Xiaomi brought their first Concept Smartphone Mi Mix last year which was featuring a Bezel-less display. This time they’ve upgraded its features and launched the better Mi Mix 2. The USP of this smartphone is its 5.99-inch bezel-less display with a ceramic built body. The company has priced handset at 36,999 INR. Let’s see how what the smartphone really is and worth our buy or not.
Design and Built:
The ceramic built body is good but the bezel-less display on the front and shiny glass cover at back makes it looks super impressive. The cuboid-shaped body with a curved edge adds an elegant look to its design. Although the size seems to be a bit bigger and the phone slips out quite often due to glass on both sides.
The rear panel has a camera at the top along with beautifully placed fingerprint sensor just below it. As said the front panel has near bezel-less display and the left out part is the lower part which has been kept for the sensors and front camera. Painted black in colour amalgamated with the ceramic body and the display, it is hard to notice the lower bar at the bottom.
Overall the design is pretty impressive but the phone is not sturdy because there glass on both sides, and you need to carry it around carefully. You should be using the protective cover which is provided with the smartphone for further safety.
Display:
The Mi Mix 2 features a 5.99-inch IPS LCD Full HD+ display with 2160×1080 pixel resolution. The display and icons seem crisp and colourful. The display makes a good 18:9 aspect ratio proportion. The sunlight readability is quite good but one needs to increase the brightness for readability.
Specifications:
Mi Mix 2 runs on 64-bit Octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor clocked at max 2.45GHz paired with a 6 GB of LPDDR4X RAM. There is a 64GB/128 GB/256 GB of USF 2.1 storage variant and we got one of the 128GB model. There is no additional storage slot provided in it, so you need to choose your model wisely. Its a Dual SIM smartphone and has other connectivity options like Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac (2.4/5 GHz), 2X2 MIMO and MU-MIMO, Bluetooth 5.0, NFC, USB Type-C (no 3.5 mm jack) and Location (GPS, AGPS, Glonass).
The smartphone runs on MIUI 9 which is based on Android 7.0 Nougat. MIUI is a good UI skin layer with lots of customisation and usage features but I’ll prefer the Stock Android OS over it. Unfortunately, this isn’t an option here.
Performance:
The Mi Mix 2 is a good performer in all aspects. The touch response is quick, multitasking is great and apps open up smoothly whenever switched. There is ample RAM that works great with SoC and offers great smartphone performance to the user.
The gaming section also works fine. First of all the 5.99-inch display gives games an edge as the user always wants a bigger screen to play games. Second, the SoC and RAM work great in this section. One can play the high-end games like Modern Combat 5 and Asphalt 8 smoothly. There is no lag or frame rate dropping issue in it.
It scored 1934 (Single Core) and 6657 (Multi-Core) in Geekbench and 175162 in AnTuTu. The scores aren’t the best but comparable to the devices in same price segment.
The fingerprint sensor is placed beautifully and works fast. The speakers are at the bottom which also work fine. The 4G LTE connectivity is good and I didn’t find any drop or connectivity issue while using it.
Camera:
Mi Mix 2 sports a 12-MP sensor camera at Rear with f/2.0 aperture, 4-axis OIS, 1.25 um and PDAF. The camera shoots good images but not anything special in it. The in-depth details and the colour composition is okay. I really love the Mi phone camera but this time it is not comparable to the smartphone with similar price ranges.
The Front camera is a 5-MP sensor and features 1080p video shoot backed up by Beautify mode. It captures pretty good selfies with good details. But with the beautify mode, the tone level seems a bit unnatural. Overall camera performance is acceptable but the low-light light performance is weak, which needs to rectified.
Battery:
Mi Mix 2 is backed by 3,400 mAh battery which offers good battery life. I was expecting a bigger battery with the size of a smartphone and also as the company always try to give better and bigger battery on almost every smartphone. The battery is supported by 2A QuickCharge 3.0 and charges the phone in 2-2.5 hours. The smartphone offers 8-9 hours of battery life with moderate usage, which is good and dependable.
Gizmo Verdict:
The Mi Mix 2 is really a good smartphone in terms of design, performance and battery life. The only compromising thing is the camera. If you’re after the design and performance only, you can surely go for it but if you want more, you can opt for OnePlus 5 or Huawei Honor 8 Pro.
