Xiaomi Mi 11 long-term review

Performance, smoothness

Let's just outright state it - the Mi 11 is the smoothest phone we've ever had for a long-term review. Period. (Or "Full stop." if you're from the UK). The UI moves like butter - delicious, lag-free, stutter-free, high refresh rate butter.

Undoubtedly, the Snapdragon 888 chipset is partly to thank for this feat, and as you'd imagine it also delivers a lot of performance all the time, no matter what you need it for. In our normal use, we've never encountered overheating or excessive throttling (by which we mean excessive enough to actually notice). If you keep running benchmarks back-to-back? Sure, then either or both of those things may become problematic, but we're not doing that for long-term reviews because that's not how most people would use a phone.

The screen is, we assume, the other contributor to the smooth feeling in operation, both because of its 120 Hz refresh rate, but also because of its sheer quality. The whopping 480 Hz touch sampling rate can't hurt either - in fact, we're pretty sure it helps a lot. So anyway, there you have it - the Mi 11 is the new king of our smoothness scale. And of course, it's the best performing Android smartphone we've ever had for a long-term review too, but that's probably less shocking because it has the best SoC ever, after all.

Battery life

Battery life is one area where the Mi 11 ever so slightly disappointed us. Don't get us wrong, battery life was very good, but that's just the thing - it could've been great, had the company used a bigger battery.

With the 4,600 mAh cell on offer, we were always able to get over 5 hours of screen on time with our use (see details below), and a few times we went over 6 hours too. That's good, but not great, especially if you consider that our use case involves mostly Wi-Fi connectivity, with only an hour or two of 5G. If you have a different use case with more mobile data in your life, then the screen on time numbers should be worse for you.

Screen on time

Our scenario involves 12-16 hours off the charger usually, with Bluetooth always on and connected to speakers or headphones for an hour or two, about half an hour of navigation via Waze, and an hour or two of phone calls. One caveat here is that we had the phone on 120 Hz and WQHD+ resolution all the time (and the setting for optimizing battery with WQHD+ was off, because that in effect switches to a lower resolution automatically, and we wanted to take advantage of the screen in all its glory).

All this said, we never felt we had to quickly top-up mid-day for fear of not making it through an entire day because we always did - but just barely. There was never any ample juice remaining in there for the next day, this was a phone we definitely had to charge every night.

Speaking of charging, going from zero to 100 in about 45 minutes with the included charger is very nice, since it means even very short top-ups will make an impact. Fast wireless charging is welcome too, although we couldn't test its promised under-one-hour charging speed because we don't have the appropriate charger. We did use wireless charging on a lesser charger, though, with absolutely no issues.

Camera

For some reason more and more manufacturers are starting to keep telephoto lenses exclusive to their ultra-premium flagship smartphones these days, and unfortunately, Xiaomi is also playing along. Not that it didn't do the exact same thing last year between the Mi 10 and Mi 10 Pro, but in 2021 in international markets, we're only getting the Mi 11 and the Mi 11 Ultra, and the price gap between these two is positively gigantic. And if you want a Mi flagship with a tele camera, you need to jump over that gap, unfortunately.

That, in effect, is our main gripe with the Mi 11's camera system. While definitely not the best around at the moment, it's plenty capable for the phone's price point, but the glaring omission of any sort of tele option is hard to get over. Sure, you can digitally zoom to 2x from the main sensor, but why not just use a 3x standalone cam and make everyone happy? OK, maybe it's just us and most people don't care about proper framing flexibility.

Xiaomi was the first company to put a 108 MP sensor in a phone, and it's still doing exactly that here, more than a year later. The Mi 11's main cam is the same as in last year's Mi 10 and Mi 10 Pro, sporting the Samsung ISOCELL Bright HMX sensor. It's a Quad-Bayer affair, and the phone combines four adjacent pixels to output 27 MP images in auto mode, which is what we've used for the samples you can see below. While you can shoot in 108 MP mode, the resulting images are noisy and lack detail, so we wouldn't recommend it. In the end, that's not how these Quad-Bayer sensors are meant to be used anyway.

