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 - Thursday, March 11, 2021 - link
What rubbish. I don't know why you're determined to attack me, rather than the original poster. I'm in no glass house, and no hypocrite, because I'm not going around attacking others based just on their nationality. Nor am I myopic to systemic faults, but calling a Tory government "fascist" (as you said elsewhere) is just leftist name-calling, not helpful politics. And it's patently untrue and ridiculous hyperbole when there are real fascist governments oppressing women actively in eastern Europe right now, within the EU.When someone calls an entire country "Nazis" then that can't go unchallenged. It's no hypocrisy to point out that making comments about an entire modern country based on the past actions of individuals, or the state (in a "democracy" that was able to be voted for by substantially less than half of the population at the time), is offensive. I wasn't defending those actions, so there was no "worthless defence". I just don't subscribe to the popular PC theory that every current citizen should feel guilty for actions in the past they weren't responsible for, which you obviously do, since you're so angry about it. And I know quite enough NOT to be lectured by some random internet knowitall who does nothing but troll every thread here as if it's their private blog.
Martin84a - Thursday, March 11, 2021 - link
Just a small observation. On one hand you say "hey, don't judge Britons based on the actions of our ancestors", but at the same time you say "hey, our ancestors fought the real fascist in World War 2." If you don't feel shame based on your ancestors actions, you shouldn't feel pride either. It's not like you took part in their actions.You can't have it both way mate. If you aren't connected to what someone in the past did, then you should feel shame for what they did. But you shouldn't feel the need to
hbsource - Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - link
Not sure Americans should be throwing insults around about killing Indians.Wereweeb - Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - link
I'm not americanBedfordTim - Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - link
Assuming you are talking about the Bengal famine, you seem to have forgotten about the assorted natural disasters that just happened to occur at the same time, the bombing of Calcutta which disrupted the rice market, and the loss of imports from Burma. Deaths through famine and misadministration do not equate to deaths in concentration camps.quorm - Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - link
I apologize for contributing to the derail.You're seriously saying that they are responsible for the deaths of millions, but because of the manner in which they died, its not so bad? Pretty sure the victims wouldn't feel the same way.
RSAUser - Thursday, March 11, 2021 - link
Pretty sure he just said you can't say they're directly responsible for it.Spunjji - Thursday, March 11, 2021 - link
They sure do look similar when the man in charge at the time saw those deaths as a moral good. Oh no, those "beastly people with a beastly religion" are dying, how sad, better keep forcibly expropriating the goods they need to survive.Nobody's "forgetting" any of what you mentioned, it's just not particularly relevant to discussion. It's like saying that Stalin didn't kill most of the dissidents who died under his regime, he just sent them off to places where they died from exposure and starvation. Go Stalin!
Spunjji - Thursday, March 11, 2021 - link
There are plenty of neo-Nazis here, and every single one of them voted Brexit. Not everyone who voted Brexit was a neo-Nazi, of course - they just voted for a magical unicorn *alongside* the neo-Nazis, spurred on by far-right voices in the popular press.hbsource - Thursday, March 11, 2021 - link
Bear in mind that I say this as someone who voted remain. If you blame 'the popular press' for Brexit then you misunderstand British politics.You have got it the opposite way around to reality. Which is a big reason why the left in this country has not won a general election since 2005.
People do buy The Sun and then decide to vote for right wing parties. The Sun pitches itself to right wing voters in order to sell newspapers.
If you think that without the right wing press then everyone would vote Labour, get ready for more decades without a left of centre government.