Amidst the vast sea of high-end flagship smartphones, it’s difficult to imagine how a newcomer could compete. That’s why Nextbit opted to avoid the water and instead go by air with their cloud-based Robin, aimed at the upper mid-range market.

Priced at $399, the Nextbit Robin competes with the likes of Google’s Nexus 5X, the Motorola Moto X Pure Edition, and the OnePlus 2 but does it hold up against its competition?

In this review, I will guide you through the Nextbit Robin experience from the perspective of the Android enthusiast. The opinions contained within are my own, but I hope that I can paint an accurate portrayal of day-to-day use of the Nextbit Robin so that you can make an informed decision about whether or not the purchase the phone. I should note that I am coming from the perspective of a long-time Google Nexus user, so my personal observations will be colored by my experience using the Nexus line-up. Before we begin, here’s a specification sheet for you to take a quick look at:

Index

• Design, Build Quality (Page 1)
• Software – Smart Storage (Page 2)
• Software – UI, Features, Launcher, Bugs (Page 3)
• Performance – Benchmarks & Real-world UX (Page 4)
• Camera, Audio & Video, and Display (Page 5)
• Battery Life & Charging (Page 6)
• Thoughts on Development (Page 7)
• Final Thoughts & Conclusions (Page 8)

Design

Some might think it’s gaudy. Some might think it looks like a toy. Personally, I think it’s beautiful. The Nextbit Robin’s design is elegant, sleek, and an overall delight to lay eyes on.

The device sports a 5.2″ display with approximately a 69.4% screen-to-body ratio. The bezels are a bit large and the black border around the screen is definitely noticeable, but the overall design more than makes up for it. The edges of the device are sharp and the body is made up of matte plastic that is firm, but soft to the touch. The mint and midnight colors stand out from the rest of the white, black, and gold colored shells you’ll find on most other smartphones.

The volume rocker, while a bit tacky, also fits with the overall design language of the device. Sure it’s a little hard to press (and the same goes for the depressed power button) but it doesn’t feel like Nextbit had to throw these buttons into their design so people could actually use the phone. Rather, it feels like the buttons are part of the overall package. The same goes for the circular front and back cameras, the circular sensors, and the circular speaker grilles on the front. All of these stand out by providing a stark contrast with the rectangular shape of the device. Within the power button you’ll also find the fingerprint sensor, a clever place to hide the sensor but which brings with it some minor inconveniences in that you have to press the button first to activate the sensor.

On the bottom you have a tiny notification LED that’s honestly pretty easy to miss since most of us are so used to peeking at the front of the device. You also have the USB Type-C port to the left, a position I’m not a major fan of as it makes the phone unbalanced when you’ve plugged it in.

Finally, on the back you have the smart storage LED lights which light up whenever smart storage is actively archiving or restoring an app or photo. As you can see in the image, the Robin is quite easy to hold in one hand. The device measures 149mm x 72mm x 7mm and weighs in at only 150g and thanks to the sleek rectangular build you won’t be able to find any angle at which the Nextbit Robin is uncomfortable to hold. Though, if you do decide to hold it with two hands in the landscape position, you might find your thumbs hovering over the two speaker dimples, which if you’re not careful you may end up covering them up and blocking out some of the audio. Overall, though, the Nextbit Robin is one of the most aesthetically and functionally pleasing devices I’ve used in a very long time. You can view more photos of the device in our previous hand-on.

Continue to  Software – Smart Storage (Page 2)

The Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 is one of Xiaomi’s trump cards to capture the low-mid end market for 2016, being the successor of one of Xiaomi’s most popular phones, the Redmi Note. Featuring some very enticing specs at a price that is unbelievable, the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 seems to bring most of the right ingredients to become the king of the low end.

But can its real world performance do justice to its beastly specifications? Or is there a catch in this too-good-to-be-true deal? Read along as we find out if the Redmi Note 3 “Pro” can put its money where its mouth is.

Here’s a quick look at the spec sheet for the Redmi Note 3:

Contents: 

• Design, Build Quality (Page 1)
• Software UI & Features (Page 1)
• Performance & Memory (Page 2)
• Display (Page 3)
• Audio (Page 3)
• Camera (Page 3)
• Fingerprint Sensor (Page 4)
• Battery Life & Charging (Page 4)
• Rootability & Future Proofing (Page 4)
• Final Thoughts (Page 4)

Design, Build Quality

Xiaomi is no newbie in the smartphone making game, and the Redmi Note 3 is a tribute to the expertise the company has acquired over the years. Moving over the plastic builds from the Redmi Note 2, the Note 3 features a metallic build that grants it a nice heft and leaves no stone unturned in hiding away the true price of the device. No way you can say this is a cheap device, because it certainly does not look cheap.

On the face of it, the Redmi Note 3 would appear as a device sporting a metallic unibody build. The marketing materials sure do point to this as they smoothen out and make the back appear to be made of one material. But, the phone is not all metal and glass. The top and bottom ends of the Note 3 are definitely plastic, but the combination of plastic bits to the metallic back that Xiaomi went for does not easily give it away. The main metal body bears a cool, smooth finish; while the plastic has a glossy finish which is less slippery. This works in the device’s favor in two ways: one, Xiaomi has a way to incorporate the antennae needed for radio communication without resorting to plastic band lines; and two, this texture difference makes the device less slippery than an entirely flat, metallic phone would be.

Speaking of flat, the back of the Redmi Note 3 is not entirely flat. It does bear curves at the edges, and these help with the grip of the device considering that it has decent thickness to it, along with a bit of height. In my case, the curved back and rounded corner help in holding the phone, resting on the palm for one handed use.

While we are on the topic of the back of the device, the back also features the rear camera module in the center, with the dual tone LED flash placed horizontally below it. Below these, you will find the fingerprint scanner inset significantly, making it very easy to find without looking at the back. In comparison, the camera module lense as well as the glass on the LED flash are flush with the back, making them vulnerable to scratches. On the bottom end of the back, you will find the Mi logo, along with some self-declaration to comply with Indian government rules. Below this, you will find a drilled grill pattern of which the middle 50% open up to the speaker on the inside.

There is also a tiny obtrusion just below the speakers, on the plastic bottom cap. Xiaomi mentioned that this was intentionally placed so that the speakers are not muffled when you place your phone on the back, but in my experience, the device did not show any noticeable gap between the phone and any flat surface because of this lip. It’s barely there, and it does not make any difference, positive or negative. Fortunately, it also does not cause any rocking of the device in any direction.

At first glance, you see a black slab of glass…

Unlike the back, the front bears a very minimalistic look. You get the speaker grill deep inset on the top, along with the ambient light and proximity sensor beside it and the front camera and notification LED following it along. The 5.5″ FHD LCD display sits in the middle, and three backlit capacitive buttons are below it. You can remap these to a certain degree for other actions, so you get some choice in the matter even though you can’t disable them entirely in lieu of the navigation bar. The front is so clean, you see only see a black slab of glass in the first glance. Focus, and then you can make out the various elements. I really like such a super clean and smooth look for my devices, but your subjective opinion may differ and that is alright.

Interestingly, the Dark Grey color of the Redmi Note 3 does not bear the black border bezel around the display, since the entire front of the device is black. This gives a very uniform color and a clean, distraction-free look to the device that I really appreciate. Bezels are necessary, I get it, but it is the choice of coloring which decides if it becomes a distraction or something you’d never notice. In contrast, the Silver and the Gold color variants have matching colored front, but with the black bezel border around them. If these are a distraction to you, I would suggest to opt for the Dark Grey color variant which has an all-black front.

Moving on to the sides of the device, you get the microphone hole and the headphone jack on the top left and the IR blaster on the top right. The left side bears only the slot for the hybrid SIM + micro SD card combination, and is otherwise devoid of any buttons or marking. The bottom side bears the primary microphone hole and the micro USB connector on the left (and not on the middle, as a lot of phones tend to go for). The right side of the device gets the volume rockers towards the top and the power button below it. These have the same texture as the rest of the metal back, so you may occasionally have an issue hitting the correct button in the first try. Otherwise, these are good stiff with a sufficient press and have absolutely no wiggle or sideways travel to them.

Before we move on, the box contents of the Redmi Note 3 are very minimal. You get a standard USB to micro USB data cable, a power adapter rated at 5V/2A of output, a SIM removal tool and some documentation. An important message in the documentation, relating to the SIM slots, is that the Redmi Note 3 does not support dual-4G. If one SIM has 4G/3G/2G, the second SIM will only be restricted to 2G. Also to mention, the Redmi Note 3 does not have NFC in it.

For its dimensions, the Redmi Note 3 has a very typical setup as you come to see in 5.5″ phones. The phone is a tad bit smaller than the OnePlus One, and is almost as thick. But the Redmi Note 3 bears a larger battery, an improvement of over 1,000 mAh in pure capacity as compared to the OnePlus One. As a result, it feels more dense and heavy even though the phone is just 2 grams heavier than the OnePlus One. The curves on the phone make it feel more smaller than the difference in pure dimensions, and the Redmi Note 3 can be used one-handed better than the OnePlus One.

The Redmi Note 3 is one of the best built phones I have owned. Holding the phone, you certainly do not feel as if this is a $150 phone. It kills all the other devices in my collection, considering how much this phone retails for. With a weight of 164 grams, the Redmi Note 3 is a tad bit heavier than the OnePlus One (162 grams), but bears slightly smaller device dimensions overall and a 33% increase in battery capacity. As a result, the Redmi Note 3 feels really solid in the hand, but not blocky either due to its curved side profile. There is no creaking or noticeable bending, no noticeable gaps, no other hardware issues. It’s just a well built phone altogether, a rarity for phones from Chinese manufacturers (although our review unit was manufactured in India as part of Xiaomi and the Indian government’s “Make in India” initiatives).

The Redmi Note 3 has an air of confidence to it. You can hold the phone without a case and not be terrified of dropping it. It is not a “tough” phone, but it certainly has that air to it. It is slightly slippery as smooth finish metal phones tend to be, but I haven’t had any incidents of it slipping out of my hand or off the table or any slight incline. Overall, I am very satisfied with the package Xiaomi has put together in terms of build quality and design and have no significant complaints.

Software UI & Features

The Redmi Note 3 bears MIUI 7.2.3.0 based on Android 5.1.1 Lollipop. We have done an extensive, comprehensive review of MIUI 7 on the Redmi Note 3, so check that out!

I did find some smaller annoyances after the review section. Mainly, I could not find any setting to turn off Android’s Spell Checker, and that the brightness slider compulsorily needs the finger to be at the current level before the slider can be dragged, which can be difficult to do when you can’t see what is on the screen.

Continue to Page 2 — Performance

HTC has had a rough year, leaving the company desperately needing to prove its worth to both its old followers and general audiences. The HTC 10 thus comes at a breaking point for the smartphone legend, and it’s clear that they are trying to grab your interest and secure your pocket.

But among all of its competitors, can the HTC 10 be as brilliant as they come?

In this review, we’ll take an in-depth dive into the HTC 10. Rather than listing specs and talking about how the experience felt, this feature attempts to provide a thorough look with contents relevant to our reader base. At XDA, our reviews are not meant to tell a user whether a phone is worth buying or not — instead, we try to lend you the phone through our words and help you come to the decision by yourself. Before getting started, let’s get the specification sheet out of the way:

 Index

• Design
• Software – UI
• Software – Features & UX
• Performance
• CPU & System
• GPU & Gaming
• Memory & Storage
• Real World UX
• Camera
• Display
• Battery Life
• Audio
• Development & Future Proofing
• Final Thoughts & Conclusion

Design

While last year’s M9 was criticized for not spicing up the traditional HTC design, and specifically for looking too much like its predecessor (to the point where HTC itself confused them), the 10 strays from that comfort zone and spices up some design elements, while still looking very much “HTC”. Both the front and the back feature a “different” design with some stand-out accents that make for much of the HTC 10’s personality.

The back of the HTC 10 is perhaps the most iconic new aspect of this phone’s design, specifically because of its arguably-oversized chamfers. These are wide and shiny, and accentuate what would otherwise be a much duller back. Most importantly, though, they serve as a distraction for the increased thickness of this phone, which now feels much beefier without feeling heavy. These edges shine beautifully against all sorts of light, and combined with the very subtle curve of the actual back, make the phone easier to hold. The in-hand fit of the HTC 10 is pretty good for a phone with such thickness, and it’s plain comfortable as well.

The back also houses an HTC logo that’s not painted on top of the metal, so there is no fear of it wearing out over time like on other phones. Then you will find the flash and laser autofocus, and the camera which does protrude a couple of millimeters, but given it is centered there is no rocking when on a flat surface, and while the camera sensor is protected by being on a slight depression, it’s also coated with sapphire glass that’s less prone to scratches. Because of this, the protrusion arguably helps the phone’s durability as scratching the bare aluminum can lead to some annoying scars on the phone. In turn, this adds some slight durability to your metal phone’s back, as well as the camera sensor.

The sides of the phone are rather thin without accounting for the edge, and host a volume rocker and power button on the right side, and then one SIM tray on each side, one of which also doubles as a microSD slot. Something I noticed from the moment I loaded up my microSD and SIM cards is that these SIM trays don’t sit completely flush with the rest of the edge. Indeed, my unit has the trays either sticking out, or depressed a millimeter inside the body. I can also push the tray sticking out in order to sink it in, but at no point does this affect functionality, and other units we’ve tested haven’t had this issue.

The volume rocker and power button are both extremely clicky, and the power buttons’ ribbed texture meant I had no trouble adapting to the new layout. The tactile feedback is thus phenomenal, but while the buttons feel great to push, the volume rocker surprisingly rocks a tiny bit, sometimes making an audible click. Getting these buttons to feel entirely solid is a hard task and I wouldn’t hold it against HTC, however — I recognize I am very picky with buttons. Over all these are very good and in a good layout for the size, with your thumb lying almost entirely on the volume keys making them comfortable to access.

There are a lot of plasticky antennae bands going around on this phone, but none are distracting from the design. The segment at the top doesn’t stick out to the eye as the centered 3mm headphone jack takes the attention away from it; the hole is only centered on one axis, however, and it carves into the back edge of the phone, but with no tactile repercussions unlike, for example, the sharp headphone jack of the Nexus 5X. The USB Type C port sits at the bottom in-between a microphone on the left and a speaker grill on the right, which compliments the speaker piece at the top of the front. We’ll go deeper into how these speaker synergise and whether the placement means better sound output later on in the review.

The capacitive back and recents keys sit at the same height as the fingerprint sensor, giving ample room between their input surface (which is rather constrained) and the screen, meaning very few accidental bottom-screen presses. The bezels on the HTC 10 are quite large, with the sides hosting thick edges due to both the black frame and the metal edge. It has similar all-around dimensions to the Nexus 5X, but I’d argue it fits better in the hand and that it feels much sturdier (because it is). Finally, there is a slight edge-curve to the glass wrapping the display that also catches light in interesting ways.

I would not call this design innovative, but it hits the right notes to update the design and still look like an HTC phone

In summary, the HTC 10 has a masterful design with well-executed hardware. The construction feels top notch, and one only needs to hold this phone to tell that it is extremely beefy and sturdy. Unlike other aluminum phones, the HTC 10 is unlikely to bend in any way, and the metal has endured our 2.5 weeks of daily-driving and testing very well. HTC has managed to produce a design that is both familiar and fresh, with its over-accentuated chamfers stealing the show by being not only functional but also helping masquerade the increase in thickness, and making it look different to boot. I would not call this design innovative, but it hits the right notes to update the design and still look like an HTC phone that properly pushes their traditional design language forward.

Software — User Interface

HTC Sense has long-been considered one of the sleekest OEM skins in terms of aesthetic design. The new and plain “Sense” in the HTC 10 is very similar to that which we saw on the HTC One A9, which debuted on Marshmallow as well, and it brings a similar experience to what Sense has always offered, but without the most consistent implementation with Google’s vision for Android. After some healthy stripping-down, HTC created a very pleasant UI.

Sense has been thoroughly cleaned of clutter, and with the A9, HTC opted for less-aggressive changes (which in turn would mean updates would be easier to implement as well). HTC sense, thus, feels more like a re-skin than a re-structure of Stock Android, but not one without glaring consistency issues. For example, the icons for “wi-fi” are different in the toggles, the toggle’s expanded wifi menu (which remains material), the status bar itself and the actual wi-fi settings. The battery icon in the status bar also doesn’t align with the other items, which looks and feels slightly unpolished. There is also no battery indicator/shortcut in the Quick Toggles, a decision that might ire those who use it frequently.

Make up your mind, will you!?

Luckily, themes can change the status bar icons in order to address part of this. And nitpicking aside, the UI is ultimately very reserved with a Stock Android color palette that will ease the transition for Android purists. Alert boxes and other prompts do look oddly out of place (and are also inconsistent, with some being left unchanged), but the UI is ultimately rather lightweight. The suite of HTC apps also look clean, with solid colors and some material elements, although with less apparent depth and shadowing. Some of these apps’ color can also be customized, which is neat for those aiming at a specific theme consistency.

You can also quickly re-order the app-drawer with a custom order (drag and drop), alphabetical and recent. Another addition of the launcher is HTC’s touted “freestyle” configuration of colorful landscapes and stickers. There are many options to choose from on the freestyle theme store, but you can design your own as well.

A few design decisions stuck out to me during my testing period. For one, the default text size was too large at first, but you can easily adjust it in the settings (I suggest “small”!). HTC also opted once more to selectively remove certain animations, perhaps in an attempt to make the phone feel different or faster. An example would be that returning to the launcher does not have an animation, only launching and switching apps, and this specific transition is very fast. But the recents menu’s animation is still slow to trigger and operate, so I suggest lowering the animation speed to make the system feel not just faster, but more consistent (the animation options are hidden inside a menu inside of developer options).

Many familiar Android UI elements remain mostly unchanged, like the multi-tasking menu which includes a “clear all” button at the bottom, and the toggles setup (although HTC made some changes, like including a calculator shortcut “toggle”). HTC’s lockscreen is also uncluttered, with the quick-access apps (docked apps by default) sitting at the bottom waiting for you to slide them up.

Delving into the settings lets you turn off “interest-based ads” in HTC Sense — if you get the phone, I suggest making sure that these are disabled. You can also personalize the phone with themes, including color layouts and fonts, but colors don’t stretch onto some system UI elements like the notification panel. The default keyboard’s color can also be customized, and overall Sense gives you plenty to play with and tweak. It’s still a shame that you can’t tweak the colors of various key UI elements, but as far as customization goes, it ranks as one of the more-tweakable OEM skins out there, even if it’s not the deepest.

Overall, Sense is a neat UI that does not impair the user experience in any way. As we’ll see in the sections below, it is relatively lightweight and its speed compliments its UI design (in a way, the experience is designed to feel fast as well). HTC has consistently offered a reserved, and perhaps even mature, alternative in comparison to those of other OEMs. As far as design goes, Sense could use some polishing to achieve better consistency, and its theming is nowhere near as deep as that of other software alternatives. Nevertheless, it is somewhat extensive, and it gives the user enough flexibility to make the phone his own.

Software — Features & UX

Past customization, HTC sense offers a healthy (and by that I mean reserved) set of extra features, some of which are tried-and-true while others are neat little surprises HTC decided to pack in.

First of all, let’s get the bloat out of the way: luckily, there is not much in the way of pre-installed applications in the HTC 10. This phone comes with over 23GB of storage open to the user upon the first boot, with duplicate apps kept to a minimum and some third-party apps bundled in, most of which are not offensive to the general user. Among the bundled applications, we have News Republic, Facebook & Facebook Messenger, Instagram, a standard set of Google apps, and a few HTC tools including Boost+ (a junk cleaner that can also lock applications and “boost game battery life” by lowering resolution –trash, basically), a flashlight app (why?), a weather app and a surprisingly helpful Help app.

The Help app let’s you access “troubleshooting” tools, which include answers to common problems as well as their probable cause according to the current phone status, hardware diagnostic tests so that you can see if anything is faulty on your device (as well as quick shortcuts to various menus), and the option to call HTC. There are also some helpful manuals and a button to check for software updates. I don’t normally care for applications like this, nor would I likely use it, but it’s one of the more polished and helpful apps an OEM could pack for the general (and often clueless) consumer. While many at XDA might find little use for it, just remember it has quick hardware checks that might come handy in the future.

The lack of clutter and gimmicks puts Android itself is at the front and center

As far as applications go, there is not much else. By default, you will find Google Calendar, HTC’s Mail app as well as Gmail, Google Photos for the gallery, the HTC Clock app, Chrome, Messages, and the HTC dialer. There are very few apps that share the same purpose, and HTC managed to pick the one that works the best and makes the most sense. Going into the individual HTC apps, we can find a very neat and tidy Phonebook with every feature you’d expect, and an extremely simple messaging app. Both are quick and easy to use.

The default launcher in the HTC 10 has Blinkfeed – a News reader – in its leftmost page. The service has been around for a few iterations now and not much has changed. It’s still useful, but I suspect much of our audience will swap out the launcher altogether.

A returning fan-favorite is double-tap-to-wake as well as other screen-wake gestures. You double tap to wake & sleep, swipe up to unlock, swipe left to go home, swipe right to launch Blinkfeed or swipe down twice to open the Camera (perhaps the most useful gesture). You can also allow apps to recognize 3-finger output gestures for media controls, linked with HTC Connect to play media on various services and devices (Airplay, AllPlay, Blackfire, Bluetooth Speakers, Chromecast and Miracast).

