Xiaomi Mi 11 4/5
More than an iterative update.
Never has Xiaomi’s rivalry with Samsung been so pronounced: the same year the latter company downgrades the specs of its flagship phones from previous generations (and the price accordingly), Xiaomi’s comes along and turns all those same specs up to (Mi) 11.
At the Xiaomi Mi 11 launch the company announced, with an air of smugness, that it had recently become the third-largest smartphone seller in the world; Samsung still holds top spot by a country mile, far ahead of Apple too, but Xiaomi is rising fast.
The Xiaomi Mi 11 is the latest flagship phone from the company; its first, and likely most important, handset of the year, and certainly the star as of its release, with no Mi 11 Pro announced alongside it.
Design
The Xiaomi Mi 11 isn’t the company’s largest flagship smartphone – the Mi 10T takes that crown – but it’s still fairly large, with dimensions of 164.3 x 74.6 x 8.1mm. At 196g, it’s fairly lightweight for a phone of its size.
The Mi 11 is long and thin as phones go – it’s not quite a Sony Xperia phone in that regard, but it’s not a million miles off. As such, despite its size, it’s fairly comfortable to hold and use one-handed, though people with smaller digits may still find it a stretch to reach the upper part of the screen.
At the bottom the phone has a USB-C port – there’s no 3.5mm headphone jack for wired-audio fans – a power button and volume rocker on the right edge, and an IR blaster at the top. This latter tool is used to send out infrared signals, and finds most use with the Mi Remote app which turns your smartphone into an ersatz TV (or AC, or smart box) remote.
The Mi 11 has a glass front and back, and aluminum frame – the glass is called Gorilla Glass Victus, and the company that makes it (and most glass phone bodies) says it’s extra-protective. Since most glass phones can be fragile, this sturdiness is welcome, and the phone remained free
from scratches and marks through our testing. A solid drop or knock could still crack it though.
Display
With a 6.81-inch display, the Xiaomi Mi 11 is the company’s biggest flagship in terms of screen size, and it also dwarfs almost all of its competitors. The screen is curved at its edges, though not dramatically so, and is broken up by a small ‘punch-hole’ cut-out for the selfie camera in the top-left corner.
In terms of resolution, the Mi 11 screen is 1440 x 3200, which is sharper than those on most flagships of a similar price (including the Mi 10 and Galaxy S21). It’s an AMOLED panel, so colors are particularly vibrant, and there’s also HDR10+ support.
The display has a 120Hz refresh rate, which many flagships now use, though Xiaomi does have a 144Hz phone on the market too. This means the image updates 120 times per second, double the ‘standard’ of 60Hz, and in effect this makes moving images appear smoother. Not everyone cares for the feature though, and you can turn the refresh rate down to
60Hz if you prefer, and this saves battery life.
The phone also has a 480Hz touch input rate, meaning the display scans for your finger 480 times per second, which is eight times faster than the average smartphone. This is particularly good for gaming, as your touch is picked up really quickly, making for more responsive gameplay.
Cameras
While the cameras represent a modest upgrade over the Mi 10, at least compared to the big upgrades in other departments, there are a few key changes that improve the photography experience here.
The main snapper is 108MP f/1.9 – this is the fifth Xiaomi phone to use such a high-res sensor, and they’ve all used this same Samsung one. That doesn’t mean photos look exactly the same as before though, as the results of our testing seemed slightly better, with improved contrast and an overall lighter tone. This is likely the result of improved AI optimisation.
Performance and specs
The Xiaomi Mi 11 is packing the Snapdragon 888 chipset – this is the most powerful chipset Android phones have available to them, at least at the time of the phone’s launch, and it posted suitably impressive processing scores.
The phone returned a multicore score of 3,569 in the
Geekbench 5 benchmark test, which is actually the highest of any phone we’ve ranked, beating the 3,424 of the iPhone 11 Pro Max and 3,401 of the OnePlus 8, although we should point out the iPhone 12 series hasn’t been put through this test yet.
That score backs up our experience in everyday use – the phone is fast in all departments. When fiddling around with the camera app’s movie modes, the phone jumped through them with aplomb; when editing photos or videos, different filters or modes could be selected with splitsecond loading.
Gaming in particular was a treat, thanks both to the snappy processor and the aforementioned faster touch sampling rate. It felt as though we had an edge in games thanks to this speed, although to what degree that was actually the case, or whether it was just confirmation bias, we can only guess.
The Xiaomi Mi 11 is one of the best premium phones you should consider buying, as it’s wellspecced in almost every department: it has super-fast processing, a high screen resolution with extra display modes, and some camera modes and features the competition lacks.
Tom Bedford