 8's AMOLED panel isn't breaking any pixel density records with its FHD+ resolution, but in day to day use you are not going to notice anything off about that, unless you really like to peek at your phone's screen from a very small distance, or with a magnifying glass. The fact that it's just FHD+ and not QHD+ means that Xiaomi was able to get this panel for a more affordable price, and that translates into how much you'd pay for the Mi 8 itself. Additionally, there are probably some marginal battery life benefits to going with the lower resolution - otherwise why would Samsung have a default on its flagships that's lower than what their displays are actually capable of?

The Mi 8's screen gets very bright when you leave brightness on auto, and our lab tests confirmed this. There aren't a lot of environments where you'll feel the need for it to be even brighter than it is at maximum, so using the phone outside on even the sunniest of days will be fine. Some competitors still manage higher numbers, but once again you're unlikely to notice a huge difference, even if you hold the Mi 8 side by side with, say, an iPhone.

So while Xiaomi has cut some corners on the resolution, it definitely went for a very high quality panel and that's to be commended. Colors out of the box pop in the inaccurate way that we're getting used to with smartphones, but if you're a stickler for calibration you can play with the display settings and reach very good levels of accuracy. For this long-term review we've gone with Automatic contrast (the default option) and switched to Warm colors, which felt like the best compromise between accuracy and pop. But if you choose the Standard contrast mode, then you're basically getting the most accuracy you can from this panel, at the expense of perceived vividness.

Settings for display contrast and colors

The auto-brightness works very well for the most part, we've rarely felt the need to manually adjust the slider. That said, we find that even the lowest setting is a bit too bright when we use the phone at night in a very dark environment. So while on one hand the Mi 8 gets plenty bright, the range of its brightness isn't mind blowing. Then again we find that most people prefer brighter screens even in pitch darkness, so this may not be an issue for you.

The notch is there and you'll never unsee it, but you'll probably get used to it in a few days. Since the MIUI 10 update, you can't mask it with a black strip anymore, and this may rub some people the wrong way. Hopefully Xiaomi is working on bringing that option back, because it is a bit strange that it was ousted, especially given how, for a lot of other things, MIUI seems to be all about throwing myriad options at you left and right.

The notch hiding setting is gone

Overall the Mi 8's display is definitely worthy of being used in a phone that used to be the company's flagship, despite having a lower resolution than most of its competitors. It's a quality panel and you're more likely to enjoy using it than not to.

Camera

The Mi 8's camera app is generally fast and reliable, but it does have a couple of bugs in its current iteration.

First off, there's a setting to turn it on with a double-tap of the Volume Down button, but that has never worked for us. And simply starting the camera requires you to unlock the screen, which quickly gets tedious.

Second, switching between the two shooters on the back, by tapping the 1x/2x button in the viewfinder, has always resulted in a slight stutter - this is in fact the one and only reliably reproducible stutter we've seen throughout the entirety of our usage of the Mi 8. Both of these things are easily fixable with an update to the camera app, and we hope that's coming soon.

Otherwise, the app is what you'd expect in this day and age. You switch between modes by swiping across the viewfinder, you switch between rear and front cameras by tapping the appropriate button, you get a Manual mode if you're into that, and a bunch of shooting options including Portrait Mode and Night Mode.

Everything works well, and the Mi 8's cameras generally produce pleasant images in all lighting conditions. While the quality may not exactly match what's offered by the current best smartphone cameras, it is pretty close. And the Mi 8 will not make you question whether you'll take a good shot - it is consistent and reliable in its good output, so you should have no anxiety about whether a specific image will turn out well or not.

The pictures have good dynamic range (and you can use HDR to pump that up even more), and they're sharp and detailed at the expense of some noise (which gets progressively worse the less ambient light you shoot in). Colors are accurate enough, and thankfully not overly saturated - unless you enable the AI mode.

Daytime camera samples

The secondary zoom lens on the back produces images that are reasonably on par with the primary sensor when there's ample ambient lighting, but starts to fall short when the light goes down - this is understandable because of the smaller sensor as well as its lack of OIS.

Zoom lens samples, daytime

On the other hand, Xiaomi lets you use this shooter even at night, unlike some of its competitors. The output, though, especially in very dark scenes, won't be amazing so you should probably stick to the main camera and then just crop if you want to go closer.

Zoom lens samples, lowlight

The dedicated Night Mode brightens things up and restores highlights if you can hold the phone still for a few seconds while it does its magic. However, we found that if you are already using HDR for your low-light shots, then Night Mode will only bring marginal improvements at the expense of the extra hassle. It's still better, but you might have to take a really close look in order to notice.