The fingerprint sensor of the HTC 10 is well-integrated and will satisfy any user when it comes to speed and responsiveness. While many might be against the idea of placing it at the front, the device’s dimensions don’t make the scanner too hard to reach without re-adjusting the hand. If you have average-sized hands, you won’t be doing much hand gymnastics with the HTC 10 at all, and that includes the fingerprint scanner.

There is really not much else in the way of features for this latest version of Sense, and stripping down the least-favorite components undoubtedly makes for a cleaner experience. Many of HTC’s services can be downloaded from the Play Store and are updated independently, like Zoe and other staples of the series. What’s in there is useful, though, and various features I have omitted from discussing as they are mentioned in other sections.

Overall, Sense offers mostly-thoughtful little additions that one can opt out of using without being pestered by them. The lack of clutter and gimmicks means that Android is at the front and center when using the HTC 10, and that’s a great thing. Too often we see OEMs pack their software with useless gimmicks, many of which are hidden behind nonsensical menus. Those looking for a toned-down system will find solace on HTC’s latest Sense.

Performance

The Snapdragon 820 SoC in the HTC 10 comes to amend the issues that last year’s Snapdragon 810 brought upon its predecessor. HTC’s last flagship went under the spotlight for being one of the first devices brandishing the controversial chipset, but with a new beginning and a fresh architecture, there is nothing tying the HTC 10 to the M9’s performance failure. The 14nm Snapdragon 820 sees a smaller, more efficient (FinFET) process size and Qualcomm’s Kryo CPU cores, as opposed to last year’s “off-the-shelf” ARM Cortex A57/A53 design, and a more powerful GPU with the introduction of the Adreno 530 GPU. We’ve detailed the Snapdragon 820’s hardware before, as well as its relative performance in the Galaxy S7 Edge. How does the Snapdragon 820 in the HTC 10 fare?

CPU & System

The 14nm Snapdragon 820 features a 2×2 CPU configuration, with two Kryo cores clocked at 2.15GHz and another two in an efficiency-centered cluster clocked at 1.6GHz. As we’ll see below, the lower number of cores does not translate to a net loss in performance (and nobody should have assumed it would), and the single-core performance of the Snapdragon 820 is excellent, with multi-core performance not managing to beat every competing smartphone chipset, but remaining in the upper-tier nonetheless.

Running the Snapdragon 820 through our usual set of tests puts it at the top single-core performance in GeekBench only second to the iPhone 6s, yet below the Kirin 955 P90 and the Exynos variant of the Galaxy S7 in multi-core results. The AnTuTu 6 benchmark, more comprehensive as far as components go, tops the chart, making for one of the highest-scoring Android smartphone we’ve seen so far. BaseMark, a more holistic test, puts the HTC 10 below other Snapdragon 820 devices and the Galaxy S7, but above the rest of Android smartphones. PCMark, another holistic test more commensurable with real-world results, puts the HTC 10 in a very good place too as seen in the graphs.

Performance-over-time sample, as well as an example of heat distribution throughout the HTC 10’s body.

As far as CPU throttling goes, when running these tests repeatedly we do find a decrease in performance, albeit this drop is more linear than the clearly-stratified drops we sometimes saw on Snapdragon 810 devices. The throttling going on with the HTC 10’s CPU is less aggressive, but we saw close to 15% drop in scores in various CPU-centric tests and metrics after numerous consecutive tests. These tests did not really increase temperature to the point where operating the device would become uncomfortable, though, with Geekbench topping at 38 degrees C in room-temperature. As far as app performance goes, the HTC 10 is one of the fastest devices we’ve tested, and general UI navigation does not suffer substantially while the CPU is very slightly throttled. As we’ll see in further sections, outside heat sources can seemingly affect the HTC 10 more than any CPU load we’ve put on it.

GPU & Gaming

The Adreno 530 GPU is one of the stand-out points of the HTC 10’s specification sheet. As we’ve seen before, the scores you can obtain on this mobile GPU are fantastic, and it once again puts the Snapdragon 820 at the top of the game when it comes to GPU performance. In most instances, you can expect the resulting performance to be as good as or better than anything else on the market, but the decision to upgrade the screen resolution means that devices with 1080p screens and the same chipset will see an advantage in graphics performance. You can find such example with the Xioami Mi5 (Snapdragon 820 and 1080p display) achieving significantly better performance than the HTC 10 and other Snapdragon 820 devices in on-screen tests. It’s also worth noting that, just like we found in the Galaxy S7 Snapdragon 820, this device sees higher throttling on GPU benchmarks (same behavior we observed in the S7 Edge) than it does on CPU benchmarks, over 30% after many consecutive GFXBench tests.

These large differences disappear in off-screen tests, where the HTC 10 leads in graphics performance. Non-Snapdragon chipsets have taken a particular beating this generation, with the latest Kirin chipsets offering measurably less performance than the Snapdragon 820 in the HTC 10 (more comparable to a Snapdragon 805’s and 808’s).

Consecutive GFXBench Manhattan tests can lower performance quite dramatically.

These differences and also throttling, surprisingly, somewhat diminish when looking at actual gaming, where the HTC 10 does a fine yet unspectacular job compared to previous devices we’ve reviewed at XDA (all games at highest possible settings).

Asphalt 8, for example, fluctuates between 30 and 55 frames per second with a resulting average above the usual 30 frames per second lock some (and not all) devices experience. Dead Trigger 2 saw an average of 34 frames per second, somewhat close to the 40 frames per second achieved on 1080p Snapdragon 810 devices — it’s safe to say that the resolution plays a big factor here. GTA: SA, one of the more taxing games you can find on mobile, had a resulting 28 frames per second on average (in a couple of instances, the framerate average of the session dipped below 27 FPS, but 29 FPS samples were common too). This is one of the highest averages we’ve found on a prolonged session of GTA: SA, showing the prowess of the Snapdragon 820.

A very positive aspect I found during testing the HTC 10 for gaming is lessened throttling. Across multiple 5, 10 and 15 minute tests of the aforementioned games, performance remained mostly good and there was no sharp or clear drop in CPU nor GPU activity, albeit the framerates did fluctuate more than in other devices in some games, and the fluctuation slightly increases over time. The averages remained high, however, and outside temperature of the device didn’t reach 41° C while gaming, at which point I personally consider phones to begin feeling uncomfortable. For reference, the OnePlus 2 and other 810 devices went past this mark during the same level of intense usage. While the performance is not as consistent as some Samsung Exynos phones, the results are stellar even after scores and framerates begin getting lower. Long sessions of benchmarks such as GFXBench’s battery benchmark test still show significant score drops (over 30% as show above) after over 30 minutes, and gaming sessions longer than 15 minutes will likely lead to more framerate drops — so I still recommend you are cautious in your usage.

RAM & Storage

The 4GB of DDR4 RAM found in the HTC 10 surpass the setup in the One M9 in both capacity and speed, and so far we have not tested smartphones sporting more RAM than this, although we know they are coming. While we will see 6GB RAM devices soon and later this year, the HTC 10 will remain future proof in part due to the sheer efficiency at which it utilizes its RAM. While other devices are notorious for holding less apps than their spec sheet suggests, the HTC 10 has no issue of the sort. The real-world demonstration below will serve as an example.

Storage performance on the HTC 10 outputs around 250.5MB/s in sequential read tests (higher than the M9’s ~160MB/s), and 103.5MB/s in sequential write tests (higher than the M9’s 33MB/s). Random read (30MB/s) and random write (15.5MB/s) are both higher than last year M9’s and close to the average Android smartphone’s.

While these numbers are lower than the current storage king’s (Galaxy S7/Edge), they are very similar to much of the competition’s barring the LG G5. You won’t find the storage in the HTC 10 holding you back, and it’s also worth noting the expandable storage found in this phone benefits from one of the fastest slots available, allowing you to add over 200GB of goodness.

Real World UX

The HTC 10’s Snapdragon 820 shows its prowess in the theoretical tests, where it scores above most Android devices to date. But as we all know, benchmarks don’t necessarily translate to real-world performance. HTC phones like the M8 have gotten praise for their snappy responsiveness, as the company had even attained some of the best touch latency in Android at the time as well. Part of the performance’s strength has traditionally come from Sense being a relatively-lightweight piece of software with design decisions that amplify the perceived responsiveness. With that out of the way, how does the HTC 10 perform in day-to-day operations?

Knowing that no odd service is bogging down your performance or affecting your battery life is one of the highlights of Sense’s lightweight experience.

Out of the box, it was hard for me to not notice that the HTC 10 was quite zippy. As far as app opening goes, and as mentioned above, it’s one of the fastest – if not the fastest – phone we’ve tested. This speed is complemented by a solid multi-tasking experience that’s above the average 4GB phone’s. That being said, it’d be unfair for me not to point out that the HTC 10’s animations are set to be faster than the average phone’s by default, and that many transitions (such as returning to the Launcher) are removed to give the UI an artificial sense of speed. This isn’t bad at all, but it has not been applied across the board, so you will likely want to change window transitions to make the multi-tasking menu and other animations speed up to par.

The HTC 10 is very good at handling scrolling lists as well, and performance is smooth — noticeable micro-janks are few and far between, making scrolling janks mostly imperceptible. You will rarely find delay while operating an application, and the 10 doesn’t keep you waiting. But this is during normal conditions only: while the HTC 10 does not get too hot from regular usage, it does seem to catch a lot more heat from outside temperature and sun than other devices (likely because of the metal body).

As a result, using the HTC 10 in high-temperature environments can make this device severely underperform, as seen in the example below. We’ve seen this effect across multiple areas in multiple hot regions including Florida, Minnesota (hey, it’s Summer) and Iowa. It is by no means a deal-breaker, but it has been a hassle to us at XDA as it undermines what’s otherwise a very good performer.

CPU usage/profiling applications like Trepn show very close to no CPU usage by undesired background processes during normal operation, an issue that we found on some more-bloated devices from Samsung and company. The clutter-cleaning that the HTC 10 underwent shows when you look at the CPU cycle consumption of background apps as well as memory usage (now easily accessible in the settings). Knowing that no odd service is bogging down your performance or affecting your battery life while using the phone for daily tasks is one of the highlights of Sense’s lightweight experience.

Some of the design decisions clearly aid achieving this goal, but much of it has to do with the remarkably small amount of background processes and the toned-down nature of Sense. Those factors allow the Snapdragon 820 to shine, as well as the below-average touch latency of the HTC 10, but at the same time users should be way that this device can get uncomfortably hot during warm seasons and in warm regions of the globe, and in turn, performance takes a dramatic hit.

Camera

The 12 MP sensor in the HTC 10’s camera follows the recent trend through which OEMs opt for lower MP counts, yet focus on aperture and pixel size to maximize important aspects such as low-light performance. With HTC’s “ultrapixel” technology back at the helm, and with optical image stabilization (in the front camera, too!) on top of Laser Autofocus, one would expect the HTC 10 to perform excellently. While the DxOMark score it received puts it neck-and-neck with giants like the Galaxy S7, our testing and comparisons gave us results which we consider below the best Android has to offer, but excellent nonetheless.

The HTC 10’s pictures are notably less saturated than those coming from many competitors, including Samsung’s. The colors look very good and natural in most pictures, making for “true to life” picture memories. Despite the laser autofocus, the camera is not particularly fast to focus (and it can have a particularly hard time to focus during video, on both cameras), and it’s also not particularly fast to launch either. In the video below you can find a sample of what the user experience is like on the HTC 10’s default camera app.

Note the way the device handles changes in focus points, and exposure adjustments (rather well if you assk me). Pictures can take more than you’d expect to process — if you are used to snapping and going on with your usage, make sure to wait until the picture appears in the gallery at the corner. Not doing so might result in you not keeping your picture — incredibly frustrating when you want quick snaps!

Exposure is well-handled with somewhat of a tendency to whiten the picture, making for the occasional white-washed photo or selfie. The camera can focus at rather close distances, and while it doesn’t frequently get stuck trying to focus, when it does this process might last longer than usual. Another small issue I found is that it’s very easy to cover the laser autofocus, and every time it happens (often when launching the camera) the message informing you so stays for a second or two and blocks your viewfinder. That being said, the pictures the HTC 10 outputs vary from good to excellent, with very few pictures in regular to good lightning needing to be scrapped. I found myself able to trust this camera.

Moving over to low lighting, though, and the story is different. While HTC has arguably been one of the first to really focus on low-light shots with its ultrapixel technology, and while the camera hardware inside the 10 suggests it’d be stellar in these scenarios, the results ultimately disappointed me (perhaps because of the hype behind it). Both selfies and rear-camera shots seem to often be mishandled by post-processing, which can give the picture a really unrealistic look in exchange for some extra visibility (clear example being the wine above). Detail, too, is often lost in the process, and the results are particularly underwhelming when compared to the Nexus 6P, running slightly lesser hardware and Google’s software camera software, yet managing to retain more detail.

The pictures can look pretty good regardless, but I personally expect more out of the 10 in this context. I do wish that it could present some finer detail in general, as grass and other objects can become rather mushy. The composition of the picture, however, is very good in most cases, and those looking for natural-looking pictures might even prefer it over the S7’s.

When it comes to video, the phone comes packed with various standard modes including the popular slow-motion and the tried-and-true 30FPS 4K and 30FPS 1080p. The slow-motion videos are about what’d you would expect and in line with competitors, while the 4K video recording can output some excellent detail, with some decent focusing up-close (as shown in the example). The front-facing camera had the most trouble keeping focus while selfie-recording and walking, which is surprising given its specifications.

In summary, the HTC 10’s camera is well-equipped in terms of hardware and it also packs decent camera software, both combining to make for a very solid shooter. I do think that HTC still has problems to tackle with its image post-processing, an issue they failed to nail in previous devices (I’ve even had pictures come out with odd artifacts). An early software update did improve things, as previous software updates on the M9 did, so we might see the resulting package evolve over time.  There are some nice manual control options as well as RAW shooting for those wanting to get the most out of the hardware, though, and in every other respect, the HTC 10 does hold up against competitors.  

Display

HTC’s Super LCD panel continues the trend of excellence on HTC phones. While AMOLED is increasingly becoming one of the most popular choices for many manufacturers, the HTC 10 managed to prove once more that LCD technology can still hold its own. This is a 1440p panel with a pixel density of 565 (one of the highest pixel densities virtue of the fact that this is “only” a 5.2 inch screen). Going into the various parameters we’ll find that HTC has managed to include a very pleasant display in this device without having to resort to AMOLED as they did on their One A9.

First, let’s start with the not-so-great: brightness on the HTC 10’s display is well-below the output of both Samsung’s latest AMOLED panels, and also the LCD technology featured in the LG G5. That being said, it’s still readable under sunlight and the auto-brightness experience has been satisfactory too. The backlight in the HTC 10 is very evenly distributed and none of our tested units have shown any sort of light-bleed. Another low-point is that the screen cannot get very dim either, something I found very detrimental when operating the phone in pitch-black environments.

Something that greatly enhances the reading experience on the HTC 10 – particularly outdoors – is its excellent contrast ratio, definitely one of the best LCD display has to offer. This display also offers very good black levels (some of the best we’ve seen, too, and even better than the LG G5’s judging from experience) and this slightly makes up for the dim brightness when operating the phone in the dark.

The HTC 10 comes with two color profiles on stock software, Vivid and sRGB. The former (and as its name implies) offers a more saturated look with greens and blues being accentuated, with a higher coverage of color space. The vivid mode is also colder than sRGB, but luckily you can tweak the screen’s temperature to get the kind of whites you are most content with. The sRGB mode is fairly color-accurate and very similar to the sRGB/Basic mode of latest-gen AMOLED displays

I can’t say I have had anything short of a great viewing experience with the HTC 10. You might find yourself wishing for an extra hair of brightness, or that you could dim the display some more, but excluding that, this is one of the best displays outside of AMOLED. With deep blacks levels, excellent contrast and neat customization options, you will be hard pressed to find a better LCD panel on a smartphone, especially non-LG flagships. The black bezels of the 10 and the slightly-curved glass further accentuate this fantastic panel, and from our tests detailed in the battery section of this review, it’s also not a battery hog (more below).

Battery Life & Charging

It’s not rare to see 3,000mAh batteries on sub 5.5-inch smartphones nowadays, and the HTC 10 thus stands with a middle-of-the-road battery package. While many would initially assume that its standard battery size would bring standard battery life, the Snapdragon 820 inside the HTC 10 promises improved efficiency that should translate to better results over last generation’s chipsets. This is particularly important given the Snapdragon 810 specifically offered less battery efficiency than Samsung’s Exynos 7420. We put the Snapdragon 820 through both battery benchmarks and real-world usage, and here’s how it fared:

As you can see from the scores above, the HTC 10 manages an impressive score on PC Mark, competing with devices such as the Galaxy S7 and last year’s Note 5, as well as A53-based devices that understandably score rather well on these tests. The resulting battery life is above last year’s Snapdragon 810 devices, but also below Qualcomm’s own 2016 Snapdragon 650 featured in the Redmi Note 3 — understandable given the A53 core arrangement inside it. When put into context, the HTC 10 fares very well. Most interestingly, we ran this test at lowest, medium and maximum brightness to assess the effect of screen brightness on the test; the differences are lower than what other devices with LCD panels like the OnePlus 2 and the Honor 5X have shown us, suggesting that the HTC 10’s screen is not one of the biggest power-sippers here

Indeed, during regular usage, we didn’t always find the screen as the top drainer. A normal day for me has had the HTC 10 last about 3 to 4.5 hours depending on my usage and location. My typical usage pattern involves at least an hour of Youtube, Hangouts throughout the entire day, some document editing on Google Docs and through Google Chrome, light puzzle gaming, music, and around 30 minutes of GPS. By my standards as judged on other phones, the HTC is just average — it offered me less screen-on-time than the Note5, Nexus 6P, and Honor 5X, but usually more than the OnePlus 2 and others.

Luckily, standby time on the HTC 10 is decent with about 0.8% to 1% drain per hour while idling without Doze. Overnight drain has been minimal for me. As for the examples above, keep in mind that I am also a heavy LTE user, so most of my screen time in any given day is while on LTE.

Charging on the HTC 10 is, in theory, as good as it gets given it comes with Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 3.0 standard. While it is indeed very fast, I have not found it to be as much as an advantage as Qualcomm pretended it would be.

The HTC 10 charges from 0 to full in around 1 hour and 25 to 30 minutes, with the bulk of the charging speed residing in the first 80 percentage points of battery capacity. Do mind that Quick Charge 3.0 is technically not compliant with the USB Type C specification, but nonetheless you shouldn’t expect to see any issues with the included or official chargers through regular usage.

One last thing that I want to note is that I did not use battery-saving modes throughout my testing. That being said, on top of the default battery-saving mode you do have an Extreme Battery Saving mode, similar to what you find on most other flagships today. If you really need your phone to last for important reasons, these features can be a life-saver.

Overall, the HTC 10’s battery life stood out as one of the more mediocre aspects of this device. While I can safely say it provides enough battery life for a casual user, I have found myself worrying about finding an outlet more than I wish while daily driving this device. It’s surprising to see that the resulting battery life is not as good as battery benchmarks suggest it is — perhaps it’s time to find better standardized testing methods for 2016 devices, or perhaps the device simply doesn’t handle real-world operations with the same grace. Whatever the case, battery life can be satisfactory, but just about there for someone focused on heavy usage. The included examples should provide you a rough idea of my user patterns and results.

Audio

The speakers on the HTC One series of flagship phones have been some of the best to ever grace Android, and also helped popularize front-facing speakers in other phones. With the One A9, HTC moved away from the front-facing speaker setup that netted it good fame, but the HTC 10 aims to provide substantial speaker quality once more, as well as an outstanding headphone experience. While it succeeds in the latter, the new implementation of HTC speakers misses some targets in its approach and execution that every front-facing speaker lover should be aware about.

Speaker Samples (Maximum volume, same distance from Blue Yeti Microphone)

The 10 has a front-facing speaker located where the earpiece speaker typically is, and a bottom-firing speaker as well. Long gone are the duo front-facing speakers, but HTC has nonetheless stood for this implementation by claiming that each speaker has its strengths, with the top speaker focusing on treble-heavy playback while the bottom one on bass. I can vouch for each speaker doing what HTC does — the bottom speaker has a good amount of bass to it, while the top speaker does seem to focus on treble, but only because it doesn’t play much bass at all.

Microphone Samples (Same distance from speakers, HTC 10 followed by Nexus 6P)

This is where the differences begin playing against the HTC 10. These are asymmetric speakers in both orientation and sound quality, meaning that the same song or movie might sound completely different depending on the speaker it is being played through, depending on the properties of said media. This is a problem that’s further amplified by the fact that, while each speaker has a “designated specialty”, it’s still stereo output, meaning that a sound coming from your left will sound different once it passes onto the right speaker. Another issue with the implementation is that the orientation does not help this asymmetry, but this is only an issue on landscape mode — if you are using the sound on portrait, but of your ears should pick up the same sound at the same volume.

Going past these structural issues, the phone’s speaker quality is actually really good. When tested against other flagships, it comes ahead of every other speaker-focused device in terms of clarity, with the exception of the HTC M9. While the sound on the HTC 10 is very clear, though, it’s not very loud — the Nexus 6P and previous HTC phone managed to get much, much louder than this device, making them much better audio playback whilst the phone is not in close proximity. The good news is that the HTC 10 does not distort sound throughout volume increases, but phones that do can play audio at around the same volume as the HTC 10 and be well under the point where said distortion becomes an issue.

