Xiaomi Mi 11X hands-on review

Software

Our Mi 11X was running MIUI 12.0.3 on top of Android 11 at the time of testing with the February security patch. We currently have no exact timeline of when this device will be getting the announced MIUI 12.5 update.

MIUI continues to be a bit of an acquired taste. Aesthetically, the UI still carries a lot of the iOS influence from previous versions, even though many of the other Android skins have moved on towards looking like Android itself. The homescreen, for example, still has the fixed square icons and the default layout is the one where all the apps are on the homescreen instead of in an app drawer. The irony of this is that even iOS has an app drawer these days.

MIUI 12

Xiaomi has also fashioned its notifications, especially the new control center, after iOS, with many of the UI elements looking like a near copy of Apple's UI. This carries over to many other parts of the UI, and eventually, you wonder at what point Xiaomi is going to get over its obsession with Apple's design. Surely the company has carved itself enough identity on the global landscape that it doesn't have to come across as a cheap Chinese iPhone knock-off anymore.

Moving away from the Apple-ness of the UI, the Xiaomi-ness is probably more bothersome. The phone is just riddled with a bunch of unnecessary apps when you first boot it up, including first party, third party, and from Google (who is increasingly becoming the biggest supplier of bloatware on Android). Some of these can be removed easily, others can only be done via ADB, the latter of which is not recommended unless you know what you're doing.

Installed apps

Some features cannot be removed, such as the Security app, which houses features such as anti-virus, memory cleaner, storage cleaner, and more. These features are of dubious value and mostly just avenues for the company to show more ads.

Security app

Speaking of ads, we didn't see any on our Mi 11X review unit. We are not sure if this was disabled on the review unit (the review unit had other alterations, such as preventing the user from running benchmarks) or if it's also going to be the case with retail units as well.

The UI also has its idiosyncrasies. The Settings app continues to be a bit of a maze for those not familiar with MIUI. There are a ton of features here, but it's not always clear where you might find them. The way some features are handled is also ham-fisted. The dark mode, for example, manually forces a dark layer on top of every single installed app. This may potentially be useful for apps that don't have a dark mode, but it does this for everything, including apps that do have their own dark mode and just end up looking weird with an additional dark layer on top. It would have been better to just let the user manually select the apps they want to be forced to dark UI.

Dark mode and Themes

One particular pet peeve is how selecting ringtones is handled in third-party apps. On most other Android smartphones, selecting to change the notification tone in an app will instantly take you to the list of tones. On MIUI, it will throw a dialog box asking you whether you want to open Themes or File Manager, which alone would throw off most people.

The correct answer? Themes. That's because the ringtones are found inside the Themes app, which also houses other things, such as wallpapers, icons, fonts, and more. And you're still not taken to the relevant menu. You are just dropped in the Themes app, and from then you have to navigate away from the Themes store, go to the Profile tab and then click on the Ringtones option to find the list of locally saved ringtones. This has been the case with MIUI forever, and it's mind-boggling how no one at the company thinks this is anything but stupid.

However, there is a good one side to using MIUI, and that is the insane level of customization and features on offer. A lot of the UI can be changed, especially the changes added in recent updates. Don't like that the notification center and control center are now separate and require a swipe down from different sides of the display? You can go back to the old design, which put both together. Don't like the vertical arrangement of apps in the Recent menu? Go back to having them be horizontally arranged like on other Android phones. Sure, all of these sound like solutions to problems Xiaomi invented but at least the option exists if you want to go back.

MIUI 12 features

Similarly, there are several other cool features. You can have apps open in a tiny floating window, which stays on screen even as you open other apps. You can also have them open while watching the video using the video toolbox. You can have multiple apps playing audio simultaneously, and you can also control their individual volume in the overall mix. If you use wired headphones with an adapter, you can also customize the sound to your specific hearing.