The difference between a regular photo (one without HDR) and Night Mode will be much more pronounced, in both shadows and highlights. Additionally, with Night Mode photos there's a lot less noise than what you get in normal mode.

Overall, the results of Xiaomi's Night Mode are pretty far from what Google's able to produce with its Night Sight for Pixels, but this is still a useful feature to have and employ with the aforementioned information in mind.

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Normal mode • Night mode lowlight photos

Selfies come out good during daytime, and there's Portrait Mode here as well - but since it's based off on one camera (and apparently not a lot of companies can work Google and Apple's magic with that), the results aren't amazing. Stray hairs will get blurred by accident.

Night-time selfies are unsurprisingly noisier, but still very much usable unless you snap them in the darkest of corners.

Selfies (without and with Portrait Mode), day and night

Overall the Mi 8's camera image quality is very much worthy of a flagship smartphone, even if its pictures aren't really up there with the greatest in the field at the moment. But with the Mi 8, you get camera performance that's pretty close to that for literally a fraction of the price of the best phones out there from this point of view.

Performance

The Mi 8 was Xiaomi's flagship smartphone when it launched, and you can feel this in the way it performs even today. The Snapdragon 845 chipset is by no means a slouch, and it's paired with ample amounts of RAM. So you'd expect performance to be great, right? It is.

The phone feels fast no matter what you do, stutters are very, very rare, and overall there isn't a feeling of lag at all, regardless of what you throw at it. The Mi 8 is very smooth, and while it doesn't quite reach the new Pixel levels of smoothness it does come very close. That's the highest amount of praise we can bestow upon an Android smartphone at the moment, so don't think of it as being a small thing. This handset simply flies.

As this is a long-term review we're basing this assessment purely on how we felt during the extended period of time when we used the Mi 8 as our one and only smartphone. Benchmark results may or may not paint a different picture, but there's a reason for the word "synthetic" in the phrase "synthetic benchmark" - none of them emulate day to day use very well.

Battery life

While the Mi 8's battery capacity isn't small by any stretch of the imagination, it's also lagging behind a lot of its Android-powered competitors'. We've finally reached a stage where expecting to see a 4,000 mAh cell (or thereabouts) in a flagship smartphone isn't unrealistic. So from that point of view you may be slightly disappointed to see that Xiaomi has fitted the Mi 8 with a 3,400 mAh battery.

However, in day to day use battery life has been very good, while obviously not matching the endurance of any device which has a beefier cell. Overall we have been very satisfied with what the Mi 8 can provide from this point of view, but with our usage we did have to charge it every single night. Afternoon top-ups occurred only during days in which we had a lot of mobile data and GPS use going on.

Normally, our use case scenario involves around 12 to 16 hours off the charger, with Wi-Fi on and connected for most of that save for an hour or two of 4G/LTE. Bluetooth is always on and streaming music for a couple or so hours every day, while location is set to the most accurate option and we have about 30 minutes to an hour of GPS navigation through Waze or Google Maps. In such a normal day, we've seen upwards of 7 hours of screen on time before we got to 10% left, and getting at least 6 hours of screen on time is what we came to expect.

Screen on time in our use

Again, with a different mix, involving less time on Wi-Fi and more time searching for a GPS signal, these numbers will definitely go down. Your mileage will obviously vary, but we're trying to keep the use case consistent for these long-term reviews so that you at least get to make reasonably accurate comparisons between different devices that have been put through this process.

Software

The Mi 8 launched on Android 8.1 Oreo but it has been updated to Android 9 Pie recently. That's less important with a Xiaomi phone than most devices from other manufacturers because the company's skin, MIUI, is so all-encompassing that most user-facing changes come from MIUI updates and not the underlying Android version a phone happens to run.

MIUI 10.2 is what the Mi 8 currently boots, and our unit has the December 2018 security patch level. That's obviously not current, but while you shouldn't expect the Mi 8 to receive security updates as soon as Google pushes them, Xiaomi is still decent at not allowing it to fall very far behind.

Android 9 Pie with MIUI 10.2

MIUI 10 is probably the company's most friendly skin towards Western audiences ever, but it still has quirks. For one thing, the default launcher on the Mi 8 has no app drawer, so if you don't like that you'll need to use a third-party app. If you want to stay loyal to Xiaomi, you can even download the Poco Launcher that ships with the Pocophone F1 from the Play Store and get an app drawer in an app that still has a quintessentially MIUI look.

We're not going to dive into the skin's design because that's a matter of personal preference. Plus, you can get different themes for it if you don't enjoy the default one.