Onto the headphones, I believe that you’ll be hard-pressed to find a better headphone experience than on the HTC 10. The discrete 24-bit DAC is noticeably better than any chipset’s built-in solution that we’ve tried, and also better than Samsung’s generally-excellent DACs. If you have a good pair of headphones and a decent FLAC library, the HTC 10 will not disappoint you. The Boomsound software also helps in this regard by providing you with different audio profiles, which make much more of a difference through the headphones than they do on the speakers.

Finally, call quality has been very enjoyable, including wi-fi calling. The top speaker being more fleshed-out than the average earpiece definitely helps the HTC 10 achieve excellent call quality.

Future Proofing & Development

HTC phones and XDA go way back, with a long history of unforgettable XDA experiences. As far as development goes, the HTC 10 has many incentives going for it. For one, HTC is much more open to development than other companies. While unlocking the bootloader is not as easy as it is on a Nexus, HTC provides unlock keys at their HTCDev website (works with T-Mobile HTC 10) through a short, 5 to 10 minute procedure. Alternatively, you can use Sunshine to turn your phone into a dev phone, without wiping your data (S-OFF/unlock/root also available for the Verizon HTC 10, in case you are stuck with Big Red). The unlockable bootloader is not the only thing the 10 has going for it, though:

Not only do you no longer need a developer edition phone for flashing goodness, but now, HTC’s warranty will cover your phone even if your bootloader is unlocked. Of course, claims that were caused by mishandling such responsibility will not be covered. But nevertheless, this is something everyone considering the phone should be well aware of.

Development for the HTC 10 has already begun in terms of ROMs and Kernels, and you will be able to find TWRP for your flashing needs, as well as a healthy set of tools including the aforementioned Sunshine. There are already good resources and guides on the HTC 10 XDA forums for you to learn everything you need to know about rooting and flashing this device, and the friendly and savvy community will likely help you in case you have any questions (but please use the Search button first!). Furthermore, there are some good and insightful discussions going on there, so be sure to check them out if you are planning on buying this device.

If you head over to the HTC 10 ROM, Kernels and Recoveries subforum you will already find a healthy selection of tweaks, ROMs and Kernels, with some familiar names like Elemental X and LeeDrOid for those wanting an easy and trustworthy first experience.

As far as future-proofing, the HTC 10 comes with the best processor and RAM configuration at the moment, and things like expandable storage are undoubtedly useful to XDA serial flashers. HTC’s warranty is also one of the best in terms of coverage and deductibles, and when it comes to updates, we know that the phone will get Android N (which was expected). HTC has been dodgy when it comes to releasing statements about updates for some of their older devices, and we did see them miss their own deadlines a few times in the past. But you should at the very least expect Android N and some future updates.

Final Thoughts & Conclusion

Addition by Subtraction

HTC has managed to make something great with the HTC 10. While there is a lot to be critical about, the things there are to praise are some of the things Android phones need the most. I have had a terrific time testing the HTC 10, and while the beginning was rocky, it grew on me in ways that very few phones have.

It’s rare to see phones that focus on the user experience to the degree that the 10 does. When HTC began advertising this phone, they hit all the right talking points — battery life, camera, performance. Their product ended up hitting the right notes too, even if not with overwhelming success. But that doesn’t matter here, because unlike some of its most-recent predecessors, the HTC 10 is not a compromised phone, nor a flawed one. Even its worst-performing aspects are mostly satisfactory, and at the very least, the HTC 10 really shows that HTC tried much harder here than it did with the M9.

The things that make the HTC 10 stand out are its superb LCD display, its refreshed design, and the user experience that the software-hardware package end up giving the user. A great part of this comes from Sense, with an UI that I am sure no enthusiast will find offensive. It is not stock, mind you, and I’d even argue that it’s not as close to stock as some portray it to be — yet it doesn’t have to, because the core of Android is still at the front. The HTC 10 is an exercise in moderation, as it strips down the things that take away from the smartphone experience with brain surgeon accuracy.

This isn’t to say there aren’t things to improve — I very much would have hoped the company would have stuck with its traditional speaker setup. I also wish the camera software would live up to the hardware specifications, but in the end I got some good shots with the HTC 10’s cameras. But these are minor complaints in contrast to what HTC achieved here, which is a very good phone that shows the company at least listened to the most vocal critics. The phone even puts the “black bar” to death, for a change! Improvements like that are hard to dismiss when they have been criticized for so long, even if they come a year too late.

I also hope to see vibrant development for the HTC 10. Previous HTC phones have had some very amazing ROMs and the HTC 10 comes with easy unlock methods and ready to crack open for those willing to dig deeper and fine-tune their experience. Time will tell whether the phone will pick up the kind of development we want out of a device with such spectacular hardware, but for now we’ll keep our fingers crossed and our recovery ready.

In summary, I think that HTC is in a good path towards reclaiming its former glory. If the HTC Nexus rumors are true, then I can absolutely see myself upgrading to one (or two!) Nexus phones this year. The HTC 10 masters many of the aspects inherent to hardware manufacturing and smartphone design, and with Google’s software running the show, I can not expect the results to be anything short of spectacular. The 10 is, at the very least, a testament to HTC’s smartphone-building capabilities. It might not make the best use of that hardware, but the package is impressive nonetheless, and the HTC 10 is ultimately very compelling device that gives the user a brilliant Android experience.

Thank you for reading!

Special thanks to XDA’s Daniel Marchena and Eric Hulse for the additional data points and perspective they provided for this review. Team effort!

UMi is a company that is otherwise unknown for being a top contender in the budget smartphone market. Their latest offering, the UMi Super, aims to take on a higher end of the  flagship market, while still keeping an affordable price point of $220. Can it compete? Let’s take a look and find out.

UMi Super Specs

Design and Build Quality

The unboxing experience was indicative of the experience you would be receiving from using this phone. The box wasn’t made of cardboard like with most devices, rather the Super came in a tin case that complimented the build of the product. The box’s contents were basic, holding only a quick start guide, a sim removal tool, a charging cable, European charging brick, and the phone itself.

The build of the phone consists of a two part glass and metal construction. The rear has two plastic faux metal bands which cover what I presume are the connectivity antennae. The camera is rear center, just above the dual tone flash and fingerprint scanner. The front is very minimalistic, with only the earpiece and front camera being immediately present.

The front chin of the phone houses a single circle notification LED. The LED is bright enough that you won’t have a hard time noticing it, but it’s not too bright as to become overbearing. It is multi-colored, to show which apps have notifications awaiting. You can change which color shows for which type of notification, but the options are still rather limited. You can also choose to have it constantly pulsing if you want.

On the top of the phone we find the 3.5 mm headphone jack, and at the bottom is the USB C connection port and dual bottom-firing speakers. More on those speakers later.

On the right side of the phone is the standard volume and power button, with the SIM Card/SD Card slot on the left side with a ridged special function button. The buttons are very tactile, and respond well, giving a firm click when pressed. Something I noticed on my unit was that the power button looked like it was not centered on the chassis properly, giving the appearance of it being slanted.

One thing that stands out about this phone’s build is just how thick it is. The Super packs a large battery, and does not mind giving up a little girth to accommodate it. This made holding the phone slightly easier, as it provided a solid edge to grip onto.

Performance

Performance on the UMi Super is one of the phone’s strong suits. Throughout my day to day usage, which includes plenty of redditing, watching YouTube, chatting on hangouts, and light gaming, the phone hardly ever stalled. The 4GB of RAM compliments the Super’s performance nicely. The only time the phone ever got warm was when I was setting it up for the first time, installing all of my apps.

During the AnTuTu benchmark testing, the phone did stutter quite a bit on the 3D portions of the test,which isn’t a surprise given MediaTek’s sub-par GPU offerings. The test score does seem to stand up well. It was able to outscore the Elephone P9000, which has a similar Mediatek SOC and Octa-Core Cortex-A53 chip. It wasn’t able to stand up to the top tier phones, but that’s expected out of such a package.

CPU and System

The Super is powered by a Mediatek Helio P10 chipset. A MT6755 with Eight Cortex-A53 cores clocked in at around 2.0 GHz.

As is typical with most devices, subsequent runs of AnTuTu show a slight reduction in scores. Interestingly, the scores do not continuously drop. In normal day-to-day usage, this is unlikely to be problematic.

The Super seems to level out around the 50,400 range and we’ve had a hard time trying to heat up the device further with just AnTuTu. This phone has powersaving-oriented cores, which ultimately sacrifice speed for stability and longevity.

GPU and Gaming

The Mediatek comes equipped with a Mali-T860 GPU. During the BaseMark X testing, it was very easy to tell that the Super would drop a frame or two every once in awhile. Looking at other device’s scores, it’s easy to see that the Super might not stack up among the rest.

During intense gaming, the Super can indeed generate a bit of heat. The metal body will dissipate the heat relatively quickly and effectively. The Super never became too warm to be used or held.

Storage and Memory

The UMi Super comes with 32GB of internal memory, but that’s not all you get. There is a microSD slot that can hold up to 256GB. This is a good thing, seeing as how there are still phone makers around that seem content selling phones that are much more expensive than the Super, that only come with 16GB storage and no MicroSD card slot.

The flash storage provided is fair, with sequential read speeds of 250.75 MB/s and random read speeds of 28.54 MB/s. For comparison’s sake, here’s how the Super stacks up to the Note 5.

As shown earlier, the 4GB of RAM serves the multi tasking experience well. On average, I was able to have 20 apps open at any given point before any of them would have to reload when being opened from the Recent Apps menu. A major pain point with many budget phones is launcher redraws, something I haven’t seen much of on the Super.

Display

It’s been a trend recently for smartphone displays to pack as many pixels as possible, with 2k resolution becoming the standard. The Super doesn’t conform to this trend though, choosing to use a 1080p resolution panel. It does fit in with a sea of 5.5 inch LCD displays, however. The display is plenty bright, making sunlight viewing easy. Because it’s so bright, you will need a screen dimming app at night time to keep your eyesight.

The display didn’t seem too warm or cold to me, but there is a hefty amount of settings to let you adjust it to suit your personal needs.

Something to note about the panel is that there is light bleed present on my unit, and I was able to spot it within my first few hours of use. The display does seem to fade out on the edges when viewing at steep angles, but isn’t really a problem when looking at the panel straight on.

Something else I noticed on the display panel is that it developed a spot after a few days. It’s most noticeable on white screens, and when I press around the spot on the display it will accent where the spot is. We reported this spot to UMi. They said that we are the first to report such a flaw, which leads us to believe that there was a problem with our particular unit and that it’s not a widespread problem.

Audio

One of the weaker points of the Super is its speakers. They are bottom-firing, with the standard motif of having one real one and one fake one. The speakers are particularly quiet, and I found myself having to turn the volume up all the way constantly. To put it into perspective, my old Moto X 2014 was louder at half volume than the Super was at full volume.

Headphone performance was better, being able to get as loud as most of the other phones I’ve used. The quality wasn’t the best, and definitely left something to be desired.

Camera

Smartphone cameras now a days have gotten drastically good. The 13 MP sensor on the Super, is not all that special however. Below are a few sample shots taken outdoors and indoors.

The front 5 MP sensor is the same story as the back. It can capture some clear details and it’s good enough for getting a funny snapchat in here or there, but ultimately not the best for super high quality captures.

Since cameras on smartphones are becoming so quality-packed, the Super has a hard time keeping up. If you decided that you wanted to use a third party camera app, such as the Google Camera app, it should be noted that pictures taken on other apps come out much dimmer than those taken on the main app. If you want a great camera on your phone, then you might want to look at other options.

UMi states that they are working on improvements to the camera which will come in a future OTA software update.

Battery Life and Charging

The most impressive part about the Super is the phone’s battery. It packs a 4,000mAh battery, and I honestly had a hard time killing this thing. I received the phone on a Wednesday, and for the rest of the week I only had to charge it twice.

My first Run from 100% to 5% lasted me from 7am Thursday morning until 6pm Friday evening, getting about 8.5 hours of screen-on time. My second run from 100% to 5% lasted me from around 4am Saturday morning until 4:30 Sunday evening, coming in with 9 hours of screen-on time. These usages are as close to real as I could get, trying to make up for a lack of cell reception. Because of incompatibility with the US networks and the bands in the UMi, I was left without signal for a long time in my rural Tennessean home.

During my usage, my unit of the Super had a particular problem. When the screen state was off, the phone would only check for notifications for system apps. I had initially assumed this was a measure taken to extend battery life, but soon noticed that I was the only one having these problems. After a factory reset, and whitelisting all the apps I needed on the background tasks cleaner menu, I was able to see notifications come regularly. UMi was made aware of my notification issue, and assured us that this is not normal behavior that might be caused by our unit being pre-production.

When we did a Geekbench battery test, running the battery from 100% to 0% at max brightness, the phone was able to last up to 6 hours and 9 minutes. That time beat the Nexus 6P by ten minutes, and was ten minutes shy of the Galaxy Note 5’s time. Considering the processor employed, that is not a bad result.

Software and UX

The UMi Super is advertised as coming with Stock Android 6.0 Marshmallow. That claim is correct, as it ships with a rather stock build of Marshmallow with very few additions here and there. Something to note about the software, some built-in apps such as the web browser will not run unless all permissions are granted, meaning it needs access to your camera, microphone, location, etc. at all times to function.

The Super lets you choose between on-screen software buttons, or off-screen capacitive buttons. The on-screen buttons behave very much like you would expect, with the option included to swap the back and recents keys, as well as a hide button to hide them if you are going to be in one app for a while. The capacitive buttons are fairly responsive. The LED notification light acts as the home button, with a back and menu key flanking it on either side. You can change the order of the back and menu key, but you cannot change their pressing functions. To access the recents on the capacitive keys, you have to hold the home button, meaning the Google Now On Tap functionality available in the soft keys is not present on the hardware keys. The capacitive keys do not have any LEDs to tell you where they are, so you are left just guessing where they might be at first use.

There are small bits of theming and additions throughout the OS. The notification shade and quick settings panel both sport a transparent black overlay, as opposed to the regular material theme. This change is not thorough, with quick settings sub menus still retaining their material color. the only other place the system has a dark theme is in the calculator, which is themed black, for whatever reason, since the display is an LCD panel and will still have to light up every pixel anyway.

There are some custom quick settings available, such as a toggle between different sound modes that will adjust your ringer/vibration accordingly, a Battery saver, and a HotKnot toggle. Adding and removing these custom toggles in the System UI tuner menu will cause a system UI crash, interestingly enough.

There are a few pre-installed applications, such as a flashlight app, a backup and restore app, FM radio app, SIM toolkit, and a sound recorder. These are all utility additions, and don’t affect performance at all. None of the pre-installed apps can be disabled, however, besides the Messaging and Phone apps, so it’s ultimately an annoying bloat practice.

The Super will let you set the Special Use Button to open any app you want, however it will not let you activate it while the screen is off, or set it to change any settings, just open apps (with activity-trigger apps, though, that can be worked around). Another addition is a Turbo Download option, that will let you use a mix of WiFi and Cellular Data to get the fastest download possible. Because of band incompatibility in the US, we were unable to test the speeds.

If you’ve ever used the software on the Elephone P9000, you’ve used the software on the UMi Super. With the exception of the half-finished dark theme, the Super is running the a similar software set, with the same feature brandings.

Fingerprint Scanner

The fingerprint scanner on the Super is rear-mounted, and sits in a nice dimple, reminiscent the finger holding dimples on the Moto line of phones. It is a capacitive reader, meaning you will not need to power on the display for it to read. The scanner is fast, given that it can read the finger the first time: more often than not, I had to recenter my finger for it to read.

Final Thoughts

While a solid and well thought-out device, some aspects of the phone felt heavily derived from other offerings on the market, and it brings most of the flaws you’d expect out of a phone in this price-range. When I read a few past reviews on the XDA site, I had noticed that there were a few phones that the Super took a fair bit of inspiration from.

Many users on Reddit have called out the UMi website for looking a bit “too good to be true”, starting that one should not trust the company to deliver a quality product. While I initially agreed with those sentiments, actually using the device changed my mind. If you head over to UMi’s community forums, you can see just how other users of this phone feel.

But overall, the UMi Super is a pretty sturdy Android device for the price. I mostly enjoy using it and the way it feels in the hand. The software is close to stock in functionality, and the phone itself is well made with a decent display (if your unit doesn’t have lightbleed) for its cheap price point. The only glaring issues that really bothered me with the phone have to be the connectivity issues and lack of cell service I faced. That aside, the feature that is the most attractive is the Super’s battery, which at times seems like it will just never die. If you can live with a budget device and need insane battery life, you should consider the phone — but first, you must make sure you can live with the downsides and consequences.

*This review was sponsored by UMi; however, 100% of the opinions expressed above are those of Jake Westall and this article has been unaltered by UMi.

With a new year comes a new OnePlus flagship, with the goal of taking on the big league players and give them a serious run for their money. After last year’s disappointing OnePlus 2, the “little OEM that could” drops its “Flagship Killer” slogan for a humbler release of a well-specced phone.

Can the OnePlus re-deliver the Never Settle mantra it is known for?

In this review, we’ll take an in-depth dive into the OnePlus 3. Rather than listing specs and talking about how the experience felt, this feature attempts to provide a thorough look with contents relevant to our reader base. At XDA, our reviews are not meant to tell a user whether a phone is worth buying or not — instead, we try to lend you the phone through our words and help you come to the decision by yourself. Before getting started, let’s get the specification sheet out of the way:

 Index

• Design
• Software – UI
• Software – Features & UX
• Performance
• CPU & System
• GPU & Gaming
• Memory & Storage
• Real World UX
• Camera
• Display
• Battery Life
• Audio
• Development & Future Proofing
• Final Thoughts & Conclusion

Design

Aluminum body, 152.7 x 74.7 x 7.35 cm (~73% screen-to-body), 158g

The OnePlus 3 brings forth a design refreshment that does away with the signature sandstone back of the previous two phones, and shakes up the design language by softening curves and edges, as well as changing the material employed. While the OnePlus 2 introduced a sturdy magnesium frame to complement the sandstone back, the all-metal OnePlus 3 is made from a single block of aluminum that still ends up feeling surprisingly sturdy. Indeed, while the OnePlus 3 lacks the heft of its predecessor, it ends up appearing quite durable and tests have shown that it likely won’t bend on you like similar phones.

This comes as a surprise given how thin the phone is — at 7.4mm, this phone is almost as thin as the Nexus 6P. The in-hand feel is handled very well thanks to a rather efficient screen-to-bezel ratio and proper softening of the edges. The device’s camera does protrude, however, and the glass on it is not fancy sapphire, meaning you might put it at risk atop certain textures. That issue aside, the materials and dimensions of the OnePlus 3 are well-accomplished, as the device has no issue fitting in the hand comfortably with or without cases.

Moving on to specific design elements, we find that the back of the device looks very much like what you’d expect out of an aluminum smartphone nowadays. The antennae band arrangement is reminiscent of devices like the HTC One M8, the iPhone 6, and their countless copycats — that’s a conclusion we simply can’t escape. But nevertheless, it is finely executed and the various OnePlus slim cases do provide a more traditional “OnePlus” look and feel for those willing to shell out extra cash. The center of the back has a shiny and slightly depressed OnePlus logo, making for the only stand-out feature in the back.

The sides of the device are very well fused with the back through a comfortable curve and soft corners, making for an easy grip. On the right you will find the power button and the dual Nano-SIM tray, while on the left there is a power rocker and also the famous alert slider, back with its signature tactile pattern which makes it extremely easy to identify. It’s worth pointing out that the physical keys of the OnePlus 3 are excellent — they don’t rock, they are sturdy and clicky and they are placed at very natural locations. The only nuisance I personally found was with the alert slider, which is programmed to mute all notifications when fully slid up instead of down — it might sound like a small detail, but it takes more effort to slide it up with the right hand’s index finger than it is to slide it down, and an option to change this would have been nice.

The top of the device is perfectly plain whereas the bottom has a lot going on. Down there you will find the USB Type C connector at the center, a single speaker grill on the left (thank you for not giving us fake double speakers!) and a microphone and audio jack on the right, with both sides flanked by very tiny screws that oddly take away from the otherwise-seamless look.

Then we have the front, which is actually one of the better-designed aspects of this phone. The black-slab approach is toned down in favor of a visible camera and sensor, as well as a speaker grill at the top, and the prominent fingerprint scanner depression at the bottom. To the sides of the fingerprint scanner (which, while not a button, functions as a home key) you will find two white LED circles that mark the capacitive keys you can opt to use. These are much more elegant-looking than the blue slits in the OnePlus 2, as they are more neutral and subtler (they go well with any theme on your phone). Finally, it’s worth noting that the small side bezels (a fraction of a millimeter shy of the LG G3’s) coupled with 2.5D glass make for an attractive illusion that makes the phone ultimately feel narrower and smaller than it is. Also, the phone comes with a built-in screen protector, which is a nice touch.

A final point worth mentioning is that the OnePlus 3 is offered with cases that come in the same styles the OnePlus 2 styleswap covers came in: sandstone, bamboo, rosewood, black apricot and karbon. These are slim, easy to apply and hug the device better than your average smartphone case, although they are not the most protective alternative. That being said, they only add a couple of millimeters of thickness — something that many will welcome, given it makes the camera sit flush with the rest of the back, and not everyone prefers such slim devices anyway. The cases are $25 each though, which is not cheap, but the cutouts around the sides and backs compliment the device well and make it look different and also more familiar to OnePlus veterans, and it also adds an extra layer of protection (especially with the pre-applied protector) without sacrificing comfort, depending on your taste.

