Xiaomi Mi 11 review: A worthy alternative to Android flagships

Our Verdict

The all-time bargain in Android flagships right now, the Xiaomi Mi 11 offers an amazing platform for streaming video and running demanding apps and games, tied together with an enjoyable software experience. But you lot lose out on camera power — assuming you can become information technology in the starting time place.

For

Skilful macro photography
In a higher place-average specs for cost
Awesome curved QHD display with variable refresh rate
Powerful chipset

Against

Not available in U.Southward.
Underwhelming general photographic camera performance

Tom's Guide Verdict

The best deal in Android flagships correct now, the Xiaomi Mi 11 offers an amazing platform for streaming video and running enervating apps and games, tied together with an enjoyable software experience. But you lose out on photographic camera ability — assuming you tin can become it in the first place.

Pros

+
Practiced macro photography
+
Above-average specs for cost
+
Awesome curved QHD display with variable refresh charge per unit
+
Powerful chipset

Cons

-
Not available in U.Southward.
-
Underwhelming general camera performance

Xiaomi Mi 11: Specs

Starting toll: £749
Display: 6.81-inch QHD AMOLED (3200 x 1440)
Refresh charge per unit: 30 - 120Hz
Rear cameras: 108MP principal (f1.8), 13MP ultrawide (f2.four), 5MP telemacro (f2.4)
Front camera: 20MP (f2.2)
Chipset: Snapdragon 888
RAM: 8GB
Storage: 128GB/256GB
microSD: Non available
Operating system: Android 11 with MUI 12
Battery: four,600 mAh
Charging: 55W wired, 50W wireless, 10W reverse wireless
Colors: Midnight Gray (pictured), White, Horizon Blue
Size: half dozen.five ten 2.9 x 0.3 inches (164.3 x 74.6 x 8.1mm)
Weight: 6.9 ounces (196g)
IP rating: n/a

With a price lower than the Samsung Milky way S21 and the offer of superior specs in several areas, the Mi 11 will delight anyone who fancies picking i upward with just how much it packs into the telephone.

In fact, the Mi xi is ane of my favorite phones I've tested.

Throughout this Xiaomi Mi xi review, you'll see that this phone isn't lacking when information technology comes to hardware. Its display and performance specs together make this a neat phone for gaming, streaming or using CPU-intensive apps.

Its user experience is besides enjoyable, the software adding smart enhancements to the basic Android experience and its battery offer an effective mix of long life and speedy charging. Plus it's a pretty handsome piece of glass and circuitry to boot.

But while U.K. shoppers can detect the Xiaomi Mi 11, U.Due south users won't be able to. And when it comes to cameras, the Mi eleven starts to stumble a scrap.

Xiaomi Mi 11 review: Price and availability

Xiaomi brought the Mi 11 to the U.Thousand. on March sixteen, where it retails for either £749 for the 128GB storage version, or £799 for 256GB.

As a comparison, a Galaxy S21 with 128GB storage sells for £769, while a 128GB iPhone 12 goes for £849. It's non every bit large a price difference as we were hoping before the announcement, only the Mi 11, peculiarly the 256GB version, is quite the bargain compared to its rivals.

There's no U.South. availability for Xiaomi, with the company currently in dispute with the U.S. regime. (Not that Xiaomi phones were readily bachelor in the U.S. earlier that.) You'll probably be able to find it available for import if you've got your mind attack a Mi 11, but given the additional cost and potential problem with 4G/5G band compatibility, y'all're probably better off buying a phone that's already sold in your country. Our guide to the best Android phones is a adept place to kickoff if yous need culling ideas.

Xiaomi Mi 11 review: Design

From the front, the Xiaomi Mi xi resembles many other Android flagships, only it's still a looker. It'southward set apart by its quad-curve display, which gives the phone a stylish profile that catches the calorie-free attractively.

I can't make up my mind on the look of the Mi 11's back though. The photographic camera bump in the top-left corner throws me off, since its 3-part structure looks muddled, even if the rounded square shape and silver ring around the main lens await the business from a distance.

It doesn't help that the rest of the back is plain aside from logos and regulatory text toward the lesser, which merely makes it easier for your centre to settle on the cameras.

