Gadgetory

all scream all the time that was basically the philosophy behind the Xiaomi mean mix but now Xiaomi finds itself in a marketplace that might be a little bit oversaturated with small bezel designed phones that they kind of pioneered with their original device but now we have the sophomore attempt and we're here to review it because it's jar Trafigura what's going on everybody and this is our full review of this yummy me mix - now one of the first things that you will notice about this device is the screen and for good reason you still get a very high screen to body ratio on the Xiaomi me mix - and it's still one of the most pleasing devices to look at just like the original one was but once you look at what's around that display you find that quite a few things have actually changed mainly the size you have a 5.9 9 inch screen on here which makes the entire device that much smaller the curves that have been added to the me mix - might make the phone feel a little bit too familiar compared to other phones that have minimal bezels and we're going to harp on the grip of the device because the ceramic returns on the backing and it's still one of the best materials that we have ever felt on any smartphone and sámi is the main company that still uses it on their devices on that backing is the same finger parameter in a good spot and under it the me branding that keeps everything looking pretty minimal however the same compromise that helped this become a reality on the original me mix returns again and it's that large chin on the bottom that also includes the front-facing camera in probably one of the worst positions that we've used in any smart phone not only is it easy to cover up the camera with one's right hand it makes for an odd angle that selfie experts will not be too happy with sure the camera app tells the user to turn the phone around when it comes to taking a more conventional selfie but that's not something that you can do in apps like Instagram and snapchat but the vibration speaker that we didn't really like in the original me mix for the phone calls has been replaced with an actual phone speaker it's a small driver that points upward and it actually sounds so much better than last year's alternative so thus this phone addresses a couple of issues that made the original one a little bit less accessible however if you ask me this already pretty phone would have been made better if we could get our hands on the special edition the special edition of the me mix 2 comes with a ceramic unibody so that it doesn't have to cut the material to make room for a metal frame it's all ceramic wrapped that beautiful screen and then there's actually a version that is completely white which makes it one of the more unique devices that we've looked at in recent memory Xiaomi claimed that this white version is a lot like a perfect piece of jade and this is definitely the addition of the me mix to that I would rock because of its crazy good looks the size of the display makes it pretty good to handle though getting up and down the phone with Han gymnastics will still be part of the experience and brightness is pretty much where it should be for an IPS display when out in broad daylight you can change the color profile in the settings and there is a reading mode to sort of make things a little bit easier on your eyes especially during the nighttime honestly the only misstep when it comes to the screen here on the mix too is that it is still full HD plus resolution it would have been great to see quad HD on here because what we're looking at here are supposed to be one of C Ami's main flagships but keeping up with the flagship game is not tough when you look at the internals the Snapdragon 835 is accompanied with overachieving bits like six to eight gigabytes of RAM that come in at different price points storage is also not a problem for a phone that doesn't have a micro SD card slot as 64 128 or 256 gigabytes of internal storage are available so I really had no problem with everyday performance on the mix - zipping between applications despite the actual software itself being a little rough around the edges as this is a global ready phone Google Play services were pre-installed on this device so I could use it to its fullest extent here in the US more radios are in this phone than any other device in Android thus far which makes this a phone that you can use pretty much anywhere across the globe so when I use the phone on my t-mobile account I had no problems with calls and call quality on that GSM network sound in other situations is a bit of a mixed bag unfortunately without a headphone jack users are forced to use a USB type-c adapter to use wired headphones with the mix too but thankfully I do have my own solutions for that with a truly wireless set of earbuds but that wasn't really quite as upsetting as the external speaker outside in noisy environments this just didn't get loud enough and then if I lowered the volume to around 50% or below it felt like there was a noise gate there so that lower ends of the audio we're kind of getting cut off and it made for a really odd listening experience now one real bright spot to the original me mix was the battery life maybe it's because of the full HD plus resolution in the screen and also because of the upgraded internals but this 400 milliamp hour a unit was able to get me to five hours of screen on time without any issues and that was a pretty consistent metric and that screen on time was throughout