The way MIUI 10 works, however, that's another story. Quick example: you can swipe right to dismiss a notification, but swiping left won't do that, instead revealing a couple of option buttons. In Google's interpretation of Android, those show up regardless of the direction of your swipe, if you pause for a bit. And yes, in that case you can swipe both ways to dismiss any notification.

Notification pane • Quick settings

This is a very small thing, but the example is meant to show you that Xiaomi's UI overlay is still far from 'stock', and not just in looks but functionality-wise too. On the other hand, it does bring with it a huge number of options in Settings that you never had if you've used 'stock' Android before. So it's a case of winning some things and losing others.

Here's an example of where MIUI is miles ahead of Google - the gesture navigation system. Plainly put, Google's efforts in this space so far make absolutely no sense. The point of such a system is to free up more of the display area to show you an app's UI, but Google's implementation still has a navigation bar so it doesn't accomplish that at all. On the other hand, Xiaomi's full screen gestures are a joy to use and when you enable them you do actually get some extra display real estate.

Full screen gestures explained

A lot of the things MIUI does differently can be loosely traced back to its beginnings as a software skin developed for the Chinese market, which has some unique challenges. You can find a more detailed explainer of that on this page of our Pocophone F1 long-term review, so we're not going to reiterate all of those points.

If you approach it with an open mind and are willing to put in some work (if the need should arise) to get all apps to do what they're supposed to, then MIUI will be a good interface for you.

If you want everything to magically 'just work' out of the box however, and not be forced to think about app permissions not being granted by default hence hindering their behavior sometimes, then you'll be in for a rough ride at times. Whether that's a small or huge price to pay is obviously up to you.

MIUI 10 Settings

The main thing you probably need to come to grips with regarding MIUI in its current state on the Mi 8 is how it handles notification icons, and for more on that make sure you jump to the next page of this review, which is all about possible downsides, the point being not that this isn't a very good phone but that there are some things you may need to keep in mind if you want to buy one.

Frustrations, niggles, annoyances

Like with the Pocophone F1, the main issues we've had with the Mi 8 have to do with its software. First of all, it's very far removed from anything resembling stock Android. Then again, if you're a control freak you'll enjoy the many ways in which you can stop apps from misbehaving - some of these are turned on by default even.

Of course, if you only use the Play Store to source your apps and games this may quickly become annoying, as you could have to dive deep into Settings to change some options that occasionally hinder the normal functioning of certain apps.

This has definitely gotten better and better over time, but we find that MIUI is still overly protective in this regard, especially for a western audience that might be more used to things not having to be tweaked beforehand in order to get an adequate experience.

Now let's go on to specifics. Again, like the Pocophone F1, the Mi 8 has a very wide notch, and MIUI 10 doesn't show you notification icons to the left of it, where you might be used to seeing them if you're coming from another Android device, for more than a second or so as each new one comes in. After that it's back to the clock taking up the entirety of the space in the left 'ear' of the screen.

You can definitely learn to get used to this, but if you don't it will frustrate you every single day. The weird thing is that there seems to be enough space in that ear for at least a couple of notification icons to be shown alongside the clock (especially if the font is changed to something more condensed), but for some reason Xiaomi insists on not going that route which may hugely aid in the usability of its skin.

Additionally, the notch being so wide does not come with the benefit of having very secure face unlocking, the way Apple does it. Xiaomi's system in the Mi 8 uses the front camera for this, like many other Android device makers, but adds an IR sensor to ensure that face unlocking works reliably in the dark too. That's all well and good, but keep in mind that this implementation is still vulnerable to being fooled by someone who has a picture of you and shows that to the phone.

Face recognition settings

And yet what's most annoying about the face unlocking in the Mi 8 is that it's region-dependent. As in, you have to go into Settings and change your region to a few specific ones in order to get it to actually work. You can choose India or Singapore or Hong Kong, but in that case you're prone to getting some preinstalled apps for each of those specific markets magically show up. Oh, and also ads.

If you're in Europe the most baffling fact is that the system works if you change your region to some EU countries, but not all. This makes absolutely no sense as privacy regulations are the same across the EU. We went with France and got the system to work, but why can't you just pick the EU country you live in and call it a day?

Moving on, thanks to its AMOLED touchscreen the Mi 8 has an Always-On Display function that will show you the clock and date at all times, and, theoretically, notification icons too. Yet there are basically no settings for this aside for turning it on or off, and we found that it's rather unreliable. It seems to have a mind of its own in deciding which notification icons to display. More than once we saw one from a specific app, only to unlock the phone and find we actually had more waiting for us. This is obviously an easy software fix, so hopefully Xiaomi will pay more attention to its AOD implementation in future MIUI releases.