The Xiaomi Mi 11 screen'due south fabricated of Gorilla Drinking glass Victus, the same drinking glass found on the Galaxy S21, so you lot shouldn't take to worry also much near small scratches appearing past accident. Yous'll need to exist more careful near exposing the Mi 11 to water and dust though; while Xiaomi says the phone is h2o-resistant, it doesn't have an official IP rating.

U.K. shoppers take a choice of iii bones colors: a plain white, Midnight Grey and Horizon Blue. The gray of my review unit of measurement looks classy with its satin-style finish (bated from all the fingerprints information technology picks up), although I like how the blue and white add a fiddling more visual involvement to the phone.

Xiaomi Mi 11 review: Brandish

With a half-dozen.viii inch-AMOLED panel, the Xiaomi Mi 11 is on the larger side of this year'southward Android flagship phones. Still a QHD resolution, one,500-nit maximum brightness and a variable 120Hz refresh rate mean this isn't just another big screen telephone.

Those impressive features don't cause battery life to suffer excessively, either. The Mi 11 offers both a variable resolution and variable refresh rate, then under certain conditions, the phone will scale down to FHD, while opting for a 90Hz, 60Hz or 30Hz refresh speed to save y'all ability. The approach isn't as versatile as the LTPO display on the identically-sized Galaxy S21 Ultra, which can vary anywhere between 10Hz and 120Hz. Just Xiaomi's approach with the Mi ten is still effective.

I loved watching video on the Mi 11. Poring over the trailer for the upcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge, the bright colors, exist it the green of the iv testudine protagonists or the purple of their enemies' jumpsuits, were positively glowing. Ironically, the high-resolution display let me actually appreciate the grainy, retro blitheness mode that the game's cinematic uses to call dorsum to the original cartoon.

Technically the Mi xi display curves around the side of the phone on all 4 edges, just this is merely noticeable on the left and right, and even so the curved portion is generally bezel. The height and bottom curves are very subtle, with a specially obvious bottom bezel. Nonetheless the telephone does feel prissy to hold horizontally as a event.

Xiaomi'due south added a "hardware-level mistouch sensor" to avoid you lot accidentally swiping the screen just by holding the curved edges. I didn't discover the phone being particularly sensitive to accidental touches, then this system seems to do its job. If you want, you tin alter the settings so the dead zone effectually the edges is larger or smaller if the automated organisation isn't to your liking.

Xiaomi Mi 11 review: Audio

Plain quite proud of its Harman/Kardon- tuned stereo speakers, Xiaomi emblazons the speaker visitor's proper noun on the superlative edge of the Mi 11.

Listening to British rap creative person Dave's "Location", I was impressed with the telephone's depiction of his vocals and the mid-range instrumentation behind him. But as is often the case with phone speakers, the bass frequencies were lacking power.

Still, listening to the aforementioned song on an iPhone 12 Pro, information technology became clear that percussion is a lot more than prominent on the Mi xi, which if anything made the listening experience a bit worse. However, I also noticed an impressive sense of width from the Xiaomi's speakers too. Whether or non the speakers deserve the Harman/Kardon badge for quality, they deserve them for the mini soundstage effect they conjure.

Xiaomi Mi eleven review: Cameras

Although non the most powerful or diverse camera array available, the Xiaomi Mi 11 covers the basics. The back three cameras consist of a 108MP master camera, a 13MP ultrawide camera and a 5MP macro camera, plus a flash. On the front, you have a single 20MP selfie cam.

While you tin set the main camera to accept 108MP photos via the Pro way in the Mi 11's photographic camera app, the telephone takes 27MP photos by default. The Mi 11 manages this past combining sensor data from four pixels into ane virtual pixel, a procedure called pixel binning. This saves yous infinite in your phone'due south storage, plus it'south ideal for low-low-cal shots, at least in theory.

That doesn't seem to have helped the Mi 11 capture this view over an inner London park. It's much darker than the iPhone 12 Pro's image I'm using for comparison, which makes information technology hard to observe any additional detail the 27MP shot gets over the 12MP iPhone photograph.

