Xiaomi Mi Note 2 review: Filling in
Filling in
The gallery
The redesigned MIUI 8 gallery app we're already familiar from previous Redmis and the Mi Mix is here as well. It defaults to your camera roll, but it also supports different albums - Camera, Video, Screenshots. A bit surprisingly, the People and Panoramas albums are gone now.
Gallery
The new integrated editor powered by Camera 360 offers various filters, crop options, enhancements (sharpen, contrast, brightness, saturation, vignette), and doodles. Oddly, this image editing app is less capable than the one supplied with the MIUI v7.
Editing an image
For video playback you can simply open the files from within the gallery. The video player interface is very basic; subtitles and pop-up play are not supported. You do get a separate brightness slider just for video playback.
Browsing and playing videos
There is also a new video editor with MIUI 8. It supports trimming, filters, and adding text, and audio tracks.
Video editing within the gallery
Music player
The MIUI music player is a custom app with a well laid out, easy to navigate interface. The player has cool effects, transitions, and transparent elements, especially on the expandable Now Playing section. Lyrics are supported, too. The Mi Note 2 didn't recognize the tracks we loaded up on it and consequently didn't pull album art and lyrics off the Internet. We're not exactly sure what's to blame - neither the Mi Mix nor the Redmi 4 Prime we reviewed recently had any issues with that.
Music Player
Now playing
Xiaomi Mi Note 2 offers customizable equalizers within the phone's Settings menu - there are 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 headset.
Audio enhancements and equalizers
Audio output is pleasing
The Xiaomi Mi Note 2 posted excellent scores top to bottom when plugged into an active external amplifier. Its loudness was very high too, marking one of the finest performances as of late.
Adding in a pair of headphones causes moderate damage to stereo quality and introduces some extra distortion. The overall output is still very good in terms of clarity and just about every user will be happy with it. The volume dropped a bit too but remained very high, rounding up another very soild showing.
And now here go the results so you can do your comparison.
| Test | Frequency response | Noise level | Dynamic range | THD | IMD + Noise | Stereo crosstalk |
| +0.00, -0.03 | -94.4 | 94.5 | 0.0014 | 0.0062 | -91.7 | |
| +0.29, -0.34 | -94.5 | 94.0 | 0.028 | 0.417 | -51.9 | |
| +0.03, -0.01 | -94.3 | 94.3 | 0.0034 | 0.0063 | -93.4 | |
| +0.53, -0.30 | -92.9 | 93.0 | 0.017 | 0.434 | -49.7 | |
| +0.01, -0.03 | -94.0 | 94.0 | 0.0033 | 0.0066 | -92.9 | |
| +0.17, -0.04 | -92.0 | 92.7 | 0.0067 | 0.125 | -62.0 | |
| +0.10, -0.04 | -93.1 | 93.1 | 0.0015 | 0.0098 | -80.5 | |
| +0.10, -0.03 | -93.1 | 93.0 | 0.0013 | 0.015 | -76.8 | |
| LG V20 | +0.01, -0.03 | -93.0 | 93.1 | 0.0036 | 0.0075 | -93.7 |
| LG V20 (headphones attached) | +0.04, -0.09 | -92.4 | 92.4 | 0.051 | 0.105 | -57.5 |
Xiaomi Mi Note 2 frequency response
You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.
Reader comments
- Petwr
- 05 Jul 2022
- rra
Mi phone note 2 replying
- joe nodden
- 12 Dec 2020
- j5{
"FullHD resolution may be stretched a bit too thin over this diagonal" ahhhhh the good old days of 1440p flagships being normal
- Alfas
- 11 Jul 2020
- P%U
Does not remember wifi password. I tried everything that I can find on internet, nothing helped.