Xiaomi MI 2 review

Left: Phone image from Xiaomi website. Right: Box contents.

Finally, I got my hand on the highly sought-after Xiaomi MI 2 phone. Besides reading my personal experience with this phone, I would suggest you to also read the article from Engadget and, if you understand Chinese, the in-depth review from Zealer. The package comes with the phone itself, a battery, a back cover (white), USB data cable, and USB power adapter (standard China 2-pin). A few notable missing specifications are no 4G, no NFC, and no card slot (and the total available storage for user is only about 10 GB out of 16GB). I have nothing to complain considering the price of about RM 1000 / SGD 400. MI 2 has very similar pricing and specifications (official page) to another highly demanded phone, the Google Nexus 4 (quad-core, 2GB RAM, same chipsets, etc.) This phone is currently available only in China but there are plans to extend the market to Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore.

Font size. Left: MI 2. Right: Galaxy S II.

Three touch-sensitive buttons with LED notification.

Although MI 2 and Galaxy S2 shared similar screen estate (4.3"), Galaxy S2 is wider, since Galaxy S2 is in the 4:3 form factor, whereas MI 2 adopts the 16:9 (HD) form factor. Therefore, for MI 2 to achieve similar font size as Galaxy S2, its font size has to be increased to medium (from normal), but overlapping also starts to occur. Three touch-sensitive permanent buttons are located below the screen: Menu, Home, and Back. Unfortunately, these buttons are painted silver and does not lit up during the dark. Moreover, when I am using the phone, my palm often accidentally triggers the back button (I am a right-handed). MI 2 also includes LED light for notification, something that Galaxy S2 lacks of.

Normal, medium, and large font size.

MI 2 has its own launcher, MIUI, similar to Samsung Touchwiz and HTC Sense. There is no separate app drawer, all widgets and apps are put together in home screens (not maximum of 9 home screens as stated previously, my mistake). MIUI is originally built in simplified Chinese, but the user could switch the language to English (English tends to have some problems like typos though fixed). Basically, English users should have no problem operating this phone, but might encounter difficulties when accessing the bundled China-localized apps. For the purpose of this blog, all the screenshots are in English. One thing that attracts me is the user interface also adjusts itself when the font size is enlarged. For example, the icon will switch to a 3x3 array instead of 4x4 if you set the font to large (good for elderly people!)

Study room theme free launcher

Left: Toggles menu. Right: Menu after hitting more button.

Some themes come with free launcher mode, which can be activated by swiping down with two fingers at the home screens. Free launcher is an interface that allows users to interact with a collection of graphical objects, instead of the same old icons. For example, in the study room theme, touching the lamp on the table will lead to the torchlight function. You might think this is rather intuitive, but think again with the Angry Birds theme in mind. Another convenient feature is the toggles menu, which are shortcuts to important settings of the phone. It can be reached by pulling down the notification / status bar.

Theme, MI market, and Game Center.

The default theme of MIUI uses the colours of orange and white. Coming from a Galaxy S2 user, the ability to change theme directly is a big thing, especially when you could get even more of them online. In fact, you could customize the lock screen, wallpapers, icons, fonts, status bar, home screens, SMS, dialer, boot animation, and boot audio. (Talk about flexibility!)

Unlike most of the Android phones in the market (maybe otherwise in China), MI 2 does not come with Google Play pre-installed. Instead, it has its own version of app store (and you could download Google Play from there). Xiaomi Store app result is provided by Baidu App Store and it is compatible with Google Play, i.e. apps downloaded from Xiaomi Store is registered as downloaded in Google Play. Strangely, MI 2 also comes with a Game Center app to download games, but game is already a category in Xiaomi Store.

Right: permission management.

The almighty music app.

The phone is packed with many useful tools, such as cloud storage (MiDrive), data network monitoring, backup, permissions manager (normally requires root access!), torchlight, compass, etc. The key difference here is pre-installed, you can use these features out-of-the-box for free. However, the phone is also bundled with apps that only work in China, such as the weather app and Baidu map. Perhaps the most shocking thing to me is the native music player, particularly the online music discovery function. It relies on Baidu Music to let you search and stream songs to your device. The best part is you could actually download the songs (and lyrics). However, I wonder how would Xiaomi going to push this phone to overseas market.

Overall, I would recommend MI 2 because it is surprisingly good at its selling price. Before I end, here is the Antutu benchmark score for MI 2.

Update (28 Jan 2013): I forgot the mentioned that MI 2 supports Dolby Sound, I felt the difference in quality when I use the headphones, simply amazing. Besides, the update for the phone is fast. Within one month after I got Xiaomi phone, the UI version has been increased from 7 to 10. That means there are many optimizations and bugs fix done in a fast pace, including the English typos I mentioned earlier.