Switching to 108MP mode on the Xiaomi Mi eleven goes some way to addressing this problem. The straight lines and bright colors of the playground apparatus stand out much more, and makes it a far better rival for the iPhone shot. That's fine, except 108MP images can have upward to ix times as much storage space as 12MP shots. That volition fill up any phone's onboard storage pretty quick.

The ultrawide photographic camera on the Mi 11 has a magnification of 0.6x — common for Android phones but less extreme than the 0.5x camera on the iPhone 12 Pro, hence the unlike look of these two images of Archway. Either mode, this circular belongs to the iPhone thanks to its much richer colors.

The only thing missing from a typical flagship photographic camera set-upward on the Mi 11 is a telephoto sensor, only these tend to appear on more expensive models of flagships, such equally the expected Xiaomi Mi 11 Pro. What you become instead with the Mi xi is a "telemacro" camera. A lot of cheaper Android phones include macro cameras, simply the Mi 11's version offers variable magnification to improve achieve good close-up shots.

The result is the best macro shot I've taken with a dedicated macro lens on a smartphone. I tried taking the same shot of this daffodil with the master photographic camera too, and while I was able to get a meliorate focus on the stigma in the centre, I couldn't focus on the petals at the aforementioned time, and the colors are far less vivid. It's convincing enough proof of the camera's inclusion is worth your fourth dimension, rather than it being a cynical attempt by the phone maker to crash-land up the lens count.

It'south still very difficult to take these macro photos without any stabilization. The one you lot meet here was from a pick of 17 attempts. Commonly, it takes me five at almost to find a shot I'm happy with.

I have to hand information technology to Xiaomi when it comes to the selfie cam. Normally I enjoy the more than vivid colors you see in an iPhone 12 Pro selfie, but here I just look sunburnt. The Xiaomi has supplied a much more natural-looking selfie, plus does a slightly better job of cut my caput out from the copse in the background. The tradeoff is a much smoother image, which looks more than artificial despite the colors improve reflecting those I saw in the viewfinder.

Xiaomi Mi eleven review: Performance

Nether the hood, the Xiaomi Mi 11 features a Qualcomm Snapdragon 888. While you go the latest chipset Qualcomm has to offer, yous only have 8GB RAM, which pales in comparing to the 12GB you tin now notice on superlative performing Androids similar the Milky way S21 Ultra or Milky way Annotation twenty Ultra.

It's however enough for the Xiaomi to actually print. On the Geekbench 5 general criterion, the Mi 11 scored i,112 on the single core section and 3,379 on the multi-cadre section. The basic Galaxy S21 just manages one,048 and 3,302 respectively.

The Milky way S21 Plus, which uses the same bit and RAM capacity, shell the Mi 11's unmarried core score with 1,116, just the Mi eleven edged out the S21 Plus' multicore score of iii,300. The S21 Ultra easily beats the Mi 11 on both tests, but has an like shooting fish in a barrel advantage cheers to 12GB of RAM.

In 3D Mark'due south Wild Life graphics examination, the Mi 11 achieved a score of five,676, which averages to 34 frames per second. That tops the Galaxy S21'south 5,504 point/33 FPS result while finishing in line with the Galaxy S21 Plus (5,650/34 FPS).

Trying out Marvel Contest of Champions proved that these scores are reflected by real-world performance. Watching Spider-Man beat upwardly rival superheroes looked smashing and displayed smoothly on the Xiaomi Mi eleven. The Mi 11's 480Hz touch sampling rate allows the display to react faster to taps than the average phone's.

There's also a vapor cooling chamber built into the Mi eleven, which is probable why I didn't detect the phone heat up even afterward trying out all the games I downloaded, or during the benchmark tests. Fifty-fifty charging up the phone didn't noticeably increment the temperature of the casing.

Xiaomi Mi 11 review: 5G

The badge on the dorsum of the Mi 11 tells y'all it'due south a 5G-ready phone. Withal making sure you'll actually be able to use information technology on a faster network is a footling more complicated.

