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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Silver5urfer - Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - link
No NA market, no 3.5mm jack, no SD slot no buy. On top does Xiaomi phones are easy to unlock Bootloaders ?heffeque - Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - link
Well for the rest of the world the fact that it's not available in the US is not a problem.Seeing what happened with Huawei, it seems that Xiaomi's decision to not sell in the US was spot-on.
The rest of the world can enjoy their great "quality:price" ratio phones.
Happy "Mi 9T" user here!
Fulljack - Thursday, March 11, 2021 - link
I use Mi 9T Pro, it's bootloader unlocking process are very easy but you need to wait for 36 to 72 hours. there's a lot of tutorial online.Y250 - Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - link
Unfortunately this thermal throttling behavior is something that I have also experienced in my xiaomi redmi note 7. Although it was launched as a budget device, it thermal throttled pretty frequently in games, especially in summers. It seems like this is how xiaomi configures their devices. Lesson learnt for future purchases.Duncan Macdonald - Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - link
A high power SOC in a phone demands better cooling - about the only way to achieve this is for the back to be metal (aluminium or magnesium) with a good thermal connection between the SOC and the back. Plastic or glass backs can not spread the heat effectively enough to allow a SOC such as the 888 to sustain full performance.The 888 would probably do much better in a tablet that can afford to have better cooling.
Given the peak temperatures mentioned, the lithium ion battery could easily be overheated leading to short battery life.
iphonebestgamephone - Thursday, March 11, 2021 - link
Its already doing better in the rog 5, though the temp is similar to mi11, the fps is higher.Psyside - Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - link
@Andrei, 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 :/Andrei Frumusanu - Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - link
These are the same shots as on the S21 review, I haven't redone them.jaju123 - Thursday, March 11, 2021 - link
Andrei, is there any chance you'll be running the redmi note 10 pro through the battery tests? I'm wondering how such a low end/midrange device would compare to current flagships. It's currently rather flagship dominated.ElBe - Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - link
Can the bootloader be unlocked ?