Gadgetory

what we have here is a phone that hails from China brings super high specifications unique design materials a zoom lens and is priced lower than $400 but it's not coming to the West it's Joshua Vergara what's going on everybody and here it is the Xiaomi me 6 but there's a bit of a disclaimer I have to provide first I used it in the States on the t-mobile network and as such I wasn't able to get the best example of the music's performance given the fact that I couldn't use it on LTE networks now this is common for Asian phones but it does mean that this review is a little bit less deep on the hard specifications that said the phone makes a really big splash off the bat with its design it's not particularly different in aesthetic from past's Shammi devices but we applaud the company for trying to be a bit unique and in this case we have the ceramic Edition that also comes with the highest configuration of specs the ceramic shines beautifully it is complemented by small gold accents Xiaomi seems to spare no expense when it comes to the materials but it almost makes you wonder how the retail price can be so low a tactile array is below the 1080p resolution display that includes a concave home button and fingerprint reader combination the fingerprint reader works well enough and the other capacitive keys can be customized in the settings and no your eyes do not deceive you there's no headphone jack on this phone though it's a controversial move xiaomi told us that removing it allowed them to put a bigger 33 50 milliamp hour battery unit now despite this being a flagship device the music's does fall behind with a 1080p display when compared to the rest of the flagship pack the LCD isn't really bad in any regard though quad HD is more of a standard this year however Xiaomi has done well to make the LCD really bright even in daylight and impressively dark when the brightness slider is cranked down to zero this level of brightness is something that we would expect from AMOLED displays but somehow Xiaomi made it work with this phone overall there barely any issues to be had with the display though sometimes I did find it troublesome to try and find the brightness slider in dark environments because I could barely see where it was under the hood again Xiaomi spares no expense the Snapdragon 835 is the processor here putting it right next to other current flagships today however the music's does come in a lot of different configurations that can include or or six gigabytes of RAM and up to 128 gigabytes of on-board storage and as I alluded to earlier the ceramic Edition that you see here is considered the most premium of the bunch coming with six gigabytes of RAM and 128 gigabytes of on-board storage I definitely took advantage of the large amount of storage for my camera usage but I also played plenty of games on the v6 and in both situations I found no reason to doubt that the performance or the reliability of the phone would be less than any other flagship so as I mentioned earlier I had trouble using this phone to its fullest extent on t-mobile so I had to rely on Wi-Fi and tethering to get things done call quality was adequate and was helped along by this dual speaker setup which is similar to the HTC 10 from last year with a bottom mounted speaker accompanied by a unit in the call speaker the audio this was pretty good it had stereo sound but it doesn't get all that loud things get better when connecting headphones as a built-in EQ provides a nice amount of sound customization especially if you use USB type-c enabled at earphones from the company itself when connected to HSPA networks I was able to get to the end of the day without any issues and I'm sure that would be the case for normal usage however our Android Authority battery testing app put the me six at almost seven hours of continuous on-screen usage with a mixture of gaming browsing and video playback so I'm sure that the 33 50 million power battery will do a good job especially when you consider a quick charge 3.0 helping to juice it up in short bursts which brings us to the software and the me UI it follows suit of many other Asian roms by not providing an Abbe drawer so this is a bit of an adjustment for a user like me but after some time I was able to get everything organized but it still takes a little bit of getting used to when you're going through all of the different folders to figure out where you put something there are some extra features built in but the me UI remains just about what you would expect from previous editions and besides this version 8 is a beta global ROM that was used so that I could actually review the me6 all in all if you're familiar with the me UI or really any other Chinese ROM there isn't much else that really differentiates this new version 8 and finally the camera if you've been following a certain trend in this review you may notice that the music seems to take a lot of the best features from previous devices and puts them all together that's definitely true for the camera which is a dual lens system that provides a 2 X optical zoom aside from the usual wide this is reminiscent of the iPhone 7 plus and different from any other phones that provide different focal lengths out of LG's flagship lineup zoom can be quite important to shutter bugs and Jamie does well to provide one for picture taking in particular now this is because the zoom capabilities are not available for video recording which is a rather significant bummer but that said I did enjoy using the music for video recording optical image stabilization helps keep all footage from getting too jittery and there was a good amount of detail in each piece of footage though exposure might jump around from time to time there was very little to complain about other than the omission of zoom in the movie mode like I mentioned I was told that this wasn't a problem with the hardware but it could be opened up in the future via ami UI software update the software on the other hand provides extra modes including a pro mode but as an automatic shooter it was quick enough to get a good shot off even when using HDR HDR is a toggle in this version rather than an automatic mode and keeping it on will often boost up the shadows and add a little bit of saturation pictures in broad daylight generally came out looking pretty good though the dynamic range left a little bit to be desired as highlights tended to be too bright when I tried to bring up the exposure for better shadows and this same effect was observed in HDR adjustments as well and regarding the 2x zoom it's nice to be able to optically zoom into elements without a loss in quality however I found that I wasn't really using the 2x zoom in more situations that I expected however there is one situation that it comes in handy the portrait mode heavily inspired by the iPhone portrait mode Xiaomi utilizes the optical zoom to tighten up the frame while working to isolate the subject from the background when subjects are at most a couple of metres away then it goes into a depth effect mode adding boquete to the background the musics does a decent job of this and it softens out the edges but it does sometimes cut the line a bit incorrectly and it's noticeable when you zoom in but especially in good lighting photos of friends or colleagues yielded new profile picture level shots lower light situations make these and pretty much any other photo suffer especially in the finer details of the photos making this a less than ideal indoor or maybe nighttime camera which is a good way of bringing the review into perspective much like the portrait mode it is when the phone focuses on a specific feature or capability that it manages to provide some high points but trying to do too much just bogs down the overall package the Xiaomi me6 is by far the most capable phone that Dave made to date the most unique of which goes to the me mix of course but in its quest to provide every feature we've loved in the last couple of years it falls short of perfection the screen does not flagship grade the dual speaker is a bit reserved the big battery sacrifices the headphone jack and the dual camera is a proper first for Android but isn't as capable as we would like it's a give and take with the Shamim e6 and it comes right down to its price a price that is equivalent to 360 u.s. dollars that's an incredible price that would make anyone in the West excited only it's not available anywhere but the opposite side of the world which is great for them but a missed opportunity for us and ostensibly for Xiaomi it might not be perfect as a flagship but if you can get your hands on it this cacophony of features could be one of the best bang for buck phones in existence this is a pretty great phone and if you happen to live in the different markets that this phone is currently available in then you should probably pick it up because it comes in at such a good price point however for everybody else what we're seeing here is shammies move to a place where there flagships could possibly make a huge splash if it finally expands beyond those markets but until then you can keep it tuned to Android or atif or even more about the Xiaomi me six more of their phones and more from copy text 2017 which is where I am right now so you can see any announcements that we have to share from Taipei's biggest tech show from there you can keep it tuned to Android authority for even more because we are your source for all things Android