Aside from configuring the navigation keys to launch apps on press and hold, you can even assign the fingerprint sensor to access a preset feature when double-tapped. You can also have the back of the phone be tapped twice or thrice and have a specific function be activated, although this rarely worked reliably.

The Gallery app also has the most comprehensive editing features of almost any image viewer on other devices. You get the full set of filters (which annoyingly aren't downloaded to the device but download pretty quickly once you tap on them for the first time) and other editing options, but you also get other cool features, such as the option to replace the sky in images with a set of preset still or even animated options. And it does them pretty well, too. You can also do other things like erasing objects out of the frame, blur parts of the image, or add text, stickers, and doodles. You can also process RAW files directly without requiring another app.

Gallery app

Like some other brands, Xiaomi has also switched to using Google's Phone and Messages apps instead of its own. This may very well be mandated by Google these days but Xiaomi's apps generally had more features, especially Messages, which categorized incoming messages automatically.

The Mi 11X uses an x-axis vibration motor, which oscillates a mass laterally along the length of the device to produce vibrations. Unfortunately, the haptic feedback wasn't very good on the Mi 11X. Even at the strongest setting, it felt quite muted and vague and it never quite felt like it was recreating a tactile sensation.

The software on our review unit was somewhat buggy. Apart from the issues we mentioned in the display section, the device also had other minor glitches, such as the display randomly dropping refresh rate to 60Hz in apps where it should be 120Hz and the navigation keys disappearing when the phone came out of fullscreen mode. The notifications also seemed bugged with the buttons appearing misaligned below them. The phone also randomly rebooted on a couple of occasions while sitting idle.

We also want to highlight the fingerprint sensor in this section, as it seemed to be a victim of software issues. The sensor, quite simply, just didn't work most of the time. Simply placing the finger on the button only turned the screen on without unlocking the phone, and the finger would then have to be lifted and placed back at the same spot for it to work. Eventually, this got tiring and we just resorted to using the face unlock feature, which worked fine.

Performance

The Mi 11X runs on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 870 chipset with a choice of 6GB or 8GB LPDDR5 memory. Regardless of which you pick, you will be getting 128GB of UFS 3.1 storage with no further expansion.

Performance in everyday applications on the Mi 11X is excellent, with the phone feeling fast, smooth, and responsive. The 120Hz display helps tremendously, making all applications that run at the maximum refresh rate feel fluid and nimble.

120Hz support in Alto's Adventure

Playing games at 120Hz was also a great experience. Admittedly, most games don't support over 60Hz, but the ones that did look great and felt much more responsive. Some games cause the display to stay at 120Hz, but they are treated as applications rather than games, which means the refresh rate will drop to 60Hz when you stop interacting with the display. This is obviously not ideal as it causes the game to stutter every time the refresh rate changes, and the developer will have to update the title to fix this.

The hardware is quite capable of running demanding games, such as Genshin Impact, at their highest visual quality settings. The issue is, the phone does start getting quite warm after some time, especially if you live in warmer climates. And before you know it, the display dims down considerably, making it hard to see what you're playing.

We could not run our usual tests on our Mi 11X review unit as it prevented running any benchmark applications from running properly. You can check out our Poco F3 review for the benchmarks results, as they would likely be identical.

Audio

The Mi 11X comes with a set of stereo speakers. Unlike most other phones, both the speakers on the Mi 11X fire out the sides rather than from the front. That's because the earpiece speaker on the phone seems to be placed somewhere within the top half of the body and the outlet is through a port on the top of the device.

The audio quality through the loudspeakers is pretty good. The two speakers don't sound identical, with the bottom speaker being more full-bodied while the top speaker having a more bass and mid-focused sound. Combined, the two still sound fairly balanced. The speakers don't get especially loud, but for the most part, they are loud enough.

Xiaomi has announced Dolby Atmos support for the Mi 11X. However, this feature was not available on our review unit and will be added in a future update. Retail units, however, should have it out of the box.