Software – User Interface

Android 6.0.1 Oxygen OS ROM v3.1.2/3.1.4

Oxygen OS on the OnePlus 2 was a rather close-to-stock UI that focused on bringing only some useful and subtle customization and navigation options, many of which OnePlus promoted specifically for being part of the then-upcoming Android Marshmallow. Not much has changed in Oxygen OS, truthfully, and the version found on the OnePlus 3 is very similar to the latest Marshmallow build for the OnePlus 2. That being said, the changes OnePlus made to the UI and the user experience can be curious little additions.

As far as the eye can see, OnePlus’ OxygenOS does not deviate much from Material Design nor Stock Android. But extra input in some UI elements will reveal the changes that make the experience slightly more comfortable. For example, in the multi-tasking menu, you can move the card stack up to reveal three buttons: one to clear and close all recent applications, another one to kill all apps and background processes, and finally a shortcut to the app manager menu where you can quickly find and configure application options (force stopping, disabling, checking data usage and permissions, etc).

The notification panel stays the same, while the toggles see the comeback of easy toggle drag-and-drop configuration, as well as some useful additions including a Night Mode toggle (like the one coming with Android N) as well as an “invert colors” button. The latter might seem of questionable usefulness at a first glance, but consider its usefulness when browsing the web at night for reading purposes — with the OnePlus 3’s AMOLED screen, it’s actually nice to have it hanging in there for the occasional insomniac redditing session.

The OnePlus 3 comes with rudimentary theming, too: while you won’t be installing third-party themes and get your Hello Kitty game on, there is a “Dark Mode” that, unlike Google’s, is actually pitch black where it counts for maximum AMOLED synergy. You can also change the accent color while in Dark Mode, and while in Dark Mode only (why?), letting you choose from 8 color options besides the default accent. As with other ROMs that allow for the UI tuner, you can also get rid of annoying status bar elements, this time through a handy shortcut in the Customization sub-menu.

The lockscreen is what you’d expect: notifications, google and camera shortcuts, etc. The Launcher, however, is one of the places OnePlus decided to add some spice in: while the homescreen layout and app drawer (other than the icon) will be familiar to everyone, they also bring a quick notification pulldown (down) and quick search (up) gestures by default, as well as Shelf, a place with your favorite apps, widgets, time, weather, frequent contacts, memos… In short, the same things you can have on your homescreen already, albeit in resizable boards you can move around. Other than Shelf, there is not much going for the stock launcher. Having it react to the Dark Mode setting in the app drawer is also a nice touch, but ultimately the launcher will fall short for those used to more complex or liberating launchers. For everyone that just needs a traditional homescreen, it’ll do just fine.

Software – Features & UX

Oxygen OS is toned down not just on the aesthetic front, but also when it comes to features. However, that doesn’t mean that what’s in there is not useful, and I’d argue that the overall implementation and presentation of these features surpass the work of other OEMs in delivering a “no-nuisance” experience. In a few words, you won’t be digging through menus to find features because what’s there is apparent and most of it has been advertised by OnePlus anyway.

Starting with the toggle situation, there isn’t much that deviates from Stock Android. I do appreciate the setup, with the “invert colors” function being a notable feature (that I didn’t know I’d like) when considering that the AMOLED screen will give you perfect blacks. While browsing the web at night, this can help you read whatever’s on your browser without consequently stabbing your eyes (especially important given the poor minimum brightness on this device, but more on this later). In order to help with night-time usage, you can also find a night mode as seen on Android N, and the dark theme to theme your UI black.

The OnePlus 3 has no shortage of off-screen gestures and features, either. The famed double-tap-to-wake is back, as are other off-screen customizable gestures involving swipes and shapes. These are responsive and quick to use, but you can also double-press the power button to launch the camera without unlocking the screen, a neat addition for those moving from Nexus devices. And speaking of which, Ambient Display is also an option on the OnePlus 3, made all the better by the AMOLED display and the fact that you can swipe your hand above the screen in order to see your notifications without physically interacting with the device.

A feature that synergizes with the screen-off versatility of Oxygen OS is the alert slider, which has 3 positions or “stages”: up for do not disturb/silent, middle for priority mode, and bottom for all notifications. Furthermore, you can customize priority settings to allow alarms, media, reminders, events, calls and messages (from select contacts, if you so choose) to go through. Additionally, repeat callers can be allowed through if they call twice within 15 minutes — a nice addition for the rare (and hopefully nonexistent) emergency call. Sadly, customization for silent mode is not as granular, only enabling alarms and media (being able to mute media permanently while on silent mode is also useful for walking into meetings or classrooms).

If you choose to, you can of course turn off the backlight or always enable the home button, and then swap the order of the recent and back keys no matter your nav bar choice (luckily, the capacitive keys are labelled with dots open to interpretation!).

If that wasn’t enough, you can also customize the long press and double tap action of each and any key (but not when using the virtual navigation bar), with options that include: trigger the recents menu, search assistant (like Google Now/On Tap), turn the screen off, open the camera, do a voice search, open the last used app (very welcome feature!) and open the Launcher’s Shelf. Do keep in mind that the keys’ responsiveness goes down dramatically should you configure a “double tap” action, but long-press is fine. Using long-press on the home-button to turn off the screen, for example, makes the fingerprint scanner button feel symmetric in functionality (turn on/off).

And that’s precisely our last stop: the fingerprint scanner on the OnePlus 3 is phenomenal, being very fast, responsive and accurate. I’ve had no issues with this fingerprint scanner, and while I personally prefer them on the back, the handling of the OnePlus 3 (thanks to its dimensions) does not make for a cumbersome experience. In any case, smart lock can help you minimize the need to unlock your phone when out and about.

There are smaller features here and there, like the ability to wake the phone for alarms even if the device is off and also “locking-in” applications in recents so that they can’t be closed (including “close all” button), but ultimately what you see is mostly what you get, with very few features hidden behind secret menus or with vague descriptions and triggers. Ultimately, Oxygen OS is a very pleasant experience as you can easily ignore most of these additions, not theme the device, and pretend you are running a slightly modified Stock Android. Aesthetically, it mostly looks the part, and functionally, the features the ROM brings do not detract from the experience and result in a solid net positive that you can exploit at your leisure.

Performance

SD820, Quad Core 2×2 up to 2.15GHz, Adreno 530 GPU, 6GB DDR4 RAM

The OnePlus 2 was notorious for its performance issues, but it was only one in a streak of devices suffering such fate due to the Snapdragon 810 at their heart. The OnePlus 3, however, wields the Snapdragon 820 to try and smash the notorious past that put a blemish on the excellent performance record their first device achieved. With a quad-core Kryo core configuration and a maximum clockspeed of 2.15GHz on the performance-centered dual-core cluster, this device sees no sacrifice in frequency like its predecessor did (as it was downclocked), and bears the best internal hardware available at the moment. Has OnePlus been able to redeem the OnePlus 2’s performance issues? In one sharp word: yes. We’ll explain why below.

CPU & System

The OnePlus 3 leads the pack with the rest of the Snapdragon 820 devices in the CPU side, offering extremely good performance on every CPU-centric test and system-oriented tests as well. The OnePlus 3 frequently scores higher than all other devices in these tests, and it does a particularly respectable job in PCMark, which tests both the hardware and the software. In BaseMark OS II 2.0, a more holistic test, the OnePlus 3 also hangs out with the top of Android, and all of this without any sacrifices to clockspeed or through modified CPU behavior. The Snapdragon 820 proves itself once again in the OnePlus 3, although the Kirin 955 and the Exynos 8890 give it a run for its money on multi-core tasks and results, where they get an advantage likely through sheer number of cores.

AnTuTu (over 144,000) and other more comprehensive tests also put the OnePlus 3 at the top of what’s available today, and the extra RAM will ensure it gets a favorable score later down the line. Oxygen OS itself may be contributing to the good scores in some of the software-aided tests, but in any case, there is nothing else to ask out of the OnePlus 3 at the moment. It’s simply that good, and the numbers speak for themselves, leaving little else to write about in terms of peak performance.

And if the exceptional theoretical maximums were not enough, we also found that the device sees the least throttling on a Snapdragon 820 device we’ve tested. The S7 Edge, HTC 10 and (especially) the LG G5 all see higher temperatures during both regular usage and thorough stress tests, while the OnePlus 3 manages to keep its cool throughout with scores dropping as little as 2 percent over 10 tests or more. For reference, other Snapdragon 820 devices like the HTC 10 saw as big as a 6% drop, with higher a  maximum temperature as well. This is only a summary of our thorough performance-over-time analysis, which we suggest you check out for a more in-depth explanation.

GPU & Gaming

On the GPU side, the Adreno 530 is once again a stand-out feature of a flagship’s performance. We’ve seen time and again that this mobile GPU can output some fantastic scores on practically every test, and the OnePlus 3 maximizes the results of this component by keeping its resolution at 1080p. This is not something that makes a noticeable impact throughout the UI, and many games already run at 1080p regardless of the (higher) native resolution, but it greatly affects on-screen benchmarks and other tests, meaning it’s worth mentioning. While the lower resolution might seem like an “unfair advantage” (and it arguably is), we also lowered the resolution on the HTC 10 to get an idea of how another 820 device would perform under the same graphics stress.

As expected, the OnePlus 3 outperforms other popular Snapdragon 820 devices in on-screen tests, but the large difference disappears in off-screen results where the additional pixel tax disappears and the footing is even. Only 1080p Snapdragon 820 devices like the Xiaomi Mi5 can see head-to-head with the OnePlus 3 at this time, but these are merely abstract tests that don’t tell us everything about actual graphics performance during usage and gaming. Nevertheless, we downgraded the HTC 10’s resolution to 1080p to see if it fared as well as the OnePlus 3 in peak scores and over time.

The Slingshot ES 3.1 test is rendered at 1440p on both devices regardless of resolution.

The graphs are pretty telling: while the OnePlus 3 already outperformed other Snapdragon 820 devices in GPU performance over time (as seen in our previous report), the HTC 10 nevertheless throttles much harder than the OnePlus 3 in GFXBench’s Manhattan stress test (30 consecutive benchmarks). The OnePlus 3’s lower resolution meant up to 80% better framerates, and we originally assumed that this meant the GPU wasn’t taxed as much leading to better-sustained performance, but the HTC 10 shows this is not necessarily the case, as this device saw more substantial and frequent drops in frames despite starting out on even footing. Either way, the OnePlus 3 has excellent performance-over-time with no significant throttling even after reaching high temperatures of up to 46°C |114.8°F.

Heat distribution on OnePlus 3’s body

Gaming is a similar story on the OnePlus 3: the device features some of the best framerates of any device we’ve tested, with most games easily hitting – and sustaining – their framerate caps of 30 or 60. Asphalt 8, for example, kept a solid 30 frames per second (surprisingly, it was locked at 30 while the HTC 10 was not, but this device showed substantial fluctuation).

The device also handles other heavy games like Warhammer 40K and Dead Trigger really well, with 30FPS and 42FPS averages respectively. Most importantly, perhaps, is the fact that this device can sustain maximum framerate on GTA: San Andreas at maximum settings for over 10 minutes without throttling, while 810 phones and even other 820 devices commonly have issues after a few minutes. 

RAM Management and Storage

When it comes to RAM, the OnePlus 3 is mighty impressive on paper. Its 6GB of DDR4 RAM echo promises of near-infinite app caching, but reality is quite different. The OnePlus 3 went under controversy for underperforming in this regard, with videos and articles detailing how it was out-played by devices with 4GB (and even 3GB) of RAM. We took a look back then and found that the LMK/OOM values were fine, but the build.prop had a hard limit on background processes, with the relevant code line set to 20. Changing the value to over 40 allowed us to make near full use of the device’s RAM, being able to use over 5GB for applications and go back over 20 apps in recents with ease.

The culprit

Since then, OnePlus 3 released a reviewer OTA and now a final OTA that upped that value to 32, making for a slightly less compromised experience. Ideally, Oxygen OS would offer a set of preset settings so that users could take advantage of all of the device’s RAM should they choose to do so, but for now, you can either settle with OnePlus’ change (which, in reality, is setting it back to the standard of Android) and have it be in-line with other devices, or edit the build.prop yourself to make the most out of the hardware you bought.

Nonsense! There’s no such thing as “too much RAM”!

That being said, we found that with the latest software, the phone can hold more applications in memory that most people need, and few will care or notice the few app redraws they’ll face every day.

NAND performance on the OnePlus 3 is downright excellent thanks to its UFS2.0 solution, the kind that Samsung devices bragged about in exclusivity until these last few months. The OnePlus 3, thus, battles it head-to-head with the Galaxy S7, and as shown above, you can expect some quick file transfers and ROM flashing out of this phone. App installs, routinely update sprees and the like take no toll here. Sadly, there is no microSD support, but there is only one set of phones with storage as fast as this and with expandable storage. The base storage capacity of 64GB is also welcome and likely good enough for most users. While the OnePlus 2’s storage was no slouch, the OnePlus 3 is as future proof as it gets on Android right now in this regard (but I have no doubt Samsung will make me eat my words soon).

Real World Performance

Real world performance on the OnePlus 3 is one of the best parts of the phone. With the processor package documented above, plus the lightweight UI, you will not be bogged down nor halted by neither hardware nor software. In day to day use, the OnePlus 3 is simply a pleasure to behold, with speed and fluidity that rivals even the best in the game such as the Nexus 6P and its “purer” Stock Android.

App opening speeds are some of the fastest of any device out there and the screen responsiveness also helps in making the experience feel very snappy. Using Discomark, we tested the app opening speed of the OnePlus 3 against devices like the HTC 10 and Nexus 6P (same application state), and only the latter was able to surpass it in both hot and cold app launch times. Scrolling through lists is smooth, too, and I have not seen a single app crash nor any glaring stability issues in my time with devices, even on the “reviewers-only” 3.1.4 update which, according to OnePlus, has improved app launch times as well.

While we found a slight difference in our DiscoMark testing, it is so small that it could be attributed to extraneous factors. In any case, the OnePlus 3 is one of the fastest devices out there when it comes to day-to-day operations.

Multi-tasking, too, is better on 3.1.4. If you do not get the stalled consumer 3.2.0 update by the time you receive your device, I do suggest you edit the relevant build.prop values to get better RAM management. Once more, the 3.1.4 update brings the background apps setting up to the standard of 32 rather than the lowly 20 the phone shipped with. You can raise this number further by editing it by pulling it through ADB or with root on your device, and get the most out of your RAM.

But either way, hot app switching times are great as the DDR4 RAM bears no compromises, so multi-tasking is very good once the fix is in place, and as demonstrated above, it’s even better if you choose to tweak the RAM management. There are also a few multi-tasking related features like “app locking” and navigation shortcuts for the most recent app, making the experience all the sweeter.

A notable aspect of this device, especially over the OnePlus 2, is that it does not throttle with prolonged usage, nor does it get noticeably warm. This is one of the more thermal-efficient devices in recent memory, closely resembling the efficiency of the Note5 and ZenFone 2 during day-to-day usage (they sported some of the most interesting processors of 2015, too). It’s also notably better for intensive usage than other Snapdragon 820 devices like the HTC 10 and the LG G5, and OnePlus managed to go from one of the least pleasing devices for real-world usage to one of the best.

Finally, there is no bloatware to be seen in the background processes, and when running a regular workload through Trepn and other performance analytics tools we spotted none of the ugly behavior of the OnePlus 2 (such as switching to A53 cores for specific apps, or shortly after initiating arduous tasks). There are no footprints of rogue apps taking up CPU cycles neither on idle nor during usage, something I appreciate after using devices with heavier ROMs like TouchWiz or EMUI.

Camera

Front: 16MP Sony IMX 298 Sensor, 1.12μm, OIS, EIS, PDAF, f/2.0, RAW support, 4K 30FPS / 720p 120FPS 

The OnePlus 3 comes with a 16MP primary camera with f/2.0 aperture, PDAF, and OIS, a package that at first glance looks relatively unimpressive compared to its predecessor’s 13MP shooter with Laser Autofocus, OIS and the same aperture. Either way, the sensor is better than last year’s OmniVision solution, and while the OnePlus 2 had some decent camera hardware, in our review we were ultimately disappointed at its performance, with Laser AF failing to make itself noted and OIS being flakier than we were used to. Another disappointing aspect of the OnePlus 2 was the picture-taking experience through the camera app, which was slow to launch, focus and shoot. Luckily, OnePlus has managed to resolve many of these issues with their latest device.

The camera is blazing fast to launch this time around, and you can set multiple gestures for a convenient experience: either by applying a shortcut to the navigation bar (long press/double tap), by double tapping the power button, or by triggering it from the lockscreen. OnePlus is likely using the device’s ample RAM to cache the app, as implied by one of Carl Pei’s tweets regarding their approach to memory management. This isn’t unlike Samsung’s, and ultimately makes for a nice experience as the camera is launched and ready in about a quarter of a second. In fact, we tested the speed difference between cold and hot launch and they were only a couple of tens of milliseconds apart.

After you launch the app you are greeted with a pretty standard camera interface with simple controls on the right/bottom, including a giant shutter button, a camera switch key, and a settings menu which will allow you to change the aspect ratio and set a timer, as well as enable a grid, and it also gives you access to a “beauty mode” slider for the front camera (luckily, it’s disabled by default). At the top you also have access to the flash and HDR (on/off/auto), and finally you can find a sub menu at the top left that allows you to switch between different camera modes, including time-lapse, slow-motion, manual mode and panorama, and then also settings to save location, disable shutter sound and keep RAW images.

Actual picture quality is easily OnePlus’ best, with pictures from the rear camera showing good exposure and saturation all-around. While pictures can turn out a bit bright and the occasional “sky blow out” is still possible, the colors are often engaging with rich greens and blues that make for good pictures of nature. Like many cameras, though, vibrant reds and oranges can have quite the identity crisis and end up looking artificial, and also inconsistent between shots. Detail preservation is pretty good outdoors, with only “busier” textures and fine geometry getting distorted (but not much).

High dynamic range is good at getting more detail out of your pictures while preserving the colors better than the bigger offenders in the space, but it also brightens up the picture noticeably. There is little to like about the OnePlus 3’s lackluster low-light performance in general, though: while other devices focus intensely on low-light performance, results out of the OnePlus 3 can be quite grainy, but I haven’t found common issues like chromatic aberration nor particular difficulty in focusing.

Focusing on the OnePlus 3 is decently fast and the resulting depth of field and background blur can be quite satisfying. While you won’t get the best macro shots on auto mode, manual mode allows you to get around 8cm to 9cm away from the target, and we’ve been largely satisfied with the results (exemplified above). It’s worth pointing out that you can lock the focus by long-pressing on a location, and also change the exposure by sliding around the focus circle, which helps in getting the right spot and brightness. But the focus can be quite bouncy, an issue that is only made worse during video, as the focus reset can make your video end up looking jerky, reminding you this is a mere smartphone camera.

The front-facing camera can take some detailed shots in the right conditions without much difficulty, and OnePlus introduced a “smile to capture” feature that, albeit unoriginal, actually works quite well. There is also a beauty slider in there, but the quality of the resulting pictures is nice by itself and the softening it adds to your selfies will take away from it. Overall, OnePlus did a good job here, even if there is the occasional whitened image.

Video on the OnePlus 3 is perhaps one of the more disappointing aspects of the device as a whole. There is quite a bit of pixelation in some areas of the image, and it ultimately doesn’t look as sharp as the video output of other phones, with artifacts often messing up various textures like concrete. This is noticeable even in 4K video (which it can record “only” up to 10 minutes), where the lack of electronic stabilization makes on-the-move recording a bad option. Dropping down the quality of the video does kick in electronic stabilization to aid the hardware OIS and as a result there is less wobbling, which made the footage look much better at the expense of some detail. But with the macroblocking-like look going on in the 4K mode, you are probably not missing out on much quality anyway.

For a $400 phone, OnePlus did a good job here. While there are many aspects to criticize, the pictures can end up looking quite good and the camera user experience is much better than last year’s thanks to its improvements in speed and focusing. I do hope that the post-processing issues will get addressed, but for the most part, I’ve enjoyed the picture-taking experience and given OnePlus has made many changes to the camera experience of the OnePlus 2 over time, I expect this camera to get better over time too. At its worst, this camera is a thorough improvement over every aspect of the OnePlus 2’s, which I think is good enough at this price-point.

Display

5.5 inch 1080p AMOLED (401p ppi)

Switching to an AMOLED display is perhaps one of the smartest moves OnePlus made in regards to the OnePlus 3 software experience, given its perfect blacks synergize very well with the Dark Mode (which was present in the OnePlus 2) and the Ambient Display. However, the decision to use a 1080p AMOLED panel instead of a higher resolution 1440p option led many to receive this display with skepticism, and the initial objective screen analysis by websites like AnandTech ended up painting a rather grim picture for the OnePlus 3’s viewing experience.

This is an unavoidable fact: by default, the OnePlus 3’s display is saturated like something out of 2013, with neon-blues and very sharp reds/oranges. This will be an issue not just to color purists, but I presume also users that are less-used to very saturated displays (a rare breed in today’s smartphone world). While the saturation accuracy is terrible when objectively compared to the sRGB target, though, it does not automatically mean that you will not enjoy this display. In fact, it doesn’t take long to find hundreds of positive comments about this screen (in general terms) on OnePlus and Android communities (the official forums, XDA, and reddit). To many users, color-accurate screens like those of the Nexus 5 and 5X ultimately look unappealing. We can measure color accuracy objectively, but our perception and taste in color are still subject to our own eyes and personal preference.

