The Xiaomi Mi 11 Review: A Gorgeous Screen and Design
by Andrei Frumusanu on March 10, 2021 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Mobile
- Smartphones
- Xiaomi
- Snapdragon 888
- Mi 11
Battery Life - The Bad News
When it comes to battery life, the Mi 11 sports a 4600mAh battery, and comes with the newer Snapdragon 888 SoC. We’ve already seen that the new chip isn’t quite as power-efficient as its predecessor, requiring more energy to achieve its higher performance levels.
However, the biggest issue for the Mi 11 is its idle power consumption, which is just terrible. Under all situations, even under 60Hz, the device will consume in excess of 700mW when displaying a black screen, and this figure goes up to the 900’s mW’s when under 120Hz mode. These are pretty horrible figures and bad news for the device, as it’s a constant power drain that happens no matter what you’re doing with the phone, especially dominant for battery life at lower brightness levels.
I don’t know exactly why this is happening to the phone, but’s the lack of VRR makes the situation even worse.
Edit March 12th: The Mi 11 does have a coarse software-based refresh rate switching mechanism, however it does not function below 110 nits screen brightness (around 70% on the brightness slider). The battery tests below should have had the feature functioning given we test at 200 nits.
Due to the high base power consumption, the phone doesn’t do all to well in the web browsing test. The most interesting device to compare things to is the OnePlus 8 Pro, which also features a QHD 120Hz screen of a similar generation, and both devices end up towards the bottom part of our battery life results here. It’s interesting to see that the 60Hz to 120Hz delta is smaller than that of the OnePlus 8 Pro. At 60Hz, the Mi 11 also does worse than the Mi 10 Pro.
In PCMark, the Mi 11 does averagely at 60Hz, but at 120Hz it’s really falling behind by a lot and bottoms our chart again, near the Exynos S21.
When it comes to weaknesses of the Mi 11, battery life is probably its biggest one. While performance and screen quality are great on the phone, the SoC remains very power hungry, and the screen is as well. The situation is exacerbated by the very high and unusual base power consumption of the device. I don’t know where the problem lies here, but given Xiaomi hasn’t fixed it in a firmware update yet signifies it’s some hardware mis-design that’s unlikely to get changed by software.
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asmian - Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - link
Sure, there are a tiny number of fascists, as in any country. But not any significant quantities. And they are not "Nazis", who were specific to a time and place in the last century. So there's no need to accept lazy insults from people who don't know what they are talking about - it's hardly rose-tinted patriotism, it's just not standing for such extreme offensiveness.Spunjji - Thursday, March 11, 2021 - link
You're the one who saw the word "Nazi" and felt attacked. As another fellow brit, I just shrugged at what was - overall - an ill-informed opinion.The fascists here are present in sufficient quantities for us to have a fascist government. If you disagree on that count, I'd advise reading Ur Fascism by Umberto Eco and then comparing what you see with what we have. It's not pleasant reading.
hbsource - Thursday, March 11, 2021 - link
If you think we have a fascist government in the UK then you're either 15 or have the understanding of a 15 year old.Wereweeb - Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - link
Really offensive to the country that killed more Indians than Hitler killed Jews? Give me a break.asmian - Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - link
Just so we can compare which glass house you're throwing stones from... where are you from exactly? No country has a perfect history if you're prepared to dig back far enough. There's no reason to stupidly impugn current citizens for actions they weren't reponsible for.Wereweeb - Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - link
That doesn't matter, I'm not a nationalist.hbsource - Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - link
Strange then that you have no trouble with denigrating the actions of nations.philehidiot - Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - link
YAY! Stupid post by stupid person probably trying to be stupid starts prolonged argument about who is the biggest Hitler.And I thought the internet had changed. Phew.
iphonebestgamephone - Thursday, March 11, 2021 - link
YAY! A stupid person talking about a stupid post by stupid person probably trying to be stupid starts prolonged argument about who is the biggest Hitler.And I thought the internet had changed. Phew.
Spunjji - Thursday, March 11, 2021 - link
To be clear: You're the one in the glass house, asmian, because you're the one who thinks we should still get special "not fascists" credit for fighting against Nazism in WWII. Someone else pointing out your hypocrisy isn't, in itself, hypocrisy. Similarly, "everybody sucks" is a worthless defence for discussing a specific kind of suckitude.The more you know, and all that.