Gadgetory

the Xiaomi me9 is a charming smartphone so the Xiaomi me line has had some stick in the past for being a little bit derivative it's not a trendsetter it just tends to copy what all the big players are doing we know that Xiaomi can innovate they demonstrate that with the pocket phone f1 with their mEEMIC series but the me Series their flagship are somewhat vanilla and it's true for sure this is definitely not a device that is in any way particularly standout but my question is does that really matter if you're getting a really great smartphone with tons of cool features and a great design doesn't really matter if it did that stuff first I'd argue probably not and in fact whilst you can hardly call it innovation the me 9 is among the first smartphones to spot these Snapdragon 855 so in that way it is leading the way this time and it does have a couple of other tricks up its sleeve which we'll get to in this review so starting with the design the Xiaomi me9 is a really beautiful piece of kit that feels fantastic in the hand this is a slim weighty metal frame covered entirely in glass it has a gorgeous 6.3 inch AMOLED screen but in excellent 19.7% screen to body ratio it's only fhd plus that's to 340 by 1080p rather than a quad HD like some of the competition but you'd never notice it to look at it like the best Samsung phones it almost looks like a sticker rather than the screen and that dewdrop notch is really small and unobtrusive the screen is also covered in Gorilla Glass by and that's good news for me because I keep smashing my devices and getting into trouble it's great for consuming media and although it only has one speaker grille down the bottom it does a perfectly adequate job the back of the device is a kind of tapered glass affair mine is a gunmetal type color although Xiaomi calls it black now they do also do some other more interesting colors they have this holographic spectrum which comes in blue and purple and shimmers and catches the light in really cool ways you also have a transparent version much like that old Nintendo Gameboy transparent edition anyone but I must say I like my black version actually it doesn't have that holographic effects but it's kind of smart and understated and premium it looks like a little man in a suit in short the Xiaomi 9 feels so great to use and look so great that it actually makes you want to pick it up and start using it haven't felt this way about a device since the early days of the surface Pro and I'm just going to come out and say it I like this design more than the Galaxy S 10 its slimmer it's cooler it's not as fingerprint prone so yeah fantastic job there chamois and this is why someone would choose the Xiaomi me 9 over the inevitable Paco phone f2 but that nice design doesn't come without its compromises the Xiaomi me 9 unfortunately does not have a headphone jack which I know it's going to upset some people it also doesn't have an SD card slot for expansion which is a bit of a bummer the version I've got only has ticks with 4 gigabytes of storage and it only goes up to 128 megabytes so you might find yourself filling that up fairly quickly especially with those 48 megapixel photos and 4k video that you might be grabbing it does have a dual SIM slot though and what's also a little lacking is the battery which is only 3300 milliamp hours that might not sound like a lot in a 20-19 flagship where a lot of devices these days have 4,000 and above however I didn't find it to be a massive problem I was able to use it fairly normally that means consuming media watching videos playing games and I only have to top-up rights in the evening and even then not always obviously not a fantastic battery but it's also not a problem or it wasn't for me and I think that's probably down to the efficiency of the snapdragon 855 so yeah whilst it might be nicer to have a bigger battery I wouldn't let that put you off if you like miss device otherwise and the other good news about the power of course is that you get that impressive 20 watt wireless charging and Xiaomi is selling a bespoke wireless charger that should help to get the most out of this it does charge very quickly and it's very convenient to use I will say though that I try putting the Xiaomi 9 on another wireless charger I had the only other one I had to test it with and it wouldn't work for some reason I don't know if that was just them not getting on or if maybe the camera bump was in the way and that prevented it from sitting in that sweet spot something to note it would be interesting if other people have had the same experience and another more interesting feature that we're seeing a lot more of these days is the embedded fingerprint sensor this basically allows you to use your fingerprint against the screen this little image of the fingerprint appears at the bottom to help guide you to the right place and that'll unlock your phone in much the same way as a traditional fingerprint sensor meaning that you don't have to have a big chin or spot on the back to try and grope around to find and it does work quickly it does work well is quite as snappy as using a traditional fingerprint sensor and especially because you're unlikely to find the sweet spot right away and your obably gonna need to move it around a little bit luckily I actually find it quite fun using this it has a great animation so that kind of mitigates the fact it's a bit slower whether you'll still feel that way after years of using it who knows and what's also nice about that fingerprint sensor is that you can use it to activate all kinds of shortcuts if you hold on to it and then slide your finger into position then you can pick from a number of apps that you want to launch without having to navigate to them and what's also convenient and neat is that there is a dedicated assistant button at the top left that's the Google assistant no annoying bixby here and you can just long hold that to activate Google assistant you can also map this to various other actions for instance I've got it so that if I double tap it it launches the torch however you can't use it to launch any app you like which i think is a bit of a weird a missed opportunity but there you go it's still nice to have an extra button I'm all about extra buttons and anyways I'm sure you can get around that limitation with tasker and a little bit of imagination still it was just an Auto choice I'm also on the subject of neat little software tricks what can we say about me UI this time around well this time you're getting me UI 10.2 that's the latest version on top of android 9 and it works really well me UI has come along leaps and bounds in my personal opinion if they scaled back some of the aesthetic decisions and outlooks a little bit less Apple s skits nice and smooth and crisp everything's kind of minimal and there's actually quite a few neat