Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite review

User interface

The Mi 8 Lite runs Android 8.1 Oreo out of the box with Xiaomi's MIUI 9.6 software on top that adds a few extra features to the basic Android ones. And if you are a fan of the MIUI, you surely find your way around it. But if you are coming from another skin or pure Android, you may sometimes find yourself lost in the settings menu.

Once you get past the lock screen, you will be greeted with the home screen and in typical MIUI fashion, all of the installed and system apps are in there. And unfortunately, you don't have the option of bringing the app drawer so you might want to spend a little time sorting apps if you like a tidy home screen. Swiping to the right will bring you to the so-called App vault, which is basically a pane with the frequently used apps along with the usual organization apps like Mi Notes, Calendar, etc. This panel can only be disabled on the Chinese version of the ROM for now.

Lock screen • Home screen • App vault

Swiping down from the home screen brings down the notification shade with the quick toggle icons. Of course, you can re-arrange them to your liking, but the overall looks have remained the same for quite some time now. You get four toggle icons per row, shortcut to the settings menu and a screen brightness slider. Good thinking on Xiaomi's behalf for including the swiping gesture - you can swipe down from wherever and the notification shade will drop. It makes one-handed operations easier, which helps a lot in the case of the tall 19:9 screen.

Notification shade

Face unlock is not available, so you are stuck with the fingerprint reader as your only option. That's a missed opportunity because in the display menu you can find the lift-to-wake option, which would have worked perfectly with the screen unlock. Hopefully, Xiaomi will offer the lock screen option with the MIUI 10 update, which is just around the corner.

Fingerprint options • Fingerprint set-up • Lift to wake feature

Speaking of security, the MIUI comes with a Security app pre-installed that lets you scan the phone for malware, which ironically, is the least useful feature it offers because Google Play already does that for you perfectly fine. But the Security app has other useful applications - it can limit your data usage, free up some RAM, manage permissions of already installed apps and also analyze battery behaviour of certain apps.

Security app

Which brings us to the battery section in the settings menu. There's nothing out of the ordinary in there - you can track the battery usage of each app, activate power saving mode and see your overall battery usage since your last full charge. The "Smart scenes" menu is what caught our attention. The only option in there is the "Non-interactive mode" - whenever MIUI detects that you are not using the phone for a long time, it will turn off Bluetooth, GPS and other connections along with background apps and even disables notifications.

Battery menu • Battery optimization • Battery use by app • Battery usage since last charge • Smart scenes

Second space is another cool feature to have that lets you create a second account for your work, for example. You can lock it off with a password or a fingerprint. The dual apps option is practically the same but it's for selected apps only, not system-wide.

Second space • Dual apps

We assume the "Full screen" menu will be of interest to most users because it offers you to hide the notch and more importantly, choose between standard button navigation and gesture-based navigation. The latter is particularly interesting because so far, aside from the stock Android 9.0 Pie gesture navigation system with the pill, Xiaomi seems to be doing it much better than others. In fact, we can go ahead and say that it's almost as good as Apple's iOS gestures.

A quick tutorial in the menu helps you get acquainted with the gestures. Swiping from the bottom bezel of the screen takes you back to the home screen, swipe up and hold for the recent apps menu and swiping from the left or right edge of the panel works as a back button. Xiaomi even went further and included the option of turning off the back gesture animation. It could potentially shave off a few milliseconds off but we didn't find any measurable improvement in reality.

Keep in mind that the back gesture gets in the way sometimes when swiping to the right for the so-called "hamburger" menu, which many apps still use.

Full screen menu • Back gesture animation • Gestures demo

Other notable but still familiar features are the split-screen function that can be found in the recent apps menu, the off-screen shortcuts and the pre-installed apps like Xiaomi's own Gallery, Weather, Mi Drop, File Manager, Cleaner, Notes Mi Video and other software found in the "Tools" folder.

Recent apps menu • Split-screen • Additional gesture and button shortcuts

Benchmarks

The Mi 8 Lite takes things down a notch compared to the Mi 8 SE in terms of performance and efficiency since it uses a slightly older Snapdragon 660 chipset. The SD660 uses an octa-core CPU with 4x Kryo 260 cores clocked at 2.2 GHz and 4x Kryo 260 cores ticking at 1.8 GHz.

The Snapdragon 660 is known for its great performance compared to other SoCs in its class but lacks the energy efficiency of the Snapdragon 636, for example or even the Snapdragon 710, which is built on the 10nm node.

During our testing, we didn't notice any thermal throttling or overheating even after a few consecutive benchmark tests. It performs just as you'd expect from a Snapdragon 660-powered smartphone. You can see for yourself in the benchmarks below.

GeekBench 4.1 (multi-core)

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Mi 8 SE
  5908
• Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite
  5894
• Nokia 7 plus
  5893
• Honor 8X
  5651
• Samsung Galaxy A7 (2018)
  4446
• Motorola One (P30 Play)
  4183
• Huawei P20 Lite
  3756

GeekBench 4.1 (single-core)

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Mi 8 SE
  1890
• Nokia 7 plus
  1634
• Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite
  1628
• Honor 8X
  1618
• Samsung Galaxy A7 (2018)
  1524
• Huawei P20 Lite
  938
• Motorola One (P30 Play)
  867

AnTuTu 7

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Mi 8 SE
  170218
• Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite
  143257
• Nokia 7 plus
  140820
• Honor 8X
  137276
• Samsung Galaxy A7 (2018)
  123883
• Huawei P20 Lite
  87431
• Motorola One (P30 Play)
  81024

Basemark OS 2.0

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Mi 8 SE
  2658
• Nokia 7 plus
  2376
• Honor 8X
  2341
• Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite
  2338
• Samsung Galaxy A7 (2018)
  2051
• Huawei P20 Lite
  1455
• Motorola One (P30 Play)
  1324

GFX 3.0 Manhattan (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Mi 8 SE
  33
• Nokia 7 plus
  23
• Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite
  22
• Honor 8X
  21
• Samsung Galaxy A7 (2018)
  16
• Motorola One (P30 Play)
  9.8
• Huawei P20 Lite
  8.7

GFX 3.0 Manhattan (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Mi 8 SE
  30
• Nokia 7 plus
  21
• Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite
  20
• Honor 8X
  19
• Motorola One (P30 Play)
  18
• Samsung Galaxy A7 (2018)
  15
• Huawei P20 Lite
  8.1

GFX 3.1 Car scene (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Mi 8 SE
  13
• Nokia 7 plus
  9.1
• Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite
  9
• Honor 8X
  7.6
• Samsung Galaxy A7 (2018)
  6.3
• Motorola One (P30 Play)
  3.6
• Huawei P20 Lite
  3.1

GFX 3.1 Car scene (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Mi 8 SE
  12
• Nokia 7 plus
  8.6
• Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite
  8
• Motorola One (P30 Play)
  7.2
• Honor 8X
  6.7
• Samsung Galaxy A7 (2018)
  5.7
• Huawei P20 Lite
  2.8

Basemark X

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Mi 8 SE
  27560
• Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite
  21269
• Nokia 7 plus
  21063
• Honor 8X
  20416
• Samsung Galaxy A7 (2018)
  15200
• Motorola One (P30 Play)
  10524
• Huawei P20 Lite
  9090