I’m Dan Seifert with The Verge, and this is the new Xiaomi Mi MIX 2S, which doesn’t look a whole lot different from last September’s Mi MIX 2.
Now, it shares many of the same features and overall design, but there’s three new
things to talk about here: it’s got a new processor, it’s got wireless charging, and it has an all-new camera system.
It’s got a 5.99-inch, 18-by-9 LCD panel with full HD-plus resolution. It’s got Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor.
You can get it in up to eight gigabytes of RAM and 256 gigabytes of storage. It runs Xiaomi’s MIUI software. It’s up to version 9.0, and this one is based on Android 8.0, and it is available in China starting next week, and then it’ll be in Xiaomi’s other global markets following later on in the year.
The Mi MIX 2S has wireless charging through its ceramic back, which is new and nice to have. It also has wired Quick Charge 3.0 charging through the USB-C port.
Now, there isn’t a headphone jack here, but there wasn’t a headphone jack on the last model either, so that’s not really much of a surprise.
The biggest change this year is definitely the camera system. It’s a new dual camera system, unlike the single camera on last year’s phone.
It’s two 12-megapixel sensors. There’s a wide-angle lens and a telephoto lens, like you might find on the iPhone X or the Samsung Galaxy X9 Plus.
The wide-angle lens has an all-new sensor with larger pixels on it and dual-pixel auto-focus, so better, faster focusing, and hopefully better performance in low light, while the telephoto lens is pretty standard comparable to other telephoto lens cameras.
Of course, there is a portrait mode here that Xiaomi says uses new AI features that separate the forefront from the background, or your subject from the background, as well as to optimize the colors for the scene.
We’ll just see how well that works in practice. Xiaomi’s won a lot of awards for the Mi MIX 2’s design, so it’s not really a surprise to see them use the same basic design for the Mi MIX 2S.
You get that really big screen and almost no bezels all the way around it. It’s an LCD panel, it’s not AMOLED like you might find on other phones, but it still is pretty bright and vibrant, and really, looks pretty nice to my eyes.
The weird part, of course, is that the front-facing camera’s on the lower-right corner of the frame, which makes it kind of odd when you’re taking selfies.
You’re basically supposed to flip it over upside-down so that you can take a normal selfie. But, other than that, it’s a pretty great-looking phone.
Course, the new camera is familiar-looking, but it’s kinda nice to see that Xiaomi’s actually added the dual cameras to the Mi MIX line. And of course, because it’s a Xiaomi, and it’s a flagship Xiaomi phone, it has the latest and greatest processors and internal specs that you can get.
In terms of battery life, the battery is the same. It’s a 3,400 milliamp-hour battery, but Xiaomi says that because it’s using the new Snapdragon 845 processor, they’re getting better performance without any hit to battery life.
So you should expect about the same battery life as the Mi MIX 2. This is definitely one
And it’d be really great to see them expand this to other parts of the world that they haven’t been selling yet, but there’s still really no story on when we’re gonna find that out.
The Mi MIX 2S is available in two colors. You can get it in black, or this pretty sharp-looking white
model that I have here, and pricing is gonna convert to roughly $500, depending on how much RAM and storage you get in there.
It’s gonna be available in China starting next week, and then Xiaomi’s gonna roll it out to its other global markets in the coming weeks after that, but unfortunately, it’s probably never gonna come to the U.S.
Via: The Verge