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Battery life
- You'll easily get a full day's use from a single charge
- Quick-charge 3.0 support and power-saving modes
- No wireless charging
The Mi Mix 2 comes with a 3,400mAh non-removable battery packed inside its 7.7mm-thick body. There's a 1000mAh drop down on battery size when compared to the Mi Mix, but the Mi Mix 2 still manages to impress with its stamina. It easily lasted us a day on a single charge with around 10 to 15% battery left on moderate usage.
With Xiaomi's aggressive app management enabled, the staying power of the Mi Mix 2 is astronomical, but that's largely because it throttles background processes to the point of them being almost useless – hardly ideal when you want notifications to come through instantly.
Having said that, turning off this feature doesn't cause battery levels to nosedive as you might expect and the Mi Mix 2 is still perfectly capable of getting you through a full day without any issues.
Here are some rough estimates when it comes to battery consumption:
- 20 minutes of browsing consumed 3% of battery.
- 20 minutes of video streaming consumed 5% of battery.
- 30 minutes of gaming consumed 7% of battery.
Another plus point here is the support for Quick Charge 3.0. If you are about to head out for a party and have limited time to charge your phone, a quick top-up before you leave will literally give you hours of usage.
We often plugged the phone in for what felt like a short space of time only to discover that it had charged fully and was good to go, which isn't something you can say about all smartphones with batteries over 3,000mAh.
Xiaomi bundles a Quick Charger inside the retail box, but it's not a three-point UK plug so you'll need a travel adaptor. If you have another Quick Charge-compatible charger in the house then you can try using that, but not all will work.
We used a charger from our old Google Nexus 6 and that worked fine. It should be noted also that unlike many other flagship phones in 2017, the Mi Mix 2 lacks wireless charging support.
Camera
- Rear camera takes good shots in well-lit conditions
- Front camera placement is aggravating
The Mi Mix 2 comes with a 12MP Sony IMX368 rear sensor which features HDR, face detection and 4-axis OIS (optical image stabilization). On the front, it has a 5MP camera that has been awkwardly placed at the right corner of the chin to achieve the seamless bezel-free design.
The camera software is similar to what we have seen on other MIUI-based phones and takes a lot of inspiration from Apple's software.
The interface is clean and clutter-free and it has all the necessary modes to let you play with the shutter. Xiaomi didn’t try to do anything extra with the rear camera on the Mi Mix 2, like it did with the dual-camera Mi 6. There isn't really a lot special about the camera apart from stabilization and 4K video, which is a shame.
When under a decent level of natural light, the Mi Mix 2 does a stellar job, even if you have very little knowledge of photography. It captures punchy colors with great dynamic range and is quick to focus and shoot.
In low-light conditions the 4-axis OIS aids the camera performance to a degree and the phone's dedicated low-light enhancement kicks in when needed, but image quality is sadly quite poor.
Even when you're holding the phone very still it's common to get blurry photos and there's a lot of noise in dim shots. Compared to the camera on the Pixel 2 or even last year's iPhone 7, this isn't all that impressive.
The front-facing selfie camera is oddly placed and taking a video call via a third-party app is a total mess, with many apps not compensating for you having to hold the phone upside down. The angle is very narrow, too – which is odd when you consider that the trend is for phones to have wide-angle front cameras.
All in all, the Mi Mix 2 doesn't have the photography talents to compete with the best mobile snappers in the business, but in the right conditions it can take lovely snaps.
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