features in me UI you've got things like gesture navigation which is enabled by default which takes a bit of getting used to but it's a cool way of navigating your device media to have those buttons down the bottom you have more security when installing new apps you have a dark mode which from me these days is pretty much essential and as always there's a thriving community around me UI 9 with the users being able to vote on the features they want to see remember that Xiaomi began life as a custom rom designer and if you get some bloatware but what's really refreshing is that Xiaomi actually lets you uninstall those apps that you don't want and the file manager is actually really useful I don't know why the me video icon is the exact same as the Play Store icon though that's a bit confusing but performance is where it is at when you're talking about the Xiaomi me 9 and the reason for that as I alluded to earlier is because it's sporting these Snapdragon 855 backed up by six gigabytes of RAM how these Snapdragon 855 isn't anything unique to the Xiaomi me 9 it's gonna find its way through a ton of devices of course it's gonna be in the galaxy s 10 range but this is one of the first devices to sport it and yeah it's really impressive so anyone who watches my videos regularly knows that my personal benchmark is to see how it handles dolphin emulation GameCube emulation I was really impressed with the nubia red magic Mars recently because it managed to squeeze some pretty decent performance out of the Snapdragon 805 by using cooling and overclocking but this is a generational upgrade on that and it really shows for such a slim device it doesn't even get hot when you push it it's incredible so not only can you play GameCube games silky smooth I'm talking Metroid Prime Wind Waker f-zero you can also play dolphin games I was playing Sonic Colors on this again pretty crisp framerate I didn't change any of the settings or tweak anything for extra performance even plays ppsspp that's the PSP emulator so if your interaction and the only downside is that lack of storage obviously you might not be into emulation but the fact that it can handle that means it's gonna just blow anything else out of the water as well it can do anything in the Play Store top settings no issue on antutu it beat 99% of users Gary's been testing at the speed test G and it's been blowing everyone away there as well so yeah this is a performant phone and right now this is gonna outperform any gaming foam that's available of course there will be many more devices coming out over the next year which will have the same chipset and probably more performance so you might choose to wait and see but for now this is ample power and I can't really see any reason why anybody's gonna need any more and as you'd expect this handles the UI extremely smoothly no glitches no stutters and the last piece of the puzzle is that camera which should also be pretty impressive clocking in with its combination of a huge 48 megapixel F 1.75 primary lens 12 megapixel telephoto lens and 16 megapixel ultra wide-angle lens that primary lens is the eye mx-5 86 and Sony and toe-to-toe with other 40 megapixel plus offerings from the likes of Huawei and honor it's not all about pixel count of course but the Xiaomi uses tricks like 4 and 1 pixel bidding to ensure you get the very most from its shooter and you can easily switch between pixel counts if you want to keep your file sizes down and the good news is that this performs exactly as you would hope it would photos come out crisp sharp detailed punchy there's a little bit of over saturation sometimes with there's ways you can mitigate that these are really nice photographs I was actually really impressed low light performance is really good not really much to complain about actually one complaint is that Xiaomi sticks that ugly watermark down in the bottom left by default this is barely even an inconvenience to remove in the settings but it's just super annoying bokeh effects work really well and do a great job of isolating the subject without cutting off ears Picasso style and the wide-angle lens are something it's very welcomed with a 117 degree F of E it's not quite up there with the 123 degree lens on the new Galaxy S 10 there's still plenty wide and having a zoom lens also comes in handy occasionally for extreme close-ups and snapping things in the distance without losing quality and just having this combination of features gives you plenty of options from messing around or for trying to get that perfect shot it's a fun camera to use speaking of which also has tons of extra features and modes it has the beauty mode that Xiaomi phones always come with this one can remodel your face to give you a slimmer nose yes please this AI Scene Recognition which is practically useless there's a short video mode there's a slo-mo mode oh and video is also really good you can record up to 4k at 30fps or 60fps with you bring down the resolution a little bit and according to the exo markets actually apparently be best right now for video although it doesn't have optical image stabilization the digital stabilization is really good here in general it's a great all-around camera whether you're doing video when you're doing photos the selfie camera has a 20 megapixel lens and that's something I always really like to see is when manufacturers put some effort into the front-facing camera because for some types of people whether you're a vlogger for instance family you might end up relying on slightly more so to conclude I'm a really big fan of the showing me 9 is it the most exciting phone of the year absolutely not the Samsung Galaxy S 10 has far more features it offers ridiculous things like up to 12 gigabytes of RAM in some cases and so that's gonna grab all the headlines likewise people aren't gonna make much fuss about that triple lens camera because why always been doing that since the Huawei P 20 it's not the first then like I said but shammies done a fantastic job of picking and choosing features that are really useful and then offering them for a much lower price the sixth thing about ram hundred twenty-eight gigabyte storage model will set you back the equivalent of about 450 US dollars so unless you absolutely want to have the latest and greatest thing the foldable samsung phone unless there are features here that you really need maybe you want the headphone jack maybe you want more resolution then this is a hearty recommendation and if you really want your device both turn heads then just go with that transparent version job done don't find this video useful interesting guys let us know in the comments down below what you think of the Xiaomi 9 head over to Andrew authority comm for the full version of this review whilst you there have a look around because of course we are your source for all things Android