Neither the earpiece nor the downwards-facing speaker are very loud, which means that if you talk on the phone in noisy environments you'll end up pumping up the volume to the max and even then may not hear the person you're talking to very well. Likewise for video calls or ones put on speakerphone or listening to music through its speaker or watching videos, etc. Additionally, the speaker sounds tinnier than we're used to for units in flagship devices.

Speaking of sounds, when scheduled Do Not Disturb mode kicks in, it silences everything, regardless of what you were doing. You could be listening to music at that exact time and then be startled by feeling that the music simply randomly stopped. Except that's not what happened, it just got muted. With DND systems from other manufacturers we've never had this problem.

They either don't take media volume into account at all, or if they're willing to silence that too then there's an option that lets you say no to that. And that's great because having the media volume silenced as well seems like a pretty niche use case - after all you only hear media sounds if you intentionally hit Play on a song or video, it's not like with phone calls or notifications where you have no control over them coming in.

The Mi 8 is yet another Xiaomi phone that still hasn't jumped on the wireless charging train, nor, for that matter, does it have any water or dust resistance. Its price (especially now) might alleviate those issues for some people, but these features have pretty much become the norm for a top of the line device in this day and age and it's getting increasingly hard to overlook their absence.

VoLTE, like with any other Xiaomi phone running MIUI 10, is only going to be active by default in a handful of countries on a few operators. However, you can manually force enable it by dialing *#*#86583#*#*, but the company then assumes no responsibility if things go wrong.

Another word of caution here is that if you go this route, depending on your carrier's specific settings, you may not be able to send SMS while connected to LTE. Receiving works fine, it's just sending that's impacted, and for most networks across the world this shouldn't be an issue, but there are always outliers.

Finally, there's no 3.5mm headphone jack on the Mi 8. If you don't care about it, then this will obviously not affect you, but if the jack is important then unfortunately you may need to look elsewhere to get your next smartphone fix. Xiaomi's basically only aligned itself with most of its competitors in this regard, but it's still sad to see the jack go.

Conclusion

The Mi 8 is a very interesting smartphone. A flagship with a price that's more in mid-range territory at the moment. This odd pairing of specs and capabilities with the low price is what drove us to write this long-term review of it right now. Yes, the future Mi 9 is probably right around the corner, but that will obviously be more expensive, at least at first.

So can you buy a Mi 8 in 2019 and not regret it? Definitely. It's a very good device that does most things well. It has a nice glass sandwich design, great build quality, a high quality screen (even if it's not the highest-res out there), incredible performance and smoothness, and a good camera system that is very unlikely to disappoint you. Battery life is very good given the available capacity, and while the phone definitely isn't small, it's also not huge by today's standards so handling it shouldn't be an issue for most people.

On the other hand, the Mi 8 isn't perfect. It lacks a couple of features that most competing flagship smartphones have had for a while now - wireless charging and an IP rating. It's also devoid of a headphone jack in an effort to get with the trends. Additionally, its earpiece and speaker aren't the loudest out there by any stretch of the imagination, and they also sound pretty tinny, even by mobile phone standards.

MIUI is very different from stock Android, which might be a positive or a negative depending on your preferences. It gives you much more granular control over what apps are allowed to do, and you also generally have a lot more options for anything than there ever were in stock builds. However, that comes with a possible cost in frustration if you end up needing to troubleshoot why certain apps aren't doing what they should be - which is usually thanks to some part of MIUI policing them and not bugs in those apps. The skin has gotten a lot better in this regard lately, though, and we hope Xiaomi will keep improving it and adapting it to Western markets, now that it's very serious about its international expansion. Hopefully the company will also manage to stop the geo-blocking shenanigans for the face unlocking feature.

In the end though, the Mi 8's most interesting feature is probably its price. So with that in mind a lot of its shortcomings can be overlooked, we assume. It's a flagship but also not a flagship - you don't get a fancy in-display fingerprint sensor, for example, nor a very small display chin, nor some other things that we've come to expect from a top of the line device.

But if you can live with its shortcomings - chief of which, for us, has been the lack of notification icons in the status bar - then there shouldn't be anything stopping you from buying one, even today. That is, obviously, if pricing is more important to you than having the latest and greatest specs.

It's interesting that the Mi 8 is now basically priced similarly to the Pocophone F1, also a very good device from Xiaomi. You get a more premium feeling build with the Mi 8, but a smaller battery. You have NFC on board, and a slightly bigger display that's AMOLED and not LCD. You get a secondary zoom lens on the back and not just a depth sensor. But, the speakers are worse than the Pocophone's. So is it a tough choice between these two? While it might feel like that, we hope this review has helped you reach a conclusion of your own.

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