During the daytime, the Mi 11's main camera produces pictures that have ample detail levels, accurate colors, and high contrast, while noise is very low and the dynamic range is good, not great (then again some people like a more subdued dynamic range presentation, and this is definitely that). Foliage is far from perfect looking, but decent nevertheless. Colors do pop more than our eyes perceived them to in real life, but this is the way things are with any phone right now, only some do it more (read:worse) than others. From this point of view, we found the Mi 11's shots to be satisfying.

Daytime samples from the main camera

The 13 MP ultrawide camera shoots very good photos too, with a lot of detail, good dynamic range, high contrast, and nice colors that are more inaccurate than the main cam's, but not by so much that this would be an issue. Noise is handled well, and the automatic distortion correction does its job adequately, if not record-breakingly.

Daytime samples from the ultrawide

We chose to ignore the macro camera as we usually do in long-term reviews, hoping that at some point manufacturers would stop using such gimmick sensors. Adding autofocus to the ultrawide and tuning that for macro shots would be much better in our book, but then how would the Mi 11 be able to claim it has three cameras? Yeah, exactly. Furthermore, the button that takes you into the Macro mode is a hassle to get to in the Camera app, so we didn't bother. We'd wager most people who'd even be able to find that button to activate the special macro mode would probably only use it for a few shots and then forget it ever existed in the first place.

Despite the lack of a dedicated zoom lens, there's a 2x toggle in the camera's viewfinder, and testing these shots out we found them to be nothing more than cropped from the main sensor and then upscaled. No 'magic' zoom shenanigans here, it's digital all the way, and that's disappointing because the resulting images always seem lacking in detail.

Daytime 2x zoom samples

At night the main camera employs some auto Night Mode magic if you let it, and since this is turned on by default, we left it on. You can turn it off though if you're annoyed by the fact that every shot takes a couple of seconds. The resulting images are generally very good, with balanced exposures, nice highlight treatment, natural-looking shadows, good color science, and reasonable amounts of noise.

Nighttime Auto samples from the main camera

Switch to the actual Night Mode and shot times increase even more, resulting in brighter photos because of the longer exposure times. Overall, though, the difference between auto Night Mode and manual Night Mode isn't huge. The latter is still better to use if you have the time, but we'd wager for most people most of the time the auto Night Mode will deliver satisfying images.

Night Mode samples from the main camera

The ultrawide gets some of that auto Night Mode action too, although with shorter exposure times we assume are related to its lack of OIS. This means you'll get darker and grainier photos than from the main sensor, even when shooting the exact same scene at the exact same time. Detail levels aren't great, and colors are all over the place.

Nighttime Auto samples from the ultrawide

The manual Night Mode brightens things up as you'd expect, and since the auto Night Mode shots are all kind of dark, we prefer this, but you do have to be patient waiting for each shot to first be exposed and then processed. The shot-to-shot time in this mode is almost 10 seconds, which is anything but great. If you can put up with that, you'll get more detail and slightly better, yet still not great colors from the manual Night Mode.

Night Mode samples from the ultrawide

2x zoom shots at night are predictably worse than the 1x pictures from the main sensor, with lower detail and more noise. We really miss a good dedicated zoom camera here, especially at night.

Nighttime 2x zoom samples

If you go with Night Mode for these, they do get brighter, but the quality still is anything but outstanding.

Night Mode 2x zoom samples

Selfies come out rather soft sometimes, but they're still good, with Auto-HDR being used when needed, decent amounts of noise, and overall good colors and contrast. Portrait selfies have okay subject separation, good looking background blur, but lack in detail.

Selfies, day and night, Portrait mode off and on

At night, the quality levels go down sharply if you don't have a lot of ambient lighting around, and even with some light in your vicinity, the shots will be grainy and barely usable for anything, especially if you don't use the screen flash function.