That said, objectively speaking, the color distortion means that most of your media will not look as intended by its creators (should you care). Subjectively, I also find the saturation and overall color balance to be very unnatural — the literal opposite of what OnePlus claimed its “optic AMOLED” display would provide (“[more] true-to-life than ever“) with their in-house customization/calibration. The issues with the OnePlus 3’s display don’t stop there: on the default NTSC-aiming mode, there is highly visible banding on grays and grayscale, sometimes even visible on mostly-solid grays. The resolution of the display also plays against it for the sole fact of being a pentile AMOLED display, with an unequal distribution of color LEDs that is noticeable to the naked eye (should you have good vision) unlike on denser panels (like those of 1440p displays).

The effective resolution of this display is thus lower for anything but pure green (base pixel color), making this 1080p-in-name-only (TINO?). This doesn’t mean that your viewing experience will be awful, but those with sharper vision will likely spot more graininess and faults in text and UI icon edges. Another issue that is very apparent when using Dark Mode is the amount of “purple ghosting” when scrolling through lists and the like, although this is something that you can learn to ignore over time.

This being an AMOLED display, however, gives you all of its inherent strengths, including excellent contrast and perfect blacks, which are very well-exploited by the OnePlus 3’s software features. You also get excellent viewing angles with no color casting, and also no lightbleed like what you’d find on some LCD panels we’ve seen this year. The whitepoint on the OnePlus 3 is on the cold side by default — in fact, it’s almost too blue, which further adds to the “unnatural” look of the display.

That being said, there is a handy slider in the Display options that allows you to make the display warmer, thus mitigating the negative impact of OnePlus’ calibration decisions. A final point worth noting is that the OnePlus 3 does not get as bright as the OnePlus 2, or even the Nexus 6P in the AMOLED space, and certainly not Galaxy devices. There is also no “brightness boost” on adaptive mode, and the auto brightness can be slightly finicky at times (with a very disappointing minimum, too). Despite all this, outdoors legibility is above-average due to good sunlight contrast.

With the biggest downside of this display being the default calibration, you can expect custom ROM makers and tinkerers to figure out a way to make the resulting colors more appealing. But truth be told, if you want a color accurate display, OnePlus has you covered: after the criticisms came to light, the company quickly built the 3.1.4 update (coming to consumers as 3.2.0) which brings an sRGB mode (targeting said color space) and tucking it into the Developer Options. This toggle makes the display more muted and… well. color-accurate. When enabled, media looks as it should and on-par with other sRGB non-saturated display modes from other devices, like the sRGB mode of the Nexus 6P or the Basic mode of Galaxy phones. It turns this display from one of the most saturated to one of the most accurate ones quickly and easily, and anyone that enjoys color accuracy or despises over-saturated colors should welcome it kindly. OnePlus also tells us it’ll become a persistent setting that will survive reboots. It’s also worth noting that sRGB mode disables the temperature slider in the Display settings, which might turn off those that want a colder display after the switch, and that night mode is not available when sRGB mode is on.

Battery Life & Charging

3,000mAh, Dash Charge (5V 4A)

The OnePlus 2 touted a battery capacity increase over its predecessor, while the OnePlus 3 brings that number back to 3,000mAh – 300mAh less – for what is now considered the “standard” battery capacity for flagships, particularly the 5.5 inch ilk. On its face, this is nothing worth writing home about, but we also must keep in mind that resulting battery life is more than the sum of its parts — that is, the components employed by the manufacturer, mainly screen and processor, play a huge role in the overall result, as does the software that ships with the phone. Last year, for example, the Note5 managed to outperform the firmly-average OnePlus 2 in both theoretical/benchmark battery tests as well as real-world usage, in great part due to the highly-efficient Exynos 7420 and last-gen AMOLED panel. How does the OnePlus 3 stack up against the competition and past OnePlus devices?

While the OnePlus 2 suffered from the power-hungry Snapdragon 810, the OnePlus 3’s battery efficiency has seen a huge step forward, with battery benchmarks putting it above the average and past its predecessor despite the drop in battery capacity. PCMark and GeekBench (6:17) show healthy battery scores, while GFXBench showed a worse-than-average result, although this is to be expected given that at no point did the OnePlus 3 throttle or switch CPU behavior and it kept top-performance throughout. The OnePlus 2 was notorious for this, often relying on the power-efficient A53 cores after a mere few minutes of intensive use, or while using an internet browser like Chrome. The OnePlus 3, on the other hand, excellently sustains performance and still manages to output respectable battery results.

On the real-world side of things, the OnePlus 3 fares much better than the OnePlus 2 and, surprisingly, better than many other devices in my household including those with bigger battery capacities such as the Nexus 6P. Indeed, while I considered 4 hours of screen on time to be a good day on the OnePlus 2, the OnePlus 3 sees that as more of a minimum, and I’ve had no trouble going over the 4 hour mark on any given day. Moreover, after installing the 3.1.4 update rolled out to review units, my battery life was even better, but this could be merely due to usage-pattern changes given the first week of a review period is usually the most exhausting one on the device. Nevertheless, I’ve managed to get 6 hours of usage a few times on the OnePlus 3, with a healthy spread of activities including a few hours of YouTube, lots of redditing and Hangouts messaging, some (20-30 minutes) of navigation, off-screen music and podcast listening, and some LTEtime.

Standby drain on this device has been rather consistent. Measuring the overnight drain of my routinely 6-hour sleep period showed an average drain of 0.4%/hour on Wi-Fi, and one particularly “bad” instance of 0.8%/hour. Few devices have shown better standby than this, so I personally consider it respectable, and savvy users can get even better standby drain with tinkering (through Greenify or Amplify, for example). Throughout the day, Awake times were kept at a minimum within usage pauses as seen on the samples above, making for an overall-pleasant experience that doesn’t feel bogged down by wakelocks or other issues.

The OnePlus 3 does not have wireless charging, meaning previous investments in this technology would become paperweight should you upgrade. Likewise, Quick Charge 2.0/3.0 is also not present on this device, despite the Snapdragon 820 inside it being capable of utilizing the Qualcomm standard. However, OnePlus brought forth the VOOC charging standard from its “friend” company Oppo, and this technology is capable of fast and efficient charging that is an actually-welcome improvement over Qualcomm’s – and others’ too – standards. We’ve explained precisely how it works in a previous article, as well as why it is likely coming to custom ROMs near you soon, but what’s most interesting is its charging behavior, which we also documented. We suggest you read our in-depth analysis of Dash Charging, but we’ll summarize the results for you below as well.

Just don’t touch it.

Dash Charging is faster than most of its competition as it is able to net your device 63% battery in just 30 minutes. While this is a very nice spec by itself, the most interesting aspect is that this charging standard does not slow down the charging rate while you use the device. Whereas other devices, like the Nexus 6P, cut down the intake to 600mA or so while the screen is on and the phone is being used, the OnePlus 3 can receive the full listed current (4A) while still remaining cool and unthrottled (using Trepn, we found the device operated identically and still managed to sustain maximum clockspeed on benchmarks while charging).

This means that you can charge your device at the same rate regardless of your usage, although the effective charging speed is lowered given the usage itself does drain battery as well. But even then, using the phone continuously while charging has a mostly minimal impact on the final charging time, and you can still charge from 0 to full in an hour and 20 minutes while using the device.

This is one of the most underrated features of the OnePlus 3 in my opinion. With other devices, hotspotting or even texting while charging meant I would get less battery life once I would unplug to head out or head back to whatever destination. I work and study full time, and I am constantly on the go, so having my primary device charge fast with no exceptions nor downsides is something I personally appreciate. The biggest downside to this, however, is that you need both the OnePlus Dash Charger and the included cable to obtain not just this functionality, but any sort of fast-charging. If you want a car charger, too, your only option is OnePlus’ offering which is rather expensive and with limited availability. You will also not be able to fast charge out of powerbanks until (and if) OnePlus releases or licenses a specific Dash-compliant powerbank. If you can live with these constraints, the OnePlus 3 will bring you the best charging experience on Android. Just don’t touch the charger while it does its thing!

Audio

Single Speaker (Bottom Firing), 3.5mm Jack

OnePlus has not been particularly renowned for audio, and it’s no surprise that the OnePlus 3 doesn’t break this trend. Truth be told, it’s usually the more premium-focused manufacturers that pack in great DACs/AMPs and quality speakers in their flagship devices, with only a few exceptions aiming for hi-fi audio at the OnePlus 3’s price-point (such as last year’s Axon). Basically, the OnePlus 3 can firmly be placed in the “average” part of the spectrum, but that doesn’t mean that the audio experience isn’t at least better than what OnePlus offered previously or what you’d expect out of a $400 phone.

Speaker Samples (Maximum volume, same distance from Blue Yeti Microphone)

There is a single bottom speaker on the OnePlus 3 (and thankfully, no deceitful “extra” non-working speaker grill) that can get decently loud with minimal distortion at the highest notches of volume. The position of the speaker makes it harder to cover when holding the device in landscape over other devices like the Note5, but it still does not compare to the front-facing speaker of phones like the Nexus 6P. Ultimately, you get a rather standard audio solution here that is not well-fitted for a quality media experience without headphones.

With headphones, audio is sharp and clear with good bass and it is overall pleasing, without any special merits nor nuisances. It’s worth noting that the profile selection and MaxxAudio optimizations of the OnePlus 2 are gone, likely because they were not very fleshed out features, especially when factoring in the unimpressive audio experience of the device as a whole. The OnePlus 3 keeps it basic and keeps it “good enough”.

Microphone Samples (Same distance from speakers, OnePlus 3 followed by Nexus 6P and HTC 10)

Likewise, the microphone and call quality are good with no issues on either side of the call, no odd feedback or inconveniences. You can hear the samples above to get a sense of comparison with other devices; Subjectively, I’d say the microphone is slightly worse (and more uneven) than the one found in those flagships. In summary, I wouldn’t expect much out of the OnePlus 3’s audio. This being such a tinker-friendly device, it likely won’t be much of a hassle to find and optimize the audio experience to your liking through modifications such as ViPER, but if you are looking for an audiophile experience, your best bet is getting a Galaxy device like the Note5 or the HTC 10.

Quick Miscellaneous Facts & Thoughts: 

• The vibration motor is rather weak, especially on system feedback like the navigation keys. You can use Xposed modifications to tune this to your liking, or turn them off from the settings.
• The car charger has very good build quality, and looks nice. You’ll probably need an extra Dash Charger cable in your car at all times for it, though.
• When you unlock the bootloader, you’ll be greeted with an interactive splashscreen every time, which allows you to quickly boot into recovery or the bootloader through a neat GUI. It’s also full of typos and there’s a placeholder link ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ .
• The phone is a Cat 6 device (despite the x12 modem in the 820), which means lower speeds of “only” 300/50 Mbit/s. Luckily, there is VoLTE and Wi-Fi Calling support at least (the latter did not work on my T-Mobile network).
• Think twice before flashing TWRP until/unless you need it, the Stock Recovery can be pretty annoying to get back without official recovery tools.
• The built-in screen protector is prone to fingerprints and oil, and it doesn’t cover the screen from edge to edge, which can take away from the visual experience.
• The unboxing experience is, as always, top-notch.
• The style covers can be quite snugly (some more than others), so be careful when removing them — the wood ones can easily bend more than you want them to.

Future Proofing & Development

When it comes to developer support and future proofing, the phone has quite a legacy to live up to. Luckily, the odds look to be in favor of the OnePlus 3, dare I say even more so than with the previous flagship. The OnePlus 3 is a device that is easily unlockable, with no codes or hassles needed to free the device. Moreover, OnePlus included a flash-friendly stock recovery that’s easy to operate, and a boot screen that let’s you access the bootloader, whatever recovery you went for, or keep on booting, through an optional GUI (key shortcuts still work). Software-wise, the OnePlus 3 is as easy to root and flash onto as it gets.

When it comes to developer support, OnePlus has welcomed devs with open arms, and shortly after releasing the OnePlus 3 they set up a github for easy access to device trees and kernel sources. The company further encourages experimentation through its warranty policy, which will let you flash without repercussions and also ignore the “YOUR WARRANTY IS NOW VOID” messages traditionally found on our forum’s opening posts. As far as actual development goes, we know that OnePlus has provided devices for developers like Franco in the past and will most certainly continue to do so. They also helped recognized developer Grarak release an unofficial build of CyanogenMod on the week of release, before any customer had the device reach their doorstep.

If you head over to the OnePlus 3 development subforum, you will already find a healthy selection of ROMs and Kernels, including easily-recognizable names such as AOSPA, Resurrection Remix, and Exodus among others, as well as custom kernels like the ever-popular ElementalX. Keep in mind that, for now, these haven’t adopted Dash Charging, as the binary blobs will be released sometime after July so that custom ROMs and Kernels can benefit from the functionality (otherwise, you’ll be stuck with slow charging). You can also find mods, themes and good apps in our forums to complement your OnePlus 3 experience, as well as timely update zips and tools.

The hardware itself lends itself to longevity thanks to the phone’s beefy specifications, plus the inclusion of NFC for the increasing popularity of mobile payments and the now-standard USB Type C that keeps reaching new devices. The 1080p AMOLED screen means that you won’t be getting much out of the OnePlus 3 for VR purposes, though, and the phone’s construction means replacing the battery will either take you a good disassembling session of some cash out of pocket.

Firmware and general software updates, too, are worrying on the OnePlus 3 given the company’s track record. The OnePlus 2 received Marshmallow over half a year after its release, and we hope that they step up their update (and patch) game for the OnePlus 3. It’s a pity, really, because Oxygen OS did improve over time and it’d be great to see the company squash the last few issues on the OnePlus 3’s software. I wouldn’t buy into a OnePlus device expecting timely updates at this point, nor until the company states their intentions to support the phone timely and firmly — though they’ve been quick to address the phone’s issues, which gives me a sliver of hope that they’ll prove me wrong. In any case, I am confident that the development community will be quick to bring great and up-to-date software to the OnePlus 3 in one way or another. If official and timely software support is important to you, then carefully assess the pros and cons before buying this device given OnePlus’ history.

Final Thoughts & Conclusion

OnePlus has managed something commendable with the OnePlus 3: this device cuts down on the compromises of last year’s flagship in order to deliver an experience that, in most respects, isn’t held back by bad decisions or shoddy execution. This isn’t to say that the company has created a perfect device – far from it – but the flaws that the OnePlus 3 hasn’t managed to squash truly pale in comparison to the overall value of its package, unlike with last year’s flagship.

The OnePlus 2, by contrast, managed to botch the momentum the company was enjoying after their highly-successful OnePlus One. That device somehow brought regression on every aspect that its forefather excelled at — battery life, performance, software & developer support. The Snapdragon 810, in particular, really held back the device even more so than it held back the rest of that smartphone generation, with noticeable throttling issues and easy-to-spot thermal constraints. The design of the OnePlus 2 was criticized for many of the things that the OnePlus 3 improved upon, too, and this device ultimately feels more-consciously planned and built, instead of blunt and rushed. The OnePlus 2 pretended to be a premium “2016 flagship killer”, but it couldn’t amount to half of what other 2015 devices accomplished. This newest OnePlus phone does indeed give other flagships a run for their money.

For $400, you are getting the best internal specifications currently available as far as processor, RAM and storage go. The camera hardware is also very strong, even if its implementation ends up somewhat underwhelming. The speakers are fine for a phone at this price range, and the exceptional Dash Charging washes away the bad mouth taste that the OnePlus 2’s horrifically slow top-up time left behind. There are many thoughtful additions here and there, some old and some new, some hardware and some software, and ultimately this feels like OnePlus’ best-designed user experience, down to the last detail. One could always ask for more – expandable storage, removable batteries, etc – but the device ultimately redeemed the poor decisions the company made throughout 2015 (such as the exclusion of NFC) while still upping the value of the product.

And even though this phone delivers OnePlus’ best user experience yet, a few expected specifications didn’t make the cut, like a 1440p display. This isn’t to say that these are necessarily compromises — if our community is anything to go by, there is a huge chunk of people that do not embrace 1440p just yet for one reason or another. But if you do care about pixel density and are considering a purchase, the OnePlus 3 is a phone that you will likely want to try out and inspect beforehand, as the 1080p AMOLED display suffers in this regard more so than 1080p phones with different screen technology. Luckily, the saturated calibration the device has shipped with has been corrected in the latest (stalled) OTA, and the results redeem one of the most criticized aspects of this device.

The RAM management decisions, too, received a lot of flak — and, in my opinion, rightly so. OnePlus had advertised this device’s app-holding capabilities specifically as a result of its mighty RAM setup, but it was quickly shown to be lacking. Once more, OnePlus had to quickly address the issue and the latest software also brings RAM management improvements, which we noted in the sections above. Even then, I still feel like OnePlus is underusing its flagship’s RAM, as it now behaves like other phones in this regard, but not necessarily better (and certainly not 6GB-better). Ideally, the company would release an update with “preset” memory management options so that the user ends up gaining more control over the device if he/she chooses to stay on Oxygen OS.

And there are many reasons to stay on Stock — OxygenOS is lightweight, has good aesthetics and useful (if rudimentary) customization options, thoughtful features, and its additions can be ignored by those who want a more vanilla experience. Those that do want to venture into further tinkering, however, will find that they have a lot of control over the OnePlus 3’s hardware and software, virtue of OnePlus’ openness to the development community. With a healthy amount of custom ROMs and Kernels popping up, some from prominent names in the community, we should expect the OnePlus 3 to keep devs and flashaholics entertained.

And that last bit is, perhaps, shines a light on the reason why I enjoyed my time with the OnePlus 3, and why I’d recommend it to those looking for a new device to sate their tinkerer lust: for $400, this phone brings one of the best hardware packages for the enthusiasts willing to make the most out of it. Those who want to break free of an OEM’s chains or carrier’s shackles and fully explore Android will find a trusty companion in the OnePlus 3, which has the right (OP) gear to carry you through whatever quest you set out for yourself. With ample processing power in a thoughtful package, the OnePlus 3 is the perfect canvas for the spec-hungry tinkerer — but with the condition that you can live with the relatively minor mishaps of this $400 phone. The OnePlus 3 does not cater to traditional trends and does not cater to specific niches. It’s just an unassumingly solid device that let’s you mold and shape the experience to your liking. It doesn’t try to be a 2017 flagship killer (thankfully), and once or if you look past its pixel density and the more average of its components, you’ll find a tried and true smartphone, with no shiny bells and whistles but also no arbitrary gimmicks nor restrictions. For $400, that’s something worth settling down with.

Elephone’s latest device has arrived at a very reasonable $200, trying its hand at a premium design for the price bracket. But packing a 2014 SoC and just a 2100 mAh battery, can it hold up to today’s alternate budget phones? I aimed to find out.

The official specs state 145g, I weighed the device and found it to weigh 22g more than this.

Design & Build Quality

Elephone have marketed the S3 as having zero bezel to the sides and I have to give it to them, they are very impressive bezels. I have always been an advocate for some bezel to the sides just for “gripability” — however, having had a chance to spend some time with this phone, I am happy to say I am sold on the concept and it has a great aesthetic. Only having the edge of the phone holding the display in place makes the phone appear very thin and much taller than it actually is, giving the impression of a much larger display than the 5.2” affair included, which is good for users with a preference towards using their phone one handed. A thick layer of 2.5D glass sits upon the display and while it looks and feels great it also casts a shadow on the screen below it near to the earpiece, and one of the sides depending on where your nearest light source is. The feel of the 2.5D glass far outweighs the slight distraction of the shadow.  Because of the quite-thick layer, the screen curves sharply at the edges.  This makes the phone easier to hold, however, given the very narrow edges. It gives a similar (but less premium) feeling to the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge, without an actual curve to the display, although it does distort the image at the edge giving it the appearance of a slight curve. 

Unfortunately, the screen has some instantly noticeable flaws. Upon turning on the device for the first time, a single dead pixel stood out glaringly against the black of the boot animation and stayed there with a permanent green against an otherwise clear and vibrant display. The second major issue with the display is with the edge, it is apparent that the display has been pried into place during manufacturing due to small fractures in groups along the right-hand side of the display. Through these tiny cracks along the narrow bezel light constantly bleeds through, really making them stand out even in sunlight.

This minor damage concerns me as they could be potential starting points for cracks after a gentle knock at some point in the future, however, this is pure concern and I have no way of saying for sure. These two issues are the only flaws in otherwise solid build quality. I was more let down by this than I normally would be, every OEM has the occasional faulty device which is most often dealt with a return and replacement, however, I have also seen the Elephone site where when describing the S3 they had the following to say:

“In order to create the true bezel-less design, the difficulty in craftship was ignored, even if the rate of non-defective product was 10% and the product costs increased by 900%. Any impossible is worthy to become the impossibility through our efforts for giving you a perfect visual experience.”

The message that I (possibly mistakenly) took from this was that their QC would be exceptional and I would be assured an all round sturdy a non-defective product, but that simply was not the case. This was why receiving a usable-but-defective device let me down more than it would have normally, where a return and replacement would be the usual solution.