5G networks work on one or more signal bands, which some phones can selection up and others tin't. This is why if you're determined to bring a Mi eleven over to the U.South., it's crucial you cheque which bands your mobile carrier offers and which the Mi 11 will work with.

U.Thousand. customers shouldn't accept to worry though. There's much greater unity between the 5G carriers over hither, and all of them should offer 5G back up with the Mi 11 co-ordinate to Xiaomi'due south specs.

Xiaomi Mi eleven review: Bombardment life and charging

The 4,500 mAh battery in the Xiaomi Mi 11 is smaller than average for a phone of this size. The Samsung Milky way S21 Ultra has a half dozen.8-inch screen similar the Mi 11, but gets a 5,000 mAh jail cell.

Nonetheless, the Mi 11's battery does a good job at keeping the phone powered up. After watching an hour of YouTube in full screen fashion (the primary battery-intensive activity I apply my phones for), the Mi eleven lost 8% of its total charge. That equates to a full twenty-four hours of binge-watching the remakes of Hamilton songs in Creature Crossing: New Horizons, which ways the Mi 11 will probably handle a twenty-four hours of bodily piece of work capably without needing an emergency trip to a charging plug.

The Mi 11 also gets points past non only including a charger in the box, simply by offering y'all a 55W cake to lucifer the phone'due south maximum charging speed.

At that place are a few faster charging standards out at that place, for case, the 65W one used by the OnePlus 8T. But filling your phone to 45% in 15 minutes, 80% in 30 and 100% in 48 minutes as you can with the Xiaomi Mi 11 is even so respectably fast. It certainly beats the 25W charging offered by the Galaxy S21, which doesn't come with an included charger in the box.

The 50W wireless charging on the Mi 11 means yous should achieve almost identical speeds to those above without cables. Nevertheless you'll need ane of Xiaomi'due south ain charging pads to striking that speed and since nosotros don't have one we couldn't check the speed for ourselves.

Finally, the Mi 11 offers reverse wireless charging upwardly to 10W to give a friend'due south phone a boost of power or to keep your wearables and wireless earbuds topped upward.

Xiaomi Mi 11 review: Software

The typical Android 11 features come wrapped in Xiaomi's MIUI 12 on the Mi 11. It balances the super make clean look of stock Android seen on phones like the Google Pixel 5 with the more modified feature set of something like the Galaxy S21'due south One UI, which is an overall positive.

Among the unique enhancements in MIUI 12 are floating windows, which allow you open up a fully functional resizable window of one app over some other, either from a notification or via the recent apps screen. All modernistic Android phones can open up 2 apps in split screen, but this gives you more freedom to await at the areas of the apps that you want, rapidly taking notes from a browser window or fifty-fifty copy and pasting between them just as one example.

Other handy but less notable features include an always-on display, an optional app drawer, and security offerings like blurring app previews and removing location data from shared photos. MIUI as well offers an iOS-style option to divide the notification shade and quick settings bill of fare into ii, accessed separately by swiping downwards from either the left or right side of the top edge of the screen.

The phone ships with a fair number of bundled-in Xiaomi and third-party apps. Just the Mi 11 is thoughtful plenty to pack these away into a handful of folders for a less messy dwelling house screen, assuming yous don't want to just delete them all.

Xiaomi Mi eleven review: Verdict

Our Xiaomi Mi 11 review finds an impressive telephone, with very few omissions. Information technology would have been prissy to have a telephoto camera on the back instead of the telemacro lens, and a bigger bombardment would have been welcome, too. But even without those features, this phone still comes with premium capabilities comparable to more expensive phones.

Nosotros have little hesitation in recommending this to an Android fan looking for an culling to Samsung, peculiarly if you lot prioritize streaming videos or playing games over capturing photos. However photography addicts, and peculiarly U.S. shoppers, should look elsewhere for the fourth dimension being.

Richard is a Tom's Guide staff writer based in London, roofing news, reviews and how-tos for phones, gaming, audio and whatever else people need advice on. Post-obit on from his MA in Magazine Journalism at the University of Sheffield, he'southward also written for WIRED U.K., The Register and Creative Bloq. When non at work, he's likely thinking about how to brew the perfect cup of specialty coffee.