the course of a 12 to 16 hour workday most of those days and of course you can charge the phone with quick charge 3.0 but it wasn't something I felt like I had to do at least in the middle of my days so that brings us to the camera experience which unfortunately Seon me kind of took the more conventional route when you see them kind of doing more experimental things with their other flagships well this doesn't really take into account the front-facing camera which is itself unconventional and like I said before just simply odd I do a lot of video calls these days and that was when I found the camera positioning to be far less than ideal on a number of different occasions I was told that I was basically looking away from them because the camera is down here and I was looking above at their face on the screen so it was a little bit distracting they admitted but also if I tried to look at the camera itself it also felt a little bit odd and most of the time if I'm holding the phone in a regular way I got a weird upward angle and I kind of think that Xiaomi knows that the positioning of the camera while unavoidable is kind of weird because they even made the camera optic black enough to blend in with the rest of the device now the rear camera is a 12 megapixel shooter that boasts 4 axis optical image stabilization and not too much else while the stabilization does help with some of the 4k video recording that I did and it helped a little bit in low-light shooting it's about the only thing that is special about this camera that said the app does have quite a few different modes and I found myself using the manual mode a little bit more often to try to get some stylized shots for example I wanted to get some light trails in these photos so I slowed the shutter speed down so pictures in general are pretty good though it's no surprise that it kind of falls apart in low-light the HDR captures another pet peeve of mine because it is a toggle rather than in auto mode but it does do a decent job of getting better exposure and adding a little bit of color to scenes even if it does make the shutters of file speeds a lot slower the main story here is that the camera did nothing to really blow me away some pictures and videos came out really well but the same amount of them kind of came out a bit subpar I'm inclined to say that the camera is average then especially since Xiaomi is trying harder with their other phones that have dual cameras and finally make it over to the software and the you eye which is rocking Android nougat as its base now if you have used the me UI at all before then you know that it doesn't have an app drawer and a lot of users kind of find that a little bit hard to get used to but if you have used the me UI before not a whole lot has changed that said there are quite a few features at the new UI can boast like the quick ball it's a small convenient way of getting to the core functions of the phone without relying on the soft keys there's also the dual app which allows for multiple instances of the same application and you can take that even further by putting an entirely different second space on the phone for an entirely different experience on top of the one you already setup now the main issues that I have with the software are ones that I've seen before just like the features I just mentioned and mainly the biggest issue I have with the me UI is that it requires a little bit more polish parts of the OS don't seem to be completely finished or properly translated from Chinese and the notifications in particular are a bit off overall the me UI has come a long way and continues to be supported by the user forum community meaning that updates can come quickly but after one maybe two generations of flagships from Xiaomi I'm a little bit miffed to see that the me UI hasn't drastically changed which makes me think it's just simply not ready for primetime in the West if you are going to get your hands on this device and so there you have it the Xiaomi me mix 2 while I'm still excited to be able to use a ceramic phone again and it is another me mix unfortunately the luster of the original device has kind of worn off by now if you really want it to stand out from the crowd maybe the best way to do it is to spring for the special edition of the phone which will come in at around seven hundred and twenty dollars u.s. when converted from Chinese currency now consider that for a second that the special edition white ceramic one is seven hundred and twenty dollars u.s. the six gigabytes of RAM and 128 gigabytes internal storage version is almost $600 making it over three hundred dollars less than plenty of the flagships we're seeing now that get close to $1,000 in price so see ami still does have that feather in its cap the fact that its phones are still about as affordable as they possibly can be so depending on your stance regarding the lower resolution display the single camera and the Chinese software experience this might be one hell of a steal and thus we want to blame you if you wanted to go back to the phone that got us all wanting all screen all the time you simply just have to find a way to get your hands on one let us know what you think of the me mix too and don't forget to drop some likes on this video and to subscribe to the channel if you haven't already so you can keep up with all of the great releases that we're seeing at the end of 2017 and you can follow us for that and even more because we are your source for all things Android