Adorning the back are the square camera, flash and fingerprint sensor. The camera protrudes just a mm while the fingerprint sensor and flash are inlaid ever so slightly.  The choice to go with a square for each of these certainly highlights them against the curve of the back. On the bottom of the device, you will find 2 grills of 6 holes, with a speaker behind the right-hand one (yes, it’s that bad practice again). Between these is the micro USB port capable of charging at 2A. The sides of the device are flat and slightly chamfered at the back, and bring to mind images of other popular devices, which here is by no means a bad thing. It ultimately looks well-built and professional.The phone itself feels very solid, with the metal back not giving at all. There are no apparent rattles or movement within the unit (we have to point this out for budget phones), the power and volume buttons sit well in the unit and can be described as very “clicky” giving a definite tactile feel when pressed. On the other side of the unit lays the SIM tray which thankfully sits perfectly flush to the side of the phone. The antennae bands are flush against the unit and while they are visible they cannot be felt when running a finger down the back of the unit merging seamlessly with the sand-blasted “anodic oxidated” back.

All in all the phone looks and feels great, the small screen size coupled with the exceptionally-crafted body give off an elegance rarely seen from phones in this price bracket. But like when someone tells you not to think of something, try as I might I can’t stop noticing that single green pixel, or those flaws in the screen. I assume these defects will be a deal breaker to many of you, so keep in mind they might just creep up on your unit.

Software & UX

As far as the software is concerned, I found the entire experience to be enjoyable as the ROM is very close to the concept of stock. An outlier is Elephone’s custom launcher, which is similar in many regards to Xiaomi’s MIUI and Huawei’s EMUI, both which feature square icons and lack an app drawer does not have to be used and is not set as default, meaning upon the first boot it asks whether you wish to use Google’s Launcher3 or Ele Launcher. I’m sure that, like myself, many readers here will have a preferred custom launcher anyway;  as the Google Play Store is included (a common grey area for Chinese OEMs), if I were to continue using this device I would likely never see either of these launchers again regardless. Although Ele Launcher has just enough bugs for me to want to avoid it as possible (see below).

A feature I quickly learned to appreciate was the ability to swipe left and right on the fingerprint sensor to cycle through homescreens of the Ele Launcher. Utilizing the fingerprint sensor for simple navigation is one of my favorite features from Huawei’s EMUI where it allows the opening and closing of the notification tray. Something I would love to see in future updates is the ability to scroll using just the fingerprint sensor.

Launcher aside, the phone is very lightweight when it comes to software, there are only two additional apps present on the device that could even come close to being called bloatware. The first is “ELE Xender” (14MB), which as far as I can tell is just Anmobi’s Xender app, which can be used to transfer files quickly between devices at a speed faster than Bluetooth without using WiFi or Mobile data. I am not sure the significance of the ELE at the beginning of the name and can only assume it is part of a licensing deal. The second additional app is “Service” (5.6MB) an app that brings up a contact form for Elephone and options to open their forums and website, which could be useful if you ever have a question for them but is likely going to be left unused in the vast majority of cases; nevertheeless, it’s good for filing bug reports quickly and simply (and for this you might need it). Both apps can be disabled but not uninstalled without root (if Elephone’s previous devices are anything to go by, rooting is as simple as flashing TWRP and then Super SU).

The S3 ships with the 2014 MTK6753 SoC, comparable to the Snapdragon 615 with a few minor differences, including a limitation of just 1920*1080 when recording due to the Mali T720 GPU.  One benefit of a MTK processor is the inclusion of some additional features not typically found built into Snapdragon, Kirin or Exynos devices, which include scheduled Power On & Off, which lets your phone turn itself off and then back on again according to your schedule.

Finally, 3GB of RAM is adequate for all most all day-to-day usage and while it may appear to be low next to the likes of the OnePlus 3 which showcase 6GB, it is still worth remembering devices such as last year’s Samsung Galaxy S6 had the same amount of RAM. Storage is limited to just 16GB (12GB usable), however it can be expanded by an additional 128GB using the SD card slot located in the SIM tray.

For general usage, while scrolling or typing the phone runs smooth, start to perform other tasks such as entering sub-menus or apps and you will begin to see skipped frames and jumps.

Final Thoughts

The S3 is not likely to see a huge development backing, long term OTA updates or security updates, however at just $200 the device certainly does look and feel like a far more expensive phone. The combination of close-to-stock Android and smooth performance gives a very enjoyable experience; however, I was unable to shake my disappointment at the issues with the display and some of its bug. I would have expected better from Elephone, frankly.  The extremely low capacity battery allows for light usage all day, but if you plan on attempting to run games or other power intensive apps (like Pokemon Go) then don’t expect it to last you past the evening.

Xiaomi has been riding waves of success in the Indian market, with very successful products like the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 and other disruptors like the Mi 5.

We reviewed the Redmi Note 3 Snapdragon 650 variant recently, and the phone left us mightily impressed in a product segment that sees some of the heaviest, most competitive price wars in the market today. With the Mi Max, Xiaomi is pitching the innards of the Redmi Note 3 in a product segment that sees virtually no competition from all the major OEMs.

Can the Mi Max fill in a rare bracket with a value that none can top, if they dared to try at all?

In this review, we’ll take an in-depth dive into the Xiaomi Mi Max. Rather than listing specs and talking about how the experience felt, this feature attempts to provide a thorough look with contents relevant to our reader base. At XDA, our reviews are not meant to tell a user whether a phone is worth buying or not — instead, we try to lend you the phone through our words and help you come to the decision by yourself. Before getting started, let’s get the specification sheet out of the way:

Our review unit is the base Snapdragon 650 variant with 3GB of RAM.

 Index

• Design
• Software
• Performance
• CPU & System
• GPU & Gaming
• Memory & Storage
• Real World Performance
• Camera
• Display
• Battery Life
• Audio
• Development & Future Proofing
• Final Thoughts & Conclusion

Design

The Mi Max is a device whose first impressions primarily revolve around one core aspect of the device: it’s physical dimensions. The device is huge, if you take the average smartphone size in the market as the point of comparison. Most of this hulking body is comprised by a 6.44″ display, as the device boasts of a very impressive 74.8% screen-to-body ratio. For comparison, the OnePlus 3 has a screen-to-body ratio of 73.1%, while the Nexus 6P goes down further to 71.4% and the Redmi Note 3 is up at 72.4%. The bezels on the device are quite reserved, and we’ll touch on this in a bit.

Once you do look past the size of the device, you’ll notice that the design language on the Mi Max is similar to the one found on Xiaomi’s Redmi Note 3, but there is a separate sense of personal identity to the Mi Max.

The Redmi Note 3 sported a single-piece metallic back and side frames, with plastic caps on the top and bottom, and the Mi Max is identical in that regard. But the Max has much more of a brick-like appearance to it, as there are more flat edges than rounded ones. The side frame of the device is flat with thin chamfers on both sides. Where the chamfer ends on the back, the device curves gently to meet the mostly-flat back. The end result is a device that honestly feels like a sheet of metal. The slight curves on the side edges do help a bit in holding, but you’d still be using up most of your hand in making sure you have a decent grip on the device, so the gains are marginal.

The curves do give the device an illusion of being thinner that it actually is. At 7.5mm in thickness, the Mi Max is just 0.1 mm thicker than the OnePlus 3. The numeric figure and the perceived thinness of the phone is astounding when you consider that there is a healthy 4,850 mAh battery inside. The weight of the device, at a good 203 g courtesy of the aforementioned battery, felt a bit disconcerting at first because of how thin the device looks. I am used to holding heavy devices, with the Elephone P8000 that I reviewed coming in at the same 203 g for a 5.5″ display device. But the weight distribution on this one threw me off and took a bit of time to grow acclimatized to. The device does not feel unevenly chunky, but evenly-weighted across the entire physical dimension which in turn is pretty expansive. So if you have the device rested on your palm, you may get the sensation that the phone would topple over (but it didn’t thankfully).

The Mi Max has curved sides and is quite thin. Notice the 3.5mm jack for an estimate on thickness

Moving on to the individual elements of design on the phone, the front of the phone is rightfully dominated by the display. The earpiece is up at the top, flanked by the identical holes on either side — one houses the proximity sensor and the ambient sensor, the other the front camera. On my white color variant, there’s a good sense of symmetry on the front of the device that Xiaomi obviously intended, which becomes apparent when the notification LED lights up from below the colored pane, instead of having its own uncolored circle. The bottom of the device sports the capacitive buttons (with backlight support) for UI navigation. Curiously, the buttons on the sides are closer to the central axis instead of being towards their respective corners. This is presumably to help in reachability in case you could use the device one-handed.

The back of the Mi Max is largely barren. There’s the Xiaomi logo towards the bottom. The fingerprint sensor is towards the top, while the rear camera and the dual-tone flash occupy the upper-left corner. The placement of the fingerprint sensor is a minus point for the device — the sensor itself works wonderfully, but it is placed poorly for a device that wasn’t ever going to be easy to use with one hand. It would have worked much, much more painlessly had it been placed a tad bit lower at points where it would be easier to access for people with medium sized hands. Better, a front fingerprint sensor like on the Xiaomi Mi 5 would have worked a lot better than a rear fingerprint sensor. If on the front, you wouldn’t need to pick up this behemoth and wiggle it around on your palm in order to unlock it. The placement spoils the convenience aspect of the fingerprint sensor, and I was left wondering if I really needed a fingerprint sensor with such hassles. This particular experience is in stark contrast to the Redmi Note 3 and other phones that I have reviewed, where the sensor was placed perfectly for their use cases.

The left side of the device is devoid of any buttons, but houses the hybrid SIM tray. The top of the device sports the 3.5mm earphone jack on the left, the IR blaster and the secondary microphone hole. The right of the device is home to the volume rocker and the power button. The power button was within thumb’s reach for me, but the same could not be said about the entire volume rocker. The response on the buttons was excellent however, and there is no room for any wiggle. The bottom of the device has symmetrical holes for the speaker grille, but only the right side houses the speaker. The primary microphone is likely hidden on the left hand side holes. The micro-USB port occupies the middle position between the two ends.

There isn’t too much to complain about the design aspect of the Mi Max which isn’t directly a consequence of the phone being large (including my complain on the fingerprint sensor within this). While the device feels like it could bend and snap, it did not when I gave it slight tugs. The thinness of the device and its height and width may give the impression that the phone might be malleable, but it retained its shape throughout my usage. Even when placed in my front thigh pockets in my jeans, the phone survived with no deformities to its shape or any sort of bends. Due to the sheer size of the phone, it does stick out from jeans and may cause you discomfort if you tried to bend at the waist. But the device itself was as strong as phones could be, and there was no bend-gate issues with me so far.

It’s not all flowers though, because I did have one complaint with the phone that wasn’t about its size: black bezel borders make an appearance on this phone too. There’s a thin back strip running all around the display, giving the screen a framed appearance when the screen is on; and an illusion of absolute minimal bezel when it isn’t. What’s most annoying about this is that the actual bezels (or more appropriately, the lack thereof) on this device are really damn impressive — we even praised the awesome 74.8% screen-to-body ratio of the device in the starting paragraphs! Considering that people who would buy this device would be heavy media consumers to appreciate such a large screen, the presence of the black bezel border is befuddling since it does nothing but distract. I even wished there was more bezel on the device to aid in gripping, but I sorely wished that it wasn’t a different color than the rest of the front. The Xiaomi Redmi Pro has bezels on its marketing materials so far, so this trend might be on its way out.

When OEMs insist on two different colors on the front, giving us the Black Bezel Border

Overall, the theme of the design on the Mi Max is that you need to know firsthand that a large screen is your first priority. Users who buy this device based on the internal specs and assume that they can get used to the 6.44″ screen will have a steep learning curve as they figure out how to handle the phone without dropping it. The phone is big, unapologetically and unabashedly. It’s the main selling point, and there’s no way to get around it. To appreciate the phone properly, you need to have big hands and physically big pockets (or a purse) because the phone is certainly not for everybody. I am 6′ in height, and can consider my hands to be medium sized and I certainly had issues while handling this Hulk of a phone. Using it one handed was an impossibility, and having it in my pocket and running was a difficulty. But, if you like it big, then the Mi Max is the way to go with no regrets. It’s a top notch Xiaomi device with excellent build quality and a premium feel that scores above its price level.

Software

The Xiaomi Mi Max runs on Xiaomi’s proprietary and closed-source skin, MIUI. On its Chinese launch, the device was promised to be running on MIUI 8 based on Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow. But considering that MIUI 8 continued to remain in Beta for a long time after the release of the device, we can’t 100% stand by this claim. The Indian variant of the device was released with MIUI 7, but based on Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow. Our device did go into a random bootloop for reasons still unknown, but we were able to fix it with the necessary files from Xiaomi. As a result, our review unit runs on MIUI 7.5.6.0 (MBCMIDE) on Android 6.0.1.

Wait, both MIUI 7 and MIUI 8 run on Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow?

Yes and no. It’s complicated. You see, the version of Android remains unaffected by the version of MIUI. So you can have any number of combinations with Android versions and MIUI versions, since updates for MIUI run independent of the Android version.

So there are Xiaomi devices that received the MIUI 7 update, but still continue to remain stuck on Android 4.4 Kitkat (Redmi 2 Prime), while some like this Mi Max are on Android 6.0.1 on the same MIUI 7. And then, MIUI 8 will arrive on Android 6.0.1 for the Mi Max. [A “trick” to recognize the Android version in the Stable MIUI ROMs with a simple glance is to see the starting alphabet for the builds — Kxxxxxx is Kitkat, Lxxxxxx is Lollipop, Mxxxxxx is Marshmallow].

So how disparate are features then? One would assume that the same MIUI version (MIUI 7) on Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow (Mi Max) would have a lot of difference than on Android 5.1 Lollipop (Redmi Note 3). But that is not the case. So similar is the experience of MIUI 7 on the Mi Max with the Redmi Note 3, that my previous indepth review of MIUI 7 stands applicable to the experience on the Mi Max as well. I will note down any differences or additional features in this review, along with some of my qualms with MIUI not covered in the previous review. But for the most part, it’s the same experience.

One of the biggest negatives that I found with my MIUI 7 experience was how Permission Management is made unnecessarily complex to access. Permission management was not a very accessible feature in Android 5.1, so Xiaomi’s implementation could be excused in that instance since they practically made available to every user a feature that wasn’t intended to exist in that Android version. But with Android 6.0.1 embracing Permission Management with open arms, Xiaomi’s stagnation with the same way of accessing these permissions make things confusing, difficult and unnecessary.

Let me explain. In AOSP Android 6.0.1, a user needs to navigate to Settings > Apps and then click on any app to see the permissions it has. A click on the permissions options will then reveal a switch to deny permissions if the user deems necessary. This is management on individual app basis. AOSP also had you covered in case you wanted to control permissions on individual permission basis. All you need to do is to go to Settings > Apps, and then tap the gear icon on the right corner. This opens up a page where you select App Permissions, and then be treated to a list of different categories of permissions along with number of apps installed that have access to that permission. Both these approaches have a common origin in Settings > Apps, and feel familiar to anyone used to AOSP.

Example behavior in AOSP ROMs:

But on MIUI 7 (irrespective of Android 5.1 or 6.0), going through Settings > Installed Apps brings up an app list. Once you select an app, you can scroll down to the Permission Manager and click on it… and a blank page opens. This is where App specific permission management should exist, but for some reason, it doesn’t. Similarly, the gear icon in Settings > Installed Apps does nothing in relation to Permission Management.

So if you do need to access the Permission Manager, you need to find the Security app and click on the Permissions option and then again on Permissions to see the different categories of Permissions. It’s the same menu you’d find on AOSP, and it works about the same way. But it isn’t present where you’d expect it to ordinarily be. The total permissions needed by an app can be found nowhere in the menu — so if you wanted to check if any app was trying to reach up too high unnecessarily, you can’t.

Example of the behavior on MIUI 7:

Outside of this, I did not find anything that felt off to me and that wasn’t noted previously. The MIUI 7 build on the Mi Max improved and added a few features too. For example, the multitasking screen now defaults to open previews instead of just simple screens. There’s also Double-Tap-to-Wake functionality on the Max, and I really appreciated this addition as it meant that I could go without trying to reach the power button when waking up the device.

There’s also some features that although may have had good intentions, did not really work out for me in terms of convenience but your personal mileage may vary. First up is the Quick Ball functionality, which is very similar to the Assistive Touch functionality found in iOS devices and achieves similar purpose as PIE Launcher found in custom ROMs. You can move the “ball” around to any part of the screen as a floating button, and you can reconfigure the options within for commonly used actions, settings and even apps.

Another feature to re-iterate here owing to the large screen is the One-Handed functionality. You can resize the contents of the display to fit within smaller display diagonals anchored at either corner. If you have marginal difficulties in reaching parts of the screen, this feature can help you out in those pinchy moments. But if the phone felt too large for you and you have difficulty handling the physical dimensions eitherways (as was my case), this would do nothing for you.

To wrap things up, MIUI 7 on the Xiaomi Mi Max runs wonderfully overall. MIUI always has been a very different experience when compared to AOSP, and it continues to be so. There definitely is a learning curve to it, and combined with the learning curve that is the Mi Max itself (in terms of handling), the experience might be overwhelming to the average Android user if they did not know what they signed up for. But there’s nothing in MIUI that would denote a sluggish or a sub-par Android experience. A lot of the credit for this goes to the Snapdragon 650 SoC and the 3GB of RAM, but MIUI does keep things in check for an Android skin that does deep modifications.

Performance

If the Redmi Note 3 (Snapdragon variant) set any precedent for performance, it’s that you don’t need to be a flagship to deliver some stellar results. The phone went on to beat several known names in the low end right up to the mid end, and was even deemed to be better in performance than a few yesteryear flagships. The Snapdragon 650 SoC is no joke, and the combination of the Quad-core Cortex-A53 cluster clocked at 1.4GHz with the Dual-core Cortex-A72 cluster at 1.8GHz accommodates a wide variety of use cases with no compromises. The Snapdragon 652 ups the ante by adding in another two Cortex-A72 cores in the performance cluster. The Mi Max starts off the basic variant with the Snapdragon 650 SoC and moves on to the reportedly-better Snapdragon 652 in the higher variants, so the device should be on course to follow along in the footsteps of the Redmi Note 3 and even kick things up a notch.

CPU & System

The Mi Max is a niche product in the >6″ space, so there’s virtually no competition to the device around its own screen size. We can find other phones if we expand our search to include 6″ devices, but all of these devices belong to the upper end of the market, such as the Huawei Mate 8, ASUS ZenFone 3 Ultra (6.8″), Sony Xperia XA Ultra and the Samsung Galaxy A9 Pro. The closest in pricing is the 6″ ZTE Max Pro which was just released a while ago. Because of all of these, it is difficult to compare the Mi Max with similar devices, and so, most of its comparison would have to be SoC-centric rather than competition-centric.

As demonstrated on the Redmi Note 3, daily average tasks are just a breeze for the Snapdragon 650 and its Quad Core Cortex-A53 setups, and the same holds true for the Mi Max as well. Heavier tasks, such as intense gaming, also get done well with the Dual Core Cortex-A72’s . Most consumers would find no difference between the performance on the Mi Max and a flagship, because the Snapdragon 650 leaves very little room for doubt to creep in. On the value front, due to the higher cost of the device, it isn’t as performace-per-buck as the Redmi Note 3, but Xiaomi’s pricing ensures that the phone still trumps ahead in the competition on that end as well. My complaints with multitasking on MIUI were largely offset in this case by the additional 1GB of RAM over the Redmi Note 3 unit I reviewed, and I find that I have virtually nothing to complain about in the performance department. It works and it works well, what can I say.

Is it flagship grade performance based on the benchmark numbers? No. The benchmarks can only be destroyed by true flagships, like the OnePlus 3. The Mi Max is not a flagship, and it never pretends to be one. Scoring and comparison on the basis of pure numbers will put the device behind several Snapdragon 820-totting devices of 2016 which is no surprise. But Qualcomm has seriously upped the game for itself in 2016 after a disappointing 2015, so the Snapdragon 650 is still one of the best bets in the mid-end, upped only by the Snapdragon 652. It performs higher theoretically than most yesteryear’s flagships and comes up above current competition from mid-ends from Mediatek.

For the price tag of the phone, this is the best SoC you can get, hands-down. If you want to do heavy lifting with your device, it might be a better idea in the long run to opt for the Snapdragon 652 with its two additional Cortex-A72 cores in the performance cluster, providing that extra oomph when you need to stretch the limits. For most practical purposes though, the Snapdragon 650 works as good as the Snapdragon 652 and might be a better deal based on its lower price value (since the GPU is also the same on both).

GPU & Gaming

With regard to thermals, the Mi Max does come out behind the Redmi Note 3 (which was a thermal pleasure). Running the extensive GFXBench benchmark made the device get a bit warm, and that is the extent till which the device heats up. The device never gets beyond slightly warm even with other gaming scenarios such as NFS No Limits or FIFA 16 or Pokemon GO for that matter. Repeated benchmarking under these slightly above-ordinary temperatures reveals no signs whatsoever for aggressive thermal throttling, so this slight increase in temperatures is likely just accelerated heat dissipation. I even tried to “heat” the device by running these tests under heavy insulation, but the scores showed only a marginal variance with the device returning to its normal temperatures fairly quickly.

For the GPU, the Mi Max bears the Adreno 510 on both the Snapdragon 650 and the Snapdragon 652 variants. For the mid end where most screens still opt in for 1080p resolutions or lower, the GPU works very well. Since GPU performance is tied closely with the resolution of the display rather than its size, the 6.44″ Mi Max works just as well with the Adreno 510 as the 5.5″ Redmi Note 3 did; both being FHD displays.

