Our review unit is the Piano Black version, which is the most visually unimpressive model in our opinion. If you like to make a statement with your phones, then the Ocean Blue and Lavender Violet versions are likely to be a better choice as light creates a rainbow effect when it refracts of their glass backs. We have included official press photos of those two models below, for reference. All three models have black displays and unfortunately have no IP certification against the ingress of water or dust.
While our review unit feels great in hand, it picks up fingerprints easily despite Xiaomi stressing that it has an anti-fingerprint coating. Moreover, the mostly glass design makes the Mi 9 somewhat slippery so we would recommend buying a case and a screen protector to limit the chances of damaging the device if or when it falls from your hands. Additionally, the Mi 9 sits shakily on a flat surface like a table, because its rear-facing cameras protrude by a few millimetres from its rear case. Best Displays , for University Students.
Additionally, no model supports microSD card expansion. Moreover, our review unit, which is the 64 GB model, had only While MIUI operates on the same concept as stock Android, Xiaomi has heavily customised it to the extent that it hardly resembles the OS that Pixel devices use in some areas. One noticeable absentee is the app drawer, with Xiaomi choosing instead to spread app icons over several home screens like Apple does with iOS.
Moreover, you swipe up from the home screen to bring up Google search rather than right as you do on stock Android; open apps are closed by swiping to the side instead of down too. Furthermore, Xiaomi has rearranged the settings menu, which may take some acclimatisation if you are used to a more stock Android experience. In short, MIUI will not feel alien to you if you have used recent versions of Android or iOS, but it has its idiosyncrasies that may catch you out initially. Xiaomi preinstalls the standard suite of Google apps and its own along with a few third-party apps like AliExpress and Facebook.
You can uninstall the latter two though, which is not always the case with some custom versions of Android. The 11 apps that Xiaomi files under the Tools folder take up approximately MB of space, which is a rather small impediment on the 64 GB of storage. Incidentally, our review unit had February security patches installed during our tests towards the end of March. These were only one month old with Google releasing the March security patch on March 4. Hence, there should be no problems here with old and potentially compromised security patches.
Hence, you should have no issues with connecting to an LTE network regardless of where you live. The device has an NFC chip and supports Bluetooth 5. We should also point out that the Mi 9 emits comparatively high levels of radiation, which manufacturers measure in SAR, which is an acronym for specific absorption rate.
The Mi 9 emits 1.
However, other manufacturers manage to significantly undercut Xiaomi here. While this is not overly concerning, it is something that distinguishes the Mi 9 from other modern flagships. As expected, our review unit achieved excellent Wi-Fi speeds in our iperf3 Client tests. The latter can also be found in some flagships like the Mate 20 Pro and helped our review unit achieve a satellite fix with up to four metres accuracy after a few seconds regardless of where we tested it.
In short, the Mi 9 has excellent GPS accuracy. The MIUI phone app has a different layout than the stock Android 9 Pie, but it has all the usual features that other call apps have like a call log, contacts and quick access to phone settings too. Our review unit has impressive call quality even over hands-free.
Our call partners could easily understand us and reported that background noise did not mask our voice. Hence, the microphone does a great job at suppressing ambient noise. The Mi 9 also maintained excellent mobile network reception when connected to Vodafone despite us testing the device in a rural area. The days of dual rear-facing cameras being something special are definitely over.
OEMs have moved towards triple or quintuple rear-facing cameras in the last year, and Xiaomi has done the same with the Mi 9. The Chinese company has even included a dedicated 48 MP mode in its MIUI camera app, such is its attempts at delivering an excellent camera experience. Practically, the 48 MP sensor should capture even finer details than other smaller sensors can, and you should be able to enlarge photos without losing any image fidelity too.
The default camera app scales the resolution down to 12 MP for standard photos by interpolating four pixels into one, which theoretically should make pictures look more detailed. There is a 20 MP front-facing camera too. Together, these cameras offer an impressive array of options for budding photographers, which is further helped by the plethora of camera modes including a Pro mode should you want to adjust settings like ISO, shutter speed and white balance. There are other modes too like portrait, panorama and night as there are with most modern flagships.
The triple rear-facing cameras achieve exquisite results in daylight, as demonstrated below by scenes 1 and 2. Both photos have excellent dynamic range, are detailed and they look incredibly sharp too.
Qualitatively, the photos shot with the Mi 9 look noticeably better upon looking closely than those shot with the Honor View 20 , which uses the same 48 MP sensor. The triple cameras struggle with image noise in artificially dim lighting as with scene 3, but the result is still leaps ahead of what the View 20 manages.
The default camera app has a super slow-motion mode too that records at FPS. Overall, our review unit took equally impressive videos during our tests. Choose a scene and navigate within the first image. One click changes the position on touchscreens. One click on the zoomed-in image opens the original in a new window.
