Gadgetory

Shami might be coming out of the Chinese market but they have been making moves to reach wider audiences and you guys must be a part of that because you've been requesting us to take a look at these phones for some time well I've been playing around with their brand new flagship and I gotta say it's pretty solid hey it's Josh Boogaard from Android authority what's going on everybody and this is my review of the Xiaomi me for the me for joins the growing line of phones particularly out of the Chinese market that are starting to swarm metal in their frames the mean four comes with and apparently elaborately constructed metal of skeleton that only helps with sturdiness but also helps with its looks even the buttons on the right side of the phone are metallic and this time around you're getting the easy to reach power button that is now beneath the volume rockers follow the line around the phone and you'll see clean elements that include the headphone jack up top the microUSB charging port on the bottom and a speaker that is also on the bottom the metal skeleton keeps together two panels that obviously one is of the five inch screen and then on the back you have the glossy plastic now speaking of the five inch screen you do have a pretty respectable bezel all around it's really not all that big and really it gives the phone an even better factor of slenderness underneath that screen are the capacitive keys and an LED light that is used primarily when charging the phone jump around to the back and the glossy plastic takes on a white color in this version I have and despite its simple outlook oh the feel of glossy plastic still tends to lend itself to some slippage now handling the five inch form factor is a breeze compared to other phones especially the ones coming from the Chinese market that have at least a half inch more diagonally getting around with one hand as far from difficult in the flat sides of the metal frame make it very easy to grip you really do get the sense that this is a sturdy phone which is a common conception when you think of a metal device sure it might look like a couple of other phones out there but honestly when they happen to make the fun look this good we're not going to complain while there are certainly no problems with this 1080p 5-inch display that has 441 pixels per inch these are numbers that we've grown accustomed to seeing any way throughout screens of this size and caliber colors are quite vibrant and the contrast allows for some deep blacks making the viewing or even the gaming experiences as good as they should be on a flagship device the viewing angles are also quite good too with the image losing fidelity only at angles that are steeper than what practicality dictates and if you look closely around the screen you will see a small black line that frames the image somewhat adding to the overall bezel size now it's not a big deal by any means and it is not a big offender as we've seen on other displays but it is something that I thought would be worth noting but underneath that enjoyable display is also the processing power that we've come to expect from a flagship like this the Snapdragon 801 and the adrenal 330 backed by three gigabytes of RAM it's certainly the kind of power that you would need in order to do everything from working and playing play in particular was pretty dang fun on this device as I had little to no slowdowns and even highly intensive games one particular game that I got sucked into shadow fight 2 showed off the contrast possible on this display as well as never quite slowing down but then it is in hardware that we see the main issues with having a Chinese market phone outside of its origin this version of the phone only connects two HSDPA networks making the internet experience less than ideal for Western audiences while that is something I've certainly had to contend with in the past I've unfortunately had plenty of connection issues and haven't been able to use mobile networks consistently as I said before however Xiaomi is trying to reach more audiences and thus a version made for 4G and Western networks is upcoming which is great phone calls came in loud and clear and the same could mostly be said about the speaker on the bottom of the device when playing clear music and playing high-caliber games the sound actually comes through quite loud which is a big plus in the media department and finally the issue of network connectivity on the me--for did make it kind of tough for me to create some real battery metrics for you so I'll just give you my experience one thing I will tell you is that the standby time is actually really great I had the phone sitting for quite a while and it really made no dent in the longevity of the phone overall I did do one specific test using a looped season of a television show at half brightness and volume while it died before I could get a screenshot of the battery usage it definitely took at least eight hours to reach single digits we then move on to the camera which is mostly a standard affair and another example of Xiaomi taking off all the right boxes on the me for 13 megapixels are what you get in the rear-facing camera with a very impressive eight megapixels packed into the front-facing camera the interface is pretty simplistic and can be changed from simple to advanced which does add some settings but mostly removes the icon labels ultimately the functionality is on par with other smartphone camera offerings which include burst modes and even a refocusing mode if you want to play with your depth of field camera quality is about as standard as you can expect in broad daylight the camera does well to capture detail though it might produce the occasional photo that is well too bright indoors it starts to taper off in quality but that's to be expected when you start to lose light the grain appears and gets exponentially worse as conditions get less ideal with color even losing fidelity in those darker situations the front-facing camera does produce some nice large photos but its color reproduction leaves quite a bit to be desired selfie lovers might enjoy the higher pixel counts on this front-facing camera but it doesn't bring anything extraordinary to the table and thus we make it to software which is where some real differences between this and other flagship devices truly appear in the me UI operating system we have Android in what I could call a hybrid fashion much of what you'd expect from Android is turned on its head here like the lack of an Abbe drawer and the lack of Google Play services in the Chinese build but it's not hard to install it yourself and actually thankfully in my version of this unit the Play Store was actually already installed bubbly icons are par for the course here all sprawled out on home screens that will only be organized by the will and use of folders due diligence as thus needed here but you will be able to make a clean interface with some efforts after that the menus take on the same simplistic but attractive style and just about everything moves in some sort of interesting fashion via some lovely transitions get underneath the surface and you'll find quite a lot of customization a powerful theme engine gives you a slew of new themes and options to get away from the norm the notification drop-down can be customized to a good amount to show icons and rows or grids or even show certain information like your current bandwidth speed the capacitive keys can be further used for long press functions as well Xiaomi zone apps are all still in Chinese making them impossible for anyone who can't read it while I didn't have too much trouble with the applications I installed on there I did see the Google Play Store crash on more than a few occasions at the very least you can't say that the me UI isn't always improved updates are available on a weekly basis and might be a mixed blessing because of how frequent they'll notify you of that now the me--for isn't available widely just yet but if you do want this one right now the currency exchange will make this about three hundred and fifty US dollars that's actually a pretty good price for some really solid hardware which is the best way to describe this phone make sure you'll be able to use it on your network though and in the end the xiaomi me--for is another example of a point i posited not too long ago that if the chinese market for smart phones is trying to break free and show us what it's really made of here on the other side of the world then examples like the me for service signs that they are definitely succeeding what you get here is a package that is easy on the eyes and easy to use thanks to the somewhat controversial take on android called me you i we're seeing a new batch of metal clad smartphones especially in the asian market but it seems that they're all going to come to the u.s. in one way or another and in the case of the me--for they're off to a good start thank you guys very much for watching and i hope you enjoyed this review of the Xiaomi me floor will definitely keep our eye on Xiaomi from now on and I know that sometimes I may not pronounce the name correctly but I hope Xiaomi is about as good as I'm gonna get it but nonetheless stay tuned for more coverage of this and Aoife is right on its way it's just days away so you can make sure to take a look at all the coverage I'm going to have I'm gonna be there right on the shelf floor bringing you all of the new announcements for a bunch of new phones and also smartwatches as we're going to be seeing quite a bit of presence of those with Android we're on the cusp so from there make sure you stay tuned and take a look at content from my colleagues in Android as well and from there drop us some likes subscribe if you haven't already and once you're done with all of that don't forget to head on over to android authority comm because we are your source for all things Android