Once again, the Snapdragon 650 continues its winning streak with the Mi Max, as it demonstrates that gaming is certainly not even near its weak point. Games work remarkably well, whether they are casual titles like Clash Royale or whether they involve heavy-lifting like Modern Combat 5. Again, it’s deja-vu, as the Max remains well within comfortable heat limits even under intense and prolonged sessions and poses no threat of interrupting your gaming fun with high temperatures of any sort. Once (or more probably, “if”) you get used to handling the dimensions and weight of the device, you will easily get lost within the gaming experience for hours at end — it’s smooth, cool to touch, jank-free and generally impressive.

On titles with softer graphics like NFS: No Limits and FIFA 16, the Mi Max maintained a steady 30fps during gameplay. With Asphalt 8 as well, the game stuck around on the 30fps cap despite being run on highest settings. With heavy graphics game like Dead Trigger 2, the Mi Max did fall behind as it failed to maintain a steady 60fps. While our benchmark app could not properly get an average, the fps hovered within the 50-60 range during gameplay.

RAM Management and Storage

The biggest complaint I had with the Redmi Note 3 that stopped from making it my daily driver was the paltry amount of RAM on the device. The 2GB of RAM on the base variant made multi-tasking a nightmare — apps closed if you exited them and opened anything else. One simply could not have any scope of decent multi tasking — games and the music player did not go together well, nor did YouTube and IM apps. After a while, you thank your stars that Notes and Calculator can at least co-exist. MIUI being a heavy and intensive OS also was as much to blame as the lack of physical capacity.

With the Mi Max, things are off to a much better start. The base variant of the Mi Max starts off with a 3GB LPDDR3 RAM variant while the top guy goes for 4GB RAM. The difference that an additional GB of RAM makes on MIUI can be felt as soon as you start playing around with the device. It now becomes practical to lock popular apps like IM into memory, and you can leave apps and return back to the last position a day later. It’s a whole different experience, which makes the Mi Max work towards providing a superior multitasking functionality than its closest brother. With the 4GB variant, I reckon things would be much more future proof seeing that our needs are evolving, not to mention the eventual multi-window updates to Android and MIUI.

But, the 3GB of RAM inside the Mi Max is still not neck-to-neck with the 3GB of RAM in my other AOSP-based devices. Granted, it is a very noticeable improvement from the 2GB of the Redmi Note 3 base variant, but pure numbers paint a rosy picture of the ground reality. If one goes by the number of apps that can be held in memory, the Mi Max lags out behind the pack mostly because of MIUI and its stock functionality. Most consumers will not notice it, but if you are someone who pushes your phone to its limits often, you will find that the device is not future-proof. For everyday tasks, the Mi Max works just as well as other phones. Also, there are settings inside MIUI that alter multitasking behavior, but we have stuck to the defaults assuming that most normal consumers would not know about these.

When it comes to storage, the Mi Max is back on track to doing things right. The internal storage is good in terms of speed and for its price range, with the Mi Max improving on the scores of the Redmi Note 3. It does not compete with the quick storage solutions seen in flagships that employ UFS 2.0, but I wouldn’t hold that against this device since it never meant to compete in that space. Storage space starts off at a healthy 32GB on the base variant, and kicks it out of the park with 128GB on the higher variant, so most of its target audience wouldn’t likely need an external card. But if they do, the Mi Max does come with microSD support, but you have to choose between using the card or the SIM card as the phone uses a hybrid slot for the same.

Also to note, the Xiaomi Mi Max does not support adoptable storage. With the base variant starting off at 32GB, this will be less of an issue. But we would rather have the option and not use it instead of having no choice at all.

Real World Performance

Real world performance of the Mi Max is top notch, despite the existence of MIUI which can be considered both, a feature and a limitation in the same vein. Yes, the skin is heavy, but its is heavily optimized for the hardware. Because of this, there are no lags or stutters within MIUI or while using the phone. Credit also goes to the hardware itself, as the Snapdragon 650 are some trusty shoulders to lean on for an experience that is indistinguishable from phones twice the price.

App opening speeds on the Mi Max are impressive considering that this is a device that is barely a mid-ranger. Again, this is no flagship, but the difference between this and a flagship does no justice to the price gap between the two. For example, Discomark clocked in an impressive 2.368s for opening through Chrome, Gmail, Play Store and Hangouts from cold boot states. This is behind the super-impressive 1.89s of the OnePlus 3 and the 2.057s of the HTC 10, but isn’t too far away either. Most users would not be able to tell the difference in the speeds unless they try to accurately monitor the timings since we are talking differences in fractions of seconds for cold-booting four apps. The difference between the current top dog of Android with 6GB of RAM and Snapdragon 820 with a clean AOSP ROM and a mid ranged phone with 3GB of RAM, Snapdragon 650 and a relatively-heavy MIUI skin is 0.478 seconds for four apps combined. So my incessant harping on about the Snapdragon 650 being legit has some fair basis to it.

Thermal throttling is non-existent on the Mi Max as well. The device slightly gets warm during prolonged use, but is in no way unusable in terms of heat, nor are there any signs of slowdown.

All in all, there would be no real complaints on the performance aspect of the Mi Max. It’s another solid performer coming out of Xiaomi’s stable, and for its price, it offers very good value. Multitasking is just the area where it can still continue to improve on, and is one of those cases in Android where more physical memory might be beneficial for the future. The present is served very well, making it a second time in a row for a reviewed Xiaomi device here.

Camera

The Xiaomi Mi Max comes with a 16MP rear camera with f/2.0 aperture, along with phase detection autofocus and dual tone LED flash. Xiaomi wasn’t forthcoming with the exact details on the sensor, and the camera entries in apps like AIDA64 were blank as well. There are sporadic talks with the sensor being the same as the one on the Redmi Note 3, but outside of this, I was unable to find any concrete and verifiable information. If the sensor on the Mi Max is indeed the same Samsung ISOCELL S5K3P3, then I wouldn’t go into the camera section with high expectations. The rear camera can shoot video at 4K @ 30fps which is an upgrade over the Redmi Note 3 which could only go upto 1080p @ 30fps. Slow-mo is available at 720p @120fps. The front is a 5MP selfie cam with f/2.0 aperture.

One recurring theme with the Mi Max camera was with over-exposure. The shots that I took often tended to be over-exposed in the brighter areas and slightly under-saturated overall. This happened a lot, with the remedy in sight being HDR mode. There are also hints of over-sharpening, but these are more apparent when you start zooming in. If the lighting is good, the camera works out OK at best — point and shoot isn’t the forte of the device.

The camera app and response times are both very good. The UI remains the same as seen on the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 as MIUI 7 retains it across devices (video of the UI from the Note 3 below). Opening the app and clicking photos can be done in a snap, but autofocus tended to take a second and half (and you can see the over-exposure in the resultant photos afterwards).

With videos, the tales of over-exposure continues. Videos are also visibly over-sharpened, moreso than the photos. Further, I did find a few quirky behaviors, one of which can be reproduced. First, during my first attempt at taking a video sample, the camera app started skipping frames very horribly after a few seconds. The uploaded video can be found here. The device was behaving normally outside of this — no heating, no thermal throttling, no rogue app eating into RAM or CPU cycles. I tried but I could not reproduce which left me scratching my head on what is happening.

The other quirky behavior with the video recording is that the camera resets the video quality every time the app is purged from memory. The default setting for videos is 720p, with steps up to 1080p and 4K. But if at all you close the camera app and the phone clears it out of memory, you have to consciously change the setting back to higher settings, lest you end up shooting videos in 720p and curse yourself later on. This is reproducible on my end.

A video sample in 4K is given below. The device does not have OIS and its dimensions and slim bezels make it difficult to maintain stability when you hold the phone at shoulder-level.

You can view additional video footage here: 1080p | 720p. Another video of over-sharpening (on 720p unfortunately, before I could realize that 4K was not enabled) can be found here.

Unfortunately, the camera review for this device has to be cut short. Weather conditions in my city (Mumbai, India) are adverse with torrential rains and water logging being a staple feature for the entirety of my review duration. The phone itself is difficult to handle physically with one hand under ordinary conditions (in landscape orientation, nonetheless), so you can imagine the difficulty when trying to balance an umbrella along with it. Coupled with water-logged streets, lack of IPX7 certification on the device and my fear of dropping the phone into water, and what you would have had would be poor excuses at me trying to judge the camera. Most of my images turned out to be poor representatives as the often overcast weather did not play well with lighting conditions, and I couldn’t decide if it was the cameras fault or of external factors (likely), thus affecting my judgement.

We’d like to revisit the camera section if external conditions become favorable in the future. My personal apology for the current situation, but alas, it could not be helped without delaying the review indefinitely.

Display

We’ve arrived at the main talking point of the Mi Max.

While most people feel comfortable within the 5″ – 5.7″ display categories, some phone manufacturers went the extra mile when they recognized that some demand existed for phones with even bigger displays. Thus with this thought, 6″ displays became a thing. Of course Xiaomi tries to trump this up, and this 6.44″ monstrosity is Xiaomi trying to capture a market that is too niche to be mainstream. So niche is this market that are a very few phones that breach the 6″ mark. Lenovo’s Phab lineup (6.4″ – 6.8″), the LeEco Le Max (6.33″), the Honor Note 8 (6.66″) are pretty much the only competing devices, and none of them are popular enough with the mainstream audience due to its niche nature. None of these ever get mentioned alongside popular devices, like say the Moto G3 or the OnePlus One or the Samsung Galaxy S7 and that is because the demand for such large displays is barely there.

That being said, the Mi Max gets the display right for the most part. A 6.44″ IPS LCD panel with a RGB matrix is what you get for the display and Xiaomi still stuck around with the FHD 1080 x 1920 resolution. For a display this big, Xiaomi had the opportunity to go for a QHD panel (4K would be absurd for pricing) while inflating their pricing a bit. Instead, they did not go down either the 4K or 2K route. 1080p still works very well for the Mi Max as the pixel density comes out to be 342ppi, still invisible individually to the naked eye (for most sets of eyes, at least). The result is that image is still clear and sharp, and the battery life and GPU impacts are not as high as compared to 2K. It’s also worth noting that LCD is the best option for big 1080p panels, as current full HD AMOLED alternatives with their pentile pixel matrix cut down the effective resolution dramatically.

Color accuracy on the Mi Max is on point as well, with minimal saturation by default. MIUI gives you options to play around with contrast and the white balance on the Mi Max, so you can choose to increase your contrast (the default was a bit lacking as blacks felt brighter than expected) and go between warm and cool white balance.

Display brightness left us with the same experience as on the Redmi Note 3. The max brightness is bright for viewing under sunlight, and the low gets very low for your late night texting scenarios. Auto brightness was a bit slow to react however, as it took between 2-3 seconds to adapt. MIUI also annoyingly needs you to pinpoint your exact location on the brightness slider before you can slide it around, so the “adapting” part could use some work. Viewing angles on the Max are excellent and color accuracy is maintained until extreme angles. This is certainly noticeable on this phone, where the multimedia experience often becomes a semi-public affair.

Certainly, the display size is what sets the Xiaomi Mi Max worth its form factor. It’s a joy to consume media on this device, although my wrists disagree when the sessions start dragging on. A kickstand case would be recommended for people who look forward to media consumption as the large display means that you can keep it farther away and still make everything out on the screen. It’s essentially a pocket-TV for people with large pockets. The speaker is a bit lacking (we’ll get to this in the audio section), otherwise the device would be perfect for an impromptu, casual YouTube playthrough with your crew.

Would a 2K display help the Mi Max? If there was ever a case to use a 2K display on a smartphone, it would make the most sense on something of this size. It feels like a wasted opportunity, and my opinion is personally divided on it. On one hand, a 2K display on a 6.44″ would have gains that are more noticeable than a 2K display at 5.5″. On the other, there are various other factors to keep into consideration, such as the pricing (competitively priced for early mid-range), GPU load, battery impact. For these factors, a FHD panel makes sense. Should Xiaomi have gone for a QHD display? I find myself unable to answer the “should” part, because the Mi Max is still a joy in its current state. Don’t fix what is not broken, and Xiaomi does exactly that. A 2K display could have brought in issues that would push the phone out of reach of this already niche audience, so hopefully Xiaomi has its research done right.

Battery Life & Charging

The Redmi Note 3 blew our collective minds off with its pure physical capacity of 4,000 mAh and an insane battery life of two days of moderate use. With the Mi Max, things are going up in the capacity department, but with the increase in screen size give a net positive increase in battery life?

The Mi Max comes in with a beefier 4,850 mAh battery. This is no “slight” increase in capacity — it’s a whole different league of its own in the number game. Just for comparison’s sake, the Moto Z comes with a 2600 mAh battery, the OnePlus 3 comes in with a 3000 mAh battery and the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 comes in with a 3500 mAh battery. Combine this beefy battery into a body that is actually pretty thin (but in contrast, heavy because of density), a processor that is quite power efficient, and a custom OS skin that does not like rogue apps running in the background. What you get is a recipe for success.

With a standard PCMark test setup, the Mi Max received a mind-blowing 8h 25mins of uninterrupted benchmark performance at maximum brightness and WiFi (and Sync) enabled all through. This denotes somewhat-heavy and real-world usage scenario (using system resources, not discrete or abstract calculations), which makes it better (but not perfect) to determine how much you can expect the device to last through. Within our testing, the device can easily crank out an 8 hour shift at work if all you did was play games on the device (because that is what we do at work, right?). This figure is hands down impressive, besting even the Redmi Note 3 by a decent 20 min margin despite the bigger display. Xiaomi even bested itself in one department I thought the Redmi Note 3 was an absolute boss.

Once I turned down the brightness to minimum and switched off WiFi to see how long the phone can do in minimal use scenarios, the Mi Max cranked out 18 and half hours of looping benchmarks, with nay a drop in performance. This is a good 2 and a half hour improvement over the Redmi Note 3 in similar situations.

Combined, both of these tests give us a good range of battery life to expect from the device. Depending on your use case, you can vary from 8.5 hours of screen on time to up to 18.5 hours. Throw in some quality standby times and I wouldn’t not believe someone if they said they can get 3 days without a charge on the Mi Max. During my own use case where I charge my device on a daily basis, I can find myself not dropping below 60% irrespective of how much I use the device. Even heavy Pokemon GO sessions, while not very comfortable ergonomically, did not disappoint in the slightest in terms of battery dropout. You can go out for 4 hours and still come back with enough juice to last you through the rest of the day. What makes this even more impressive is that the SoC is not an entirely power-saving SoC, so this extended performance consisted of no-compromises from the phone — no lags, no abnormal stutters, just top notch performance.

If you are someone that looks for insane battery life and performance that can help you enjoy that much life, the Mi Max will spoil you to the point where everyone else is simply not good enough. I went in with high expectations, and still got blown away.

But then, there’s the charging,

With a battery of this size, charging all of it was expected to be a downside and it is. Official specs of the device remain quite mum on whether the device sports Quick Charging of any sorts. The official charger in the box is a simple Quick Charge 1.0 brick with 5V at 2A for 10W, but this is likely to keep the price of the device down and to increase sale of accessories (common market practice). I did have a Quick Charge 2.0 charger at hand, so most of my results are based off that. We would recommend users to stick to the official charging accessories only, for their own safety.

With my QC 2.0 charger which can do a maximum of 12V at 1.25A for 15W, the Mi Max took around 3 hours and 40 mins on an average to go from a dead state to 100% charge:

The slow charging times are not really “slow” per se, even though the percentage values make it appear so. That is because the huge 4,800 mAh battery will often be sufficient even at 50% of the charge. An hour of charging from 0% will give you around 33% battery, which can last you through the day if you do light usage. 50% battery is reached around the 1hr 30min mark, and the device really starts tapering off after 85% since you can reach that much in 2 hours 40 mins but still take another hour to reach the remaining 15%. Do you really need to reach 100% battery? The answer is no, a firm one at that. The heaviest of human use cases would do just fine with 85% battery on this behemoth to last them through a day.

Does the Mi Max support Quick Charge 3.0? This remains a talked after topic, but there is little information officially from Xiaomi in that regards. Qualcomm’s official list of devices that support QC 3.0 does include the Mi Max, and other users on the Mi Forums have reported varying success on trying out QC 3.0 certified chargers to bring down the charging time to 1 and a half hours, but we would not recommend users to use unofficial charging accessories. Even though close to 4 hours in charging time is a lot, you really do not need 2-3 days of battery life if you charge your phone daily (but it is a nice backup option to have and not carry around a powerbank for).

Battery life was one of my favorite plus points on the device, but battery testing made me waste so much time. Not only is the phone unkillable, it takes as much time to charge up, so any error meant that I had to endure this extraneous exercise all over again. The device does draw mixed feelings, as an official certification and approval from Xiaomi for Quick Charge 3.0 would have given the phone some very good specifications for battery.

Audio

The big display on the Mi Max could be have been combined with a great audio experience to make the Mi Max a truly multimedia-oriented experience. But, after a series of great runs with other parts of its hardware, the audio is that area where the Mi Max could have been better. The speaker setup on the Mi Max is comprised of a series of identically-drilled holes on the bottom mid-frame, but only the set of holes on the right hand side house the speaker.

The speakers get just about get adequately loud for a personal experience, but anything beyond that is a sub-optimal. Since the speakers are bottom-firing, it’s not up to par when compared to phones (or even tablets for that matter) with front facing speaker setups, but it is at least better than those on the rear. If you are in a noisy environment, you’d definitely want to find a different source for audio. Distortion is present at the highest volume levels. So at its best, the Mi Max is a device that is just there in terms of the speaker experience.

The earphone jack is a much better companion to the multimedia experience as the quality is what we come to expect in the price range. It is noticeably better than starter-range devices and is competitive to experiences in the mid-range. Pairing the Mi Max with a good earphone is the way to go if you plan to binge watch a few movies (but get a kickstand for the sake of your wrists). There are no earphones included in the box, as is standard in the mid ranges in the market.

For the earpiece and the microphones, the Mi Max is good and at par with every other smartphone. It works as a phone and there’s no room to complain on the quality. The phone is difficult to hold and talk for long durations, but this is a consequence of the size of the phone rather than something that is affected by the earpiece or the microphone.

Future Proofing & Development

The Mi Max (Snapdragon 650) is internally quite similar to the Redmi Note 3. The RN3 had decent levels of custom development, including a few recoveries, kernels and most popular custom ROMs making their way over. Due to the popularity of the device, and its size and every other factor kept in mind, the RN3 SD650 variant fared quite well honestly. The MediaTek variant of the RN3 was not as fortunate though. The bootloader unlock procedure is also something that people do not look forward to, as you need forum activity for speedy consideration. On the whole, the RN3 is no OnePlus or Nexus, but it still does offer a good platform to tinker around in the very early price brackets of the market.

With the Mi Max, however, things do not appear as rosy. The first part that would likely impact the development scenario on the device is the niche nature of the product itself. The Mi Max cannot be considered a mainstream product, and the size of the device is definitely not for everyone. This works against the device and creates a negative feedback loop of sorts for those looking for an active dev device: the device is not popular -> fewer development projects -> fewer enthusiasts look forward to it and all over back again. Popularity of the device remains questionable with the general public, so you can expect a similar drop in the number of knowledgeable Android enthusiasts who will pick up the device (especially keeping in mind that the device does not really utilize the big screen outside of media just yet).

That does not mean that the means to develop on the Mi Max are closed off. The device fares well when compared to other Chinese devices. With the internals of one variant of the Mi Max (hydrogen) being so similar to the RN3 (kenzo), it is easy to port over resources for this variant from the ready stuff on the RN3. The other Snapdragon 652 variant (helium) will have some initial difficulties comparatively.

The bootloader on the Mi Max is locked from what I can derive from past experiences. My device was a review device and hence had an unlocked bootloader out of the box, but this is an exception scenario and not the norm. Regular consumer devices would be having a locked bootloader. The bootloader unlock procedure, as is detailed in several areas on the MIUI forums since it is universally applied to newer Xiaomi devices, tends to take time. This is an intentional step to dissuade loading of malware by resellers, and while we hope that it was quicker, we can understand and sympathize with the needs of the average consumer trumping over those of the Android enthusiast.

Further, TWRP builds are available for both the device variants over in our Mi Max subforums (hydrogen | helium). There are a few threads that claim to allow installation of a recovery on a locked bootloader too.

With regards custom ROM development, there is an unofficial CyanogenMod 13 build floating around, but since the source is something I can not verify, this will not be linked nor advised to flash. Official CyanogenMod 13 (or an unofficial build from a trustworthy source) may come to the Mi Max eventually as I do know of one device maintainer who has the device, but there is no ETA or promises on this end.

The situation for kernel sources for the Mi Max are not yet released. But some conversations with a few developers pointed that these will come soon. Xiaomi did release the kernel sources for the RN3 kenzo, and the Mi Max will also get it since it is a Snapdragon device. The only question relates to the “when” aspect of it. Again, we hope for a speedy release.

Also to note, it is difficult to completely hard brick and kill (in the absolute sense) a recent Xiaomi device with a Snapdragon processor. I ended up bricking my RN3 several times after my review when I was just casually messing around. But every time I “bricked”, I did end up resurrecting the device. The RN3 has a final test point method for recovering from “hard bricks” (it is not a hard brick if it does not mean absolute death of the device, in my opinion). You do need to open up the device down to the motherboard, so it is not exactly a beginner-friendly step. But it exists on the Redmi Note 3 (kenzo) and a similar method also exists on the Mi Max as well.

