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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realbabilu - Thursday, March 11, 2021 - link
YesKernel source has been out also but no support yet from lineage
CrazyElf - Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - link
There is a Mi 11 Ultra apparently coming too.One concern I have is the updates and software. The MIUI software has not been the most stable and I am not sure about how many years of updates this phone will get.
Samsung recently offered 3 years of Android updates and 4 years of security updates. I'd like to see that be the norm.
eastcoast_pete - Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - link
Thanks Andrei! Question, possibly related to the high power draw at basic:Did you have a chance to try it with 5G turned off? In addition to the lower efficiency of the 888 vs the 865,the integrated 5G modem is apparently a bit of a power hog, compounding the already worst power draw of the 888 in Samsung 5 nm over the 865 in TSMC 7. So, how much battery drain does the 5G contribute?hanselltc - Thursday, March 11, 2021 - link
So there is this long running thing about phones playing games better in power saving mode, and I've seen a few Chinese reviewers highlight that behaviour specifically on Mi 11, pointing out power saving mode somehow reduces GPU throttle. Any plans on testing that?TheForetold1 - Thursday, March 11, 2021 - link
I also really want to know this.Calin - Thursday, March 11, 2021 - link
Could you please do picture comparisons to one flagship or high midrange phone from several (like three) generations ago?adelio - Thursday, March 11, 2021 - link
because of what china is doing internally and also in Hong Kong I am trying to NOT buy anything made in China. Hard because a lot of stuff is.But I just do not feel right giving money to China. The way they treat their people is awful and as for Honk Kong. It is not a one party state just like China with pre-elected officials sactioned by China. Neither country has any democratic proccesses left.
UtMostUR89 - Sunday, March 14, 2021 - link
Bro, don't be misled by our media. To know what China has done, you have to take a trip. The big cities are no worse than the US's, and it's safe to venture out alone at night. No country is perfect, but when you go to China, you can find out people's lives are so much better than our media reports. Just like, Apple, Lenovo, Huawei, Xiaomi, these technology brands' products are very popular in China, and you can see that most people's material conditions are not bad.Wardrive86 - Thursday, March 11, 2021 - link
Hopefully LG will do a better job of getting those thermals under control than Samsung or Xiaomi has thus far.flyingpants265 - Thursday, March 11, 2021 - link
So it's the same as every other phone on the market except it's a Xiaomi, huh? ...No thanks.My next phone will have to be an old S20 or LG G8 just due to lack of options. I paid $40 for this G6 so I don't need to pay 1000 bucks for a scam device.