Xiaomi Mi Note review: Striking the right note

Image gallery

The Xiaomi Mi Note comes with a custom Gallery app with slightly updated flat looks compared to MIUI v5. It defaults to your camera roll with two shortcuts at the top that will take you to album view of your local images and album view of your cloud pictures. You can't change this view, nor can you customize the default folders.

Gallery

The available features when viewing a single image are pretty standard - share it, delete it, enter edit mode or just get more info.

The integrated editor offers various effects, frames, tools (crop, mirror, straighten, rotate, fisheye, doodle) plus light adjustments that let you bring out the shadows or the highlights.

Editing an image

Music player

The MIUI music player is a custom app with a well-laid out, easy to navigate interface. It features a two-page layout - the first one is cloud music, similar to Google Music service provided by Xiaomi. It has similar subscription plans.

The second page has your own local and cloud music.

Music Player

The player has cool effects, transitions and transparent elements, especially on the expandable Now Playing section.

Now Playing screen • Lyrics

Xiaomi's Music app offers customizable equalizers with a few default presets already available for use. You can also try Xiaomi's MiSound enhancer, which comes into play when you use headphones, and especially, a Xiaomi-branded set.

Audio enhancements and equalizers

Finally, you can edit song info and you can also enable automatic song info download in case the ID3 tags are empty. Lyrics can be downloaded, too.

Video player

Xiaomi Mi Note does features a separate video app, but you can also use Explorer to find some videos the default app doesn't recognize (but are still playable).

The video player interface is very basic but there is rich video codec support. It managed to play everything we threw at it (including MKV and WMV files). The AC3 audio codec is supported too.

Video player

Subtitles and pop-up play are not supported by the MIUI's video player.

Amazingly loud audio output

The Xiaomi Mi Note had perfectly clean output when connected to an active external amplifier. The smartphone scored excellently top to bottom, but that’s hardly the most impressive bit about its performance. It’s actually the volume levels which are far higher than just about all the other devices in the market and among the highest we’ve ever seen. That applies to both testing scenarios and suggests that the Mi Note can handle even large, demanding headphones with ease.

The clarity did take a slight dip when we plugged in our regular set with stereo crosstalk rising and some intermodulation distortion appearing. Still, none of those is a deal breaker so we’d rate the overall performance solid.

And here go the results.

Xiaomi Mi Note frequency response

You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.