Hello! Are you curious enough of Xiaomi Mi 6?
Wonder what are the good and bad sides of this smartphone?
Well, check out this review.
We initially thought that Mi 6 would carry bezel-less design,
yet as a matter of fact, it’s not.
We think that the design is pretty similar to Honor 8 or Huawei P10.
The third screen dimension of this smartphone is quite similar as well,
around 5.1 to 5.2-inch.
We can say that Mi 6 is Mi 5 look-alike,
especially the back part that has curvy sides.
Another thing that makes Mi 6 looks unique is that the usage of striking colors,
such as blue, the one we have right now.
Plus, it has glossy and shiny finishing.
Unfortunately,
we can’t fully enjoy the beauty of Mi 6 body
since we are forced to use casing.
The reason is
because we can’t stand the fingerprints that cling on it.
We do not know whether the other colors are fingerprint magnet or not.
But for sure,
the blue one is very easy to get dirty and even little scratch.
How about the body frame? Is it strong?
We are certain that Mi 6 is way stronger than Mi 5.
We can assume it by the weight.
Yes, Mi 6 is almost 170 gram for it is made of stainless steel.
You can already feel how strong it is only by looking at it.
Despite that, the design still has flaw.
In the top part,
Xiaomi offers another advantage by equipping infrared blaster
while in the bottom part, it is lack of jack audio which is quite vital.
Jack is removed
so that Mi 6 can bear splashing water,
plus to accommodate 3.350 mAh battery.
Moving on to the front part,
Mi 6 has thick forehead and chin.
On its forehead, there is 8 MP camera and LED notification.
Meanwhile, on the chin, there is Home button that can also be used for fingerprints sensor.
You can just touch it to unlock the screen.
UI wise, there is not much of new thing that is offered.
Therefore, we will briefly discuss this section.
Mi 6 buyers can go and try android 7.1.1 based, MIUI version 8.
Since the unit we review is the Chinese version,
no wonder if there are a lot of installed bloatware.
However, we can erase all the bloatware manually, one by one.
While idle,
MIUI 8 in Mi 6 turns out to be wasting memory.
We record that the average RAM that is consumed while idle is 2.5 GB.
As usual,
Mi series smartphone is always equipped with the highest hardware,
and Mi 6 is the first Chinese smartphone to use CPU Snapdragon 835
and 6 GB RAM.
This CPU has 8 core with maximum clockspeed of 2.45 GHz
and integrated to GPU Adreno 540.
After doing AnTuTu benchmark for a few times,
the highest score we get 180 thousand points.
This score is quite similar to Exynos 8895 in Galaxy S8.
Yes, Snapdragon 835 is the fastest CPU at this moment.
But the real-world performance is not that real, if compared to Snapdragon 821.
Playing heavy games, such as Bully,
does not feel a lot different than OnePlus 3T which uses Snapdragon 821.
The point is..
that Snapdragon 835 offers faster performance,
yet not that far from Snapdragon 821.
What is great while gaming and video streaming is the dual-speaker stereo.
The volume may not be the loudest, but very much detailed.
Both speakers are in the bottom part and merged into the earpiece.
You need to note that Mi 6 has two kinds of storage.
The standard version is 64 GB,
while the ceramic version is 128 GB.
All Mi 6 variant does not have microSD slot.
So, make sure that you choose the storage capacity as needed.
Another note about the performance,
the back part of this smartphone, will heat up after using it to play heavy games for only 10 minutes.
especially the area close to camera,
So far, the hottest temperature we record is 41.5 degree Celsius.
Since this is the first Snapdragon 835 smartphone we have ever tried,
we can’t make sure if the heat comes from the CPU or other components.
More about power,
Mi 6 brings 3.350 mAh battery.
Using only one 4G SIM card and playing HD game intensely for an hour,
the SOT generates 5 hours.
Meanwhile, battery charging from none to full takes approximately 100 minutes.
Mi 6 is the third dual camera smartphone of Xiaomi that we have tried.
The first one was Redmi Pro, and the second one is Mi 5s.
We have to admit that
the improvement of its dual camera quality significantly increases, if compared to the two ancestors.
Mi 6’s 12 MP dual camera configuration,
is very similar to iPhone 7 Plus.
he left camera is to capture in normal zoom,
while the right one is telephoto lens that has 2x optical zoom.
If combined,
both cameras can deliver bokeh pictures using portrait mode.
We can capture in both vertical and horizontal position.
How about the quality?
We are satisfied!
Please note that to capture in portrait mode,
we have to distance ourselves from the object at least one to two meters.
Besides, this mode will only be optimal when there’s enough light.
If not, the result will be disappointing.
The same thing goes to iPhone 7 Plus.
For your information, while taking pictures in regular mode or auto,
the quality of pictures will look sharp, and the color is pretty accurate.
Yet the color accuracy and the sharpness will diminish while portrait mode is activated.
To make you satisfy, you can see these pictures
and video that we took using Mi 6 camera.
We can almost make sure that Mi 6 is the most affordable flagship
smartphone using Snapdragon 835 right now.
To us, this smartphone is not too impressive in terms of design and appearance
cause it gets dirty easily and doesn’t have jack audio.
Then, the most prominent thing it offers is
the camera that has great performance and quality, even as great as iPhone 7 Plus,
and yet can be bought half the price