The first image shows the scaled photograph of the test device. We also subjected our review unit to further camera tests under controlled lighting conditions.
The Xiaomi Mi 9 is the best Xiaomi phone you can buy right now, offering some impressive features at a low price. It was the first phone in the. The Xiaomi Mi 9 is a great smartphone, and we had the pleasure of reviewing it. can still plug in earphones and charge your phone at the same time. I find the recent apps overview much better than stock Android's and.
We compared its colour accuracy by comparing the colours it reproduced against our ColorChecker Passport reference chart. We also took a photo of our test chart, which sometimes catches even flagship smartphones out with its fine lines and complex structures. The Mi 9 could not reproduce the ColorChecker Passport reference colours precisely, and generally they look oversaturated. However, the triple camera setup did a mostly great job of capturing our test chart. The coloured areas at the centre of the chart look sharp and pop against the greyscale background, while fine lines are preserved too.
Contrast levels drop off noticeably towards the bottom corners of the chart, and it should not be as noticeable in most photos. In short, Xiaomi has equipped the Mi 9 with a fantastic set of cameras that challenge even the most expensive smartphones. By contrast, the company includes a more powerful 27 W Quick Charge 4. Xiaomi has an extensive set of warranty pages on its website that it splits by country and region.
Essentially, the company affords the Mi 9 a two-year limited warranty in countries in which it trades like Italy, Spain or the UK. By contrast, buyers based in countries where Xiaomi does not operate, like Germany, must rely on third-party warranty instead. Our review unit responded to inputs almost immediately with virtually no delays.
Xiaomi has also equipped the Mi 9 with an in-screen fingerprint sensor, as is the zeitgeist for flagship smartphones. The device can store up to five fingerprints and worked perfectly throughout our tests. Optionally, you can unlock the Mi 9 with your face using the front-facing camera, although this is not as secure as a fingerprint, password, pattern or PIN. The button supports double or single presses too, and neither of them must be set to the Google Assistant unlike Samsung and its Bixby button.
Xiaomi preinstalls Google Gboard as the default keyboard for the international version of the Mi 9, which functions just as well as it does on other devices that we have tested. You can replace the keyboard with another too like those that are downloadable from the Google Play Store. The display has a PPI pixel density and a Our review unit achieved an average maximum brightness of The panel in our review unit also reached a minimum of 2.
The screen in our review unit flickers at The display backlight flickers at There should be no flickering or PWM above this brightness setting. The frequency of If PWM was detected, an average of minimum: 5 - maximum: Hz was measured. AMOLED panels typically can produce absolute blacks because they can switch off pixels individually, and the one in the Mi 9 is no different. Blacks look rich and help the display achieve a theoretically infinite contrast ratio, which makes colours look sharp. The display reproduces colours accurately when set to either mode, although colours are a bit too cool for our liking on the increased contrast mode.
Our photo spectrometer and CalMAN software demonstrate that our review delivers an almost perfect colour temperature of 6, K, which is just 48 K above our ideal value when set to the standard contrast mode. Moreover, DeltaE deviations are all better than the ideal value of 3. None of our comparison devices can match the Mi 9 on colour accuracy.
Many come close but they all fall short in one area. Hats off to Xiaomi here because it has done an exemplary job at calibrating the display in our review unit. The Mi 9 is well prepared for outdoor use too thanks to its incredibly bright display. You should be able to read the device in direct sunlight, although reflections may cause you to have to look harder at the screen than if you moved to a shadier spot.
We noticed a slight brightness shift when looking at the display from the side, but this does not come at the expense of readability. In short, you should have no issues with reading the Mi 9 from practically any angle. The Mi 9 is powered by the hotly anticipated Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC , which makes its first appearance in our offices. Interestingly, manufacturers can integrate the Snapdragon with a 5G modem, so we expect to find it in several 5G smartphones by the end of the year.
As expected, the Mi 9 proves to be a worthy competitor to other flagship smartphones in synthetic benchmarks and completely outclassed its predecessor in the process. The Mi 9 is also currently one of the fastest smartphones in browser benchmarks as our comparison tables below demonstrate. Our review unit cannot shake the iPhone XR from its pinnacle, but it typically finished above or on par with our most competitive Android comparison devices.
Xiaomi equips the Mi 9 with UFS 2. We experienced practically no load times with our review unit, while apps installed almost instantly from the Google Play Store. Likewise, we could not faze the Mi 9 even with intense multitasking. In short, you should never experience any lags or stutters with the Mi 9.
AndroBench results reinforced our initial impressions too. However, this is almost irrelevant to everyday use, as we experienced when we opened multiple apps consecutively. Hence, the Mi 9 should remain future-proofed for at least a few years. Subjectively, even the most complex of modern games run smoothly on our review unit, regardless of the graphics settings at which they are played.
Unfortunately, we were unable to assess frame rates because the app that we usually use, GameBench, would not work on the Mi 9 at the time of testing.