Gadgetory

Shami maybe the fifth largest smartphone manufacturer in the world but can its latest smartphone compete with other smartphones like the one in mate galaxy s5 or LG g3 I'm Taylor Martin this is PocketNow and this is our full review of the Xiaomi me for one last time we'd like to thank 28 mobile for lending us this me--for for review if you'd like a me--for to call your own click the link in the description below or go to 28 mobile comm or you can also browse dozens of other devices and smartphones to purchase throughout our time with the me for now approaching 7 days we've remained impressed by its design and build quality the key feature of the design is the stainless steel core which has been precision machined through a 193 step process this precision is evidenced through the machined holes for the speaker grille on the bottom edge and even the SIM tray which is also steel and fits very snugly into the frame from the front and sides this phone is beautiful I'll be it lacking some imagination it's been said by many to resemble the newest iPhones and even the Lumia icon which we won't deny however we're not terribly fond of the glossy plastic around back makes the phone unreasonably slick while contrasting the high-end steel around the edges still we're very happy with the me force design and we're happy that the back plates are swappable more designs and color options will be available in the future xiaomi didn't give us much to complain about on the inside either the me--for comes with some of the best specifications you can find in a high-end smartphone today a Snapdragon 801 with a 2.5 gigahertz quad-core Krait 400 CPU and Adreno 330 GPU run the show it has three gigabytes of RAM 16 or 64 gigabytes of storage with no option to expand and a non-removable 3080 milliamp hour battery the primary camera on the me 4 is a 13 megapixel sensor capable of recording 4k video and the front camera is an impressive 8 megapixels one of the most notable features of the me 4 however is the display at 5 inches diagonally with a resolution of 1080p the IPS LCD bares of respectable density of 441 pixels per inch colors pop quite a bit and the black levels are relatively deep it also has a wide brightness range stretching from barely visible to painful to look at it's a gorgeous display and are only too complaints are how warm it is in comparison to other displays and the side visibility which seems to taper off at certain angles and all the me for is built exceptionally well and we would go as far as to say it's one of the nicest pieces of Android hardware around today the me--for comes running Xiaomi zone custom version of Android me UI atop Android 4.4.2 kitkat our unit shipped with me UI 5 although 6 is in beta the first thing we noticed about this version of me UI on this Chinese model is that it doesn't come prepackaged with Google Play services no Google Play Store Gmail hangouts maps etc instead it's loaded with Xiaomi zone services out-of-the-box we market its own theme store and ami store app fortunately Google Play services can be unofficially added with minimal effort and without rooting we did this to install the benchmarking and test applications we use on Android phones one of the defining features of new UI is the lack of an application drawer all applications reside on the home screens the other differentiator is a very powerful theme engine various themes can be purchased and downloaded in the dedicated theme store these allow users to greatly alter the appearance of the phone's UI lock screens home screens notification shades and even the settings application the nitty-gritty features however are the highlight of me UI the more you dig through settings the more things you will find a tweak there are standard features like guest mode and do not disturb but you can also customize what long pressing a hardware button will do or how the settings toggles in the notification shade appear as a bar at the bottom or as a dedicated page you can also customize what the inline buttons on headphones will do however there's a darker side to me UI a side that's filled with quirks bugs and glitches we lost count of how many times the phone completely froze and the touchscreen quit working entirely this usually happened but wasn't limited to selecting a new theme pop-up applications like Lync bubble in the fill window and LastPass simply didn't work and applications which required location services regularly could not detect our correct location as nice as me UI is on the surface it's a hot mess underneath to the point that it's very frustrating to use at times on the upshot the me--for is a monster when it comes to performance thanks to the Snapdragon 801 inside gaming on the me--for has been spectacular with no notable sluggishness or framerate jobs it slices through normal activities with ease scrolling is especially smooth and launching applications happens almost instantaneously however some animations seem to drag out things and makes part of the homescreen it's fill slower than it should be this was limited to the homescreen but shouldn't happen on a home with this much horsepower benchmark show about the same thing great scores but not nearly the highest we've ever seen what isn't terribly impressive with a meet for is it speaker quality positioned along the bottom sound emitted from the single speaker is tinny muffled and just not that impressive the same goes for call quality which we won't harp on too much since this is a Chinese model not optimized for use here in the States calls were loud and clear but not remarkable in any way and speeds since we've been limited to HSPA+ here in the Piedmont Triad of North Carolina have been mediocre we've averaged 6 megabits per second down and 1 point 5 megabits per second top without proper network optimization we also can't give solid battery metrics but we can say all things considered we've been very impressed with the battery life with a v4 it comes with a fixed three thousand eighty milliamp hour battery which easily lasted us around a day and a half of use with over 4 hours of screen on time per charge however we found the better usage in settings to be unreliable after playing around 10 minutes of modern combat 5 watching some YouTube videos of benchmarking and browsing the web for our comparison videos the screen on time was listed as 55 seconds the 13 megapixel camera around back is about as average as it gets its performance in great lighting outdoors is passable saturation is a little heavy side which is par for the course and smartphone image sensing but contrast is a little lower than we'd like we were happy with more than a few photos taken with them before but there were just as many if not more that turned out dull blurry out-of-focus or unusable especially in low-light the before is particularly bad indoors and in low-light situations images are noisy dark and under saturated fortunately HDR mode worked exceptionally well we shot a few HDR photos on an overcast day and it made the photo pop with a high contrast without a noticeable halo effect although it was obviously an HDR photo and the front camera despite the higher than normal resolution isn't all that great sure it's better than most front cameras and has several times the resolution but the images were washed out and lifeless we found some competing front-facing cameras to be better than the me fours despite low resolutions so where does that leave us well the Xiaomi me--for is a seriously impressive handset especially for the price straight out of China this thing retails for the equivalent of approximately three hundred and twenty-five dollars though importing it to other countries will undoubtedly raise the price a bit the hardware is solid inside and out and me UI has potential maybe me UI six will bring much-needed stability but for now is the software and its idiosyncrasies that keep it from being a full package would we recommend it if you want exceptional hardware for cheap and can deal with some bugs absolutely otherwise we'd recommend something a little more reliable and refined like the g3 what a mate or galaxy s5 folks thanks for watching and supporting pocket now if you enjoyed the video and would like to help us out further click the thumbs up button below and subscribe to the channel follow us around the web Twitter Facebook and Google+ at pocket now I'm Taylor Martin you can find me on twitter at casper tech and i will see you next time