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.
85 Comments
View All Comments
asmian - Thursday, March 11, 2021 - link
Your opinion is worthless, since it's a gross generalisation that takes no account of the many and varied reasons people voted, preferring to smear everyone who voted the way you despise with right-wing or neo-Nazi tendencies by clever wording. You do like the sound of your own smugness, don't you.Fulljack - Thursday, March 11, 2021 - link
hello american. we hereby stated that asia, europe, and africa market are part of the global market.sincerely, the rest of the world
Giro - Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - link
Hello Andre, thx!For loudness and clarity, what do you think of this phone ?
Andrei Frumusanu - Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - link
It's amongst the best in the market for speakers. I think Samsung had clearer mids, but this has much better lows.Psyside - Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - link
Its so frustrating to see that you still haven't received any updates on the S21U, i was so pumped to see how they stack up :/ZolaIII - Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - link
Did you try with for instance BrightRidge to see what happens with GPU and eventually get to the bottom of it?FunBunny2 - Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - link
I am among those who can't figure out why anyone would, or physically can, listen to stereo music on a phone. Or are you talking about ear buds? Does one hold the phone up to your nose? Or leave on your lap? Phone sound, under any condition I can imagine, is as close to anechoic as one can find outside a wedged foam room.ZolaIII - Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - link
Well I owne Samsung Galaxy Tab S5e and sound from speakers is almost as good as my Denon stereo but that's a tablet with more room for speakers.kaspar737 - Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - link
400MHz GPU frequency in a real world workload? I wonder what the 865 ran at?Nshade1 - Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - link
Interesting behavior of the GPU. Using so much power and heat for little benefit. We now have some more demanding games on mobile. Does it make sense to check the average frames in same more demanding games in addition to the synthetic benchmarks?