All in all, the situation is a bit worse off when compared to the Redmi Note 3 Snapdragon 650 variant, but the mainstream popularity of the RN3 is likely to be blamed for the headstart in the custom development scene. The paths to improvements do exist for the Mi Max — the device does have development potential and is not completely locked out or doomed in any way. It is just a matter of time and the device attracting some more developers and users for the development activity to really pick up the pace.

Final Thoughts & Conclusion

The Xiaomi Mi Max is an interesting device. It attempts to fit a gigantic screen in your hands, and then backs it up with some spectacular horsepower and battery life. The device then comes to you at a pocket friendly price, which is against its own pocket-unfriendly nature. The big screen is the reason why you should buy the device, and the big screen (and resultant big body) is the reason why you also shouldn’t buy the device.

Calling the Mi Max a phone would be a disservice honestly. It is not one. It is a phablet, and a proud one at that. This is a device meant for people with large hands, or for those who use their devices with both their hands majority of the time. I do not fall in either of those categories, so it was difficult for me to truly love and accept the Mi Max for what it was. Every time I picked up the device, I wished it was smaller despite its incredible screen-to-body ratio and thin bezels, which very clearly means that I am not the target audience of this device.

Let’s take aside the physical dimensions of the device and judge the Mi Max for everything else:

You get a fantastic SoC under the hood, backed up with a decent amount of storage and RAM. The GPU is a capable beast for its price, so games and other activities related to displaying content on the screen will give you no chance to complain on its performance. Thanks to the hybrid SIM slot, you can either go Dual SIM or choose a microSD card. There’s an IR Blaster on the phone, so you can also use the device as a universal remote in case you ever needed to. The device is also at a good starting point for third party development activities since the bootloader can be unlocked officially, albeit with a bit of effort. And lastly, the very large battery makes it so that charging the phablet becomes a very passive thought process instead of a habit or a daily ritual, just like from the days of feature-phones. Having a phone that can last through a whole day of usage or two, irrespective of the definition of the words “whole day of usage” across users, is something I give bonus points towards.

But the Mi Max also has a few weak points. Camera of the device seems to be the area where improvements can originate, as there are some flaws that become apparent early on. The display could have gone the whole QHD route, though I understand that there were reasons to not do so (and I agree with the minimal gains and their marginal nature, but that does not mean that everyone will be content with the FHD resolution display). Audio performance through the speakers could also have been better, as the current situation does not make the phablet fit for semi-public media consumption. MIUI 7 and Android 6.0 do not really utilize the screen size as much as I would have liked, but things may change for the better with MIUI 8 (or MIUI 9) on Android 7.0 Nougat whenever it lands on the device, making this slight negative to turn into a healthy positive. Charging speeds on the device are poor, but users have had varying results so I hope Xiaomi can at least point to an officially recommended charging speed, and if possible through software, improve on it.

Keeping the screen size aside, you do have to decide if you can live with all of the above pros and cons for a price tag of ₹14,999 ($225) for the base variant which was reviewed here. In my opinion, if it is just the internals that you are going for, the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 3GB RAM variant is the no-brainer better value at ₹11,999 ($180). X

iaomi’s insane value proposition in the Redmi Note 3 leaves little room for its other devices to compete, and the near identical nature of the insides of the RN3 3GB RAM variant and the Mi Max SD650 variant obviously tips the scale in favor of the Redmi Note 3.

The Mi Max Snapdragon 652 variant with the 128GB storage and 4GB RAM will cost you ₹19,999 ($300). The additional GB of RAM will help keep things future proof. But the gains from the Snapdragon 652 (versus the Snapdragon 650) are not very large and are noticeable in tasking scenarios only, and since you can use a microSD card, you do need to ask the question if you really need the internal storage and the performance bump.

Now, with the above said, factor in the screen size and you get a recipe for unmatched success. The Xiaomi Mi Max is a league of its own, and there is no available competitor in the (Indian) market as of right now that can try and dethrone it from claiming the pole position in this niche market. For its price point, not only do you get a phablet, you get a pretty good deal at that. You get similar value proposition as from the Redmi Note 3, but with a bigger screen. Media consumption is generally a delight, and I loved using my device for impromptu binge watching YouTube or showing off family pics in get-togethers. This is where the phone shines, where it makes the most sense, and this is its real selling point — the large screen.

Should you buy the Xiaomi Mi Max?

The answer depends on if you are looking for a big phablet. If 6″ feels small to you, the Mi Max will please you. I would recommend physically holding the device once at least before making your decision since the Mi Max is a niche product and there’s a good chance you wouldn’t have experienced many >6″ devices around. If the screen size is not your priority criteria, I would recommend going for the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3.

You can purchase the Xiaomi Mi Max in India from Xiaomi’s Mi Store.

The Xiaomi Mi Max was a mixed experience for me. I enjoyed it on the inside, but the device was just not meant for me. The device did open my eyes that my sweet spot for phones is 5.5″.

The Honor 8 is Honor’s newest flagship phone, now hitting the U.S. market and Europe at a competitive price-point. Offering excellent silicon and a glass and metal design for $400, the Honor 8 is in an interesting pricing bracket with even more interesting competitors.

Can this device honor its specifications and stay toe-to-toe with the new wave of affordable flagships?

In this review, we’ll take an in-depth dive into the Honor 8. Rather than listing specs and talking about how the experience felt, this feature attempts to provide a thorough look with contents relevant to our reader base. At XDA, our reviews are not meant to tell a user whether a phone is worth buying or not — instead, we try to lend you the phone through our words and help you come to the decision by yourself. Before getting started, let’s get the specification sheet out of the way:

 Index

• Design
• Software – UI
• Software – Features & UX
• Performance
• CPU & System
• GPU & Gaming
• Memory & Storage
• Real World UX
• Camera
• Display
• Battery Life
• Audio
• Development & Future Proofing
• Final Thoughts & Conclusion

Design

The Honor 8 marks an important shift for Honor in the realm of build quality, in particular because of the materials transition from the tried-and-true aluminum to a full glass coating. This comes at a time where other OEMs are trying their hand at a similar design, especially after the success of Samsung’s glass devices. But the latter were so renowned precisely because of the level of precision and attention to detail that Samsung could achieve due to their bleeding-edge fabrication process. The Honor 8 thus has a lot to prove in order to duke it out head-to-head with the more expensive devices that sport glass backs and metal trims. How does the Honor 8’s premium build hold up against the rest and at its price?

Let’s begin with the star of the show: Honor has tackled the challenge of producing a high-quality glass back design that feels both solid and comfortable, on a budget. The back of the Honor 8 has a slippery and clear glass coating, and it’d cover the entire surface if it wasn’t for the very subtle non-glass trim that serves as the interface between the metal edge and the actual glass pane. This facilitates the transition of materials, and Honor has made it flow rather seamlessly, as it’s only visible by keen observers. This creates the illusion of the glass back blending into the metal, and while visually it is just a trick, functionally it means that there are no sharp edges and the device is ultimately rather comfortable, with a slight curve that makes holding the phone very pleasant, even when holding it tightly (and you will often have to, more on this below). It’s also worth pointing out that there is no camera protrusion making this device extremely flat, and able to slide across tables at the slightest of angles.

The back is adorned by very tiny lines in radial patterns that allow the device to shine in interesting ways under sunlight.

The back is adorned by very tiny lines in radial patterns that allow the device to shine in interesting ways under sunlight, also virtue of a 15-layer construction, for an effect that’s rather original and seldom found outside of a couple alternatives. This is more evident on the blue variant, which produces different-hue blues that shine and bend across the surface. There’s also an Honor logo at the bottom, under the glass, in a silver font. Under it you’ll find the (rather tiny) text “powered by Huawei”, “Made in China”, and the Model number. Luckily the verbose part of the design is very small, and we’ve seen various devices hide all sorts of logos and certifications on their backs recently, so the Honor 8 isn’t alone here. That being said, this could be annoying to those that want a cleaner, more minimal design or dislike branding.

Above the center you will find the fingerprint scanner, similar to the circular “Nexus Imprint” that won our affection in 2015. There are a lot of good things about this fingerprint scanner, so stick around for the UX-centric sections of this review to learn just what makes it one of the best implementations out there. The fingerprint sensor is not covered by glass and it’s a different hue than the rest of the back, but it doesn’t look out of place and the silver trim nicely compliments all the metal and silver on the device.

At the very top you’ll find the double camera setup (no Leica cameras means no Leica branding), a laser autofocus slit, and a dual-tone flash setup. The arrangement is quite attractive and is one of the main attention-grabbers of the device’s design, as many people asked me throughout my review period just what this phone was, and why it had two cameras. Once more we must mention the lack of protrusion, a rarity in today’s mobile world.

The trim along the edge of the device is one of the better-realized parts of the phone. The metal band has a slight grainy look to it that produces a gradient effect when hit by light. It is very sturdy and also has two sets of rather thin chamfers, on both the top and bottom. These are as shiny as you’d expect and they tie in well with the rest of the phone’s design. The antennae bands are all around the bottom and on the sides, with the top only holding an infrared port and a microphone. The bottom holds the USB type C port, the 3.5mm headphone jack to the left, and one speaker grille to the right.

The SIM tray can hold both a microSD slot and a nanoSIM, and blends seamlessly with the edge (down to the grainy pattern). In my opinion, the feel of the buttons are disappointing. I hope this is only limited to my review unit(s), but even though both buttons are decently clicky, they felt somewhat loose and the power button in particular could rock with very slight finger movement. I asked others that have an Honor 8 if they had this issue, and most did not. Buttons in phones typically have wide variation due to issues with fitting due to the imperfectability of the manufacturing process at such a scale, but this being one of my pet peeves I opted for using the fingerprint scanner click to turn off my screen (more on this in the Software UX section). I do feel like other companies provide more focusing on ensuring less variation, though, as I’ve never had such a loose power button out of the box.

The front of the Honor 8 is conservative, if not a bit dull. It is well-executed nevertheless, and while there are no standouts, there are also no things to really criticize. The notification light is interestingly-placed on the right side of the speaker, which aids in minimizing the amount of elements on the front. The Honor branding at the bottom is clear, although I would argue capacitive keys (and the option to use them over software keys) would make better use of the bottom bezel. The top has the front camera and proximity sensor, as well as a speaker. The side bezels are thin for the 5.2 inch screen, and the black border around the display when it’s turned on is rather thin, resulting in an above-average screen-to-body ratio of around 72.5%. It’s also worth pointing out that the display is rather raised, more so than on other devices, which can often make it feel printed on. It’s technically 2.5D glass, but you won’t notice as the curvature at the very edge has a miniscule radius, so finding legitimate screen protectors shouldn’t be hard.

Software — User Interface

When I reviewed the Honor 5X back in January, the user interfaced packed with EMUI was one of the points that warranted more attention, as the experience resulting from Huawei/Honor’s aesthetic decisions is very different from what most users are used to through other skins, especially Stock Android. In a few words, EMUI is not the kind of UI you’ll easily grow to love if you are a fan of Stock Android, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t some things to love about its layouts, design elements and theming capabilities. We’ll take a look at each important System UI section and other areas of frequent interaction, avoiding subjective interpretation as much as possible.

By default, EMUI is an interface that completely trails away from Google’s Material Design guidelines and opts for its own design language, bringing a completely different experience altogether. This is first seen with the launcher, which comes with no app drawer for organization. The launcher has big and vibrant icons in its 4-column default, but luckily you can modify its grid size. Huawei’s iconography is full of rounded squares with muted non-primary colors, and the wallpapers that come with the phone resemble those of other flagships, in particular Samsung’s latest devices as seen below. There isn’t much in the way of customization, other than changing transitions, homescreen looping and opting for badge icons for unread notifications on a few stock applications. Other than that, you can choose to auto align apps or shake them to realign manually.

Swiping down reveals an app, contacts and messages search menu, as well as your recently-used apps, It’s a simple setup that works well, and there’s a further-simplified alternative as well in the settings menu. The launcher is an aspect that many of our readers are quick to swap for Nova or Action Launcher,  but for users wanting to keep it Stock there won’t be any headaches in the EMUI built-in solution — if you can tolerate the lack of an app drawer and the overall design language. The app opening transition of stock is the now-dated Zoom-In of earlier Android days.

The notification pane brings back the background blur by default, but this can be themed away (more on that below). It’s worth noting that it’s not dynamic blur as seen in a few elements of other OEM ROMs, it uses a screenshot of your screen and does not blur animated video, but this saves CPU cycles for a rather mundane task (and the alpha is tuned so that the background is not very visible anyway). Notifications are right-biased as the left area has a timeline for you to click tell the time of arrival, and for some reason heads-up notifications cannot be swiped to the sides for dismissals (which one can get used to, but we question the intent). At the top you will find a “shortcuts” (toggles) tab, and at the bottom left there is a “clear all” button. Swiping to the right or tapping on the shortcuts tab shows toggles and the brightness-slider. The toggles setup standard affairs except for a screenshot button, and it’s also worth noting that screenshots have edit, scroll capture and share shortcuts on the screenshot animation, for you to quickly act upon what you capture.

The recents menu is laid out differently than on stock, with horizontal cards and previews and with a “clear all” trashcan at the bottom, as well as a free RAM counter. Scrolling is smooth, but not necessarily fluid by design as it tends to make the center-most tab sticky. You can access App Info by long-pressing, but there is no tool-tip or animation prompting you in the right direction. Swiping up clears the application, while swiping down locks it down and prevents it from being dismissed by the “clear all” button. On every press, the app in the center will be your last-used app, to make multitasking easier (no last-app navigation bar gesture by default).

The iconography of EMUI is big in size, and in no way minimal. The battery indicator is laid horizontally, and the battery percentage is put beside it. With no readily-available System UI tuner, there is little room for notifications (tip: disable carrier logo from the right side in the notification settings, giving you room for 3 more notifications). However, something I learned to appreciate is that app notification icons in the status bar feature small, colorful icons dictated by the notification itself. This way, a Hangouts message displays the avatar of the relevant contact at the top, which makes it easy to know what’s what in your status bar, and whether your notifications merit a swipe down and quick glance or read. Under another design language, this would look out of place, but EMUI is so different and it ultimately doesn’t clash within its scheme.

The settings menu is colorful and a bit disorganized. There is no battery section, for example, and to access it one must dig through a few menus (Advanced Settings -> Battery Manager -> Consumption Level), and then a few more to arrive to the screen-on-time number that we love to keep track off. Ignoring the organization issues, instructions and feature descriptions are easy to understand, with visual aids that help understand some features — and this is good, because there are many.

The default color palette, iconography and blurry glass intrinsically clash with Material Design.

Applications also share the blurry glass and white clean look, and they have turned out easy to use during my review period. Of course, though, these can be replaced for different-looking alternatives. And the System UI itself has a useful theme engine that can help you change much of EMUI, including the notification bar and toggles color scheme, their icons, the settings menu iconography and palette, the launcher icons, and more. There are Stock Android themes, for example, which get rid of the blur in the notification panel. Ultimately, the layout is too different in most areas for this to feel remotely close to AOSP, and darker themes won’t make use of an AMOLED display given the phone’s LCD panel, but there are some themes worth trying out and this has personally helped me enjoy EMUI a lot more. The default color palette, iconography and blurry glass intrinsically clash with Material Design, but themes can minimize this by a large margin.

Software — Features & UX

EMUI is simply one of the most feature-packed user interfaces available. To jot down every tiny addition and functional advantage over Stock Android would take far more room than I am willing to allocate to this section, so I’ll focus on the fundamentals and every feature I believe users would care about. EMUI’s features change from revision to revision, so not everything is exactly as seen on the Mate 8, Honor 5X, and even the P9 from earlier this year. But in spirit, the ROM remains the same: it aims to offer everything you’d need, and then some.

Let’s begin with my favorite feature: smart key. You might recall that in my Honor 5X review I noted that one of my favorite additions to the fingerprint scanner was the ability to use it for extra functions, like tapping to go back or swiping down for the notification panel. You can still swipe down to access the panel, and also press it to take pictures, answer calls and stop alarms, but the fingerprint scanner is an actual button now, allowing for quick access to apps or functions with the screen on or off.

The fingerprint scanner is an actual capacitive button now.

Honor allows you to customize the button with tools voice recording. screenshot shortcut, or launch applications, which you can bind to single press, double press and/or longpress. The option to turn the screen off is, sadly, not present by default.

Luckily, you can use any “Screen Off” app and trigger it that way, although there is no way to disable double-press meaning single presses will always have a slight delay while the phone waits for additional input. This became my go-to way to turn off the screen given the lack of a stiff power button. It’s also worth noting that the fingerprint scanner is really fast, frequently unlocking my phone by accident while I unnoticeably slid my finger across its back.

At the toggles, you’ll find a few useful options including screen recording, ultra-battery saving (you are probably familiar with the concept by now), a “floating dock” that acts like an impromptu PIE menu (back, home, recents, screen off and RAM clearance keys), and an “eye-protection” mode which filters blue light to give you a sort of “night mode” as seen on other popular devices.

You can customize the navigation bar, and also add an “open notification panel” key to the right. There are other shortcuts in the form of motion controls, such as flipping to mute, picking up the phone to reduce the sound of alarms or calls, raising the phone to your ear to start or end calls, or tilting the phone to swipe through launcher screens (why? I am not sure). Then, you have knuckle gestures.

With them, you can use your knuckles on the screen to capture a normal, scrolling (very useful) or cropped screenshot, or initiate screen-recording. You can also use your knuckles to draw letters in order to open applications (letters ‘c’, ‘e’, ‘m’ and ‘w’, so four shortcuts in total). These work surprisingly well for the easier gestures and scrolling screenshots, although the app shortcuts and cropped screenshots are not as fluid.

You also have one-handed UI settings, including a mini-screen view triggered by swiping across the navigation bar, and a shifting keyboard accessed by tapping an arrow during text input. Huawei also incorporated its own voice controls, including voice wakeup to find your phone (“Dear Honor”) and quick calling which allows you to call by saying a contact’s name after pressing volume down while the screen is off. You can also answer calls with voice control and quickly get on speaker mode.

Huawei also incorporates “smart headphone controls”, which is an interesting take on the ability to control music through wired headphones with 3 buttons (action, volume up and volume down). It changes the volume up behavior to favorite a song when double pressing, and enable or disable shuffle by doing the same on volume down. The action button is then used for playback control with multiple taps, too.

The Honor 8 also comes with a smart remote controller app for it’s IR sensor, which is increasingly rare in today’s smartphones. Adding remote controls is easy and after the setup you’ll be managing your home devices without hassle. Honor also includes a batch of easily-replaceable apps like its own clock and e-mail client, and sadly bundles some applications such as Facebook, Twitter, Booking.Com, News Republic, Lyft, and Shazam. Whether these are bloatware or not is up to you (to me, they surely are), but know that you can fully uninstall them.

Suggestion: Look, but don’t touch.

You will also find a “phone manager” app that acts as a hub for your system health check-up. This includes quick access to “system optimization” to clear memory/cache (and kill backgrounds apps, of course…), a traffic manager to monitor your data (or add a lockscreen reminder), a “harassment filter” to block offensive keyword or specific phone numbers (triggered?), and a way to lock apps to your fingerprint or PIN so that others cannot access them. You can also choose which apps run while the screen is off, either protecting all or picking the ones you think won’t impact your battery life, or that have notifications you need. The system cleanup features are frankly useless, and Honor’s relationship with CleanMaster (affecting EU) makes me worry the company will further implement such systems. If you ask me, this an increasingly-annoying trend with OEMs skins.

Finally, there is the oh-so-important battery consumption section, which is missing from the settings for whatever reason. From here you can enable ROG power saving, which makes the phone run at 720p — something I really don’t recommend, given the savings are marginal and the pixel density drops from 423 PPI to 282 PPI, which makes a significant difference.  

Then you’ll have a power usage firewall for power-intensive apps (and notifications can warn you when apps are draining too much battery in the background), your battery history, and power plans. This last bit is very important and we’ll expand upon them on the battery and performance sections, but basically you can opt for a Smart profile that adjusts CPU and network usage for a reasonable balance, a Performance mode which allows the CPU to stay at higher frequencies, and an Ultra mode as mentioned earlier.

Performance

This phone comes with a rather impressive processing package for just $400. It is true, however, that at that bracket you begin to see devices sporting Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820. But the Honor 8’s processing solution is different than that of most competing chipsets, as it’s comprised of HiSilicon’s Kirin 950, the same chipset we saw in the Huawei Mate 8. Huawei released this chipset in late 2015, with just enough room to claim the performance crown for CPU prowess. The Kirin 950 packs an octa-core big.LITTLE configuration with four efficiency-focused A53 cores clocked at 1.8GHz, and four A72 performance-oriented cores.

The latter are the star of the show, as the Cortex A72 core is designed to provide up to 50% faster performance-per-MHz than the A57 cores which dominated in 2015. These cores are not only faster, but significantly more power-efficient, but the fiercest competition has also gotten up to speed with the Kryo cores in the Snapdragon 820. Coupled with the 16nm process size, the specification sheet sets high hopes for the SoC. The Honor 8 shares a similar GPU to that of the Exynos 8890, the Mali-T880. There is an important difference, however, as the Honor 8’s Mali-T880 MP4 features 4 cores as opposed to the Exynos 8890’s 12, although these have higher individual clock speeds as well. While this is the weaker aspect of the SoC, we found it still packs a worthy punch. So, how does the Kirin 950 as a whole measure up to the competition?

CPU & System

The Kirin 950 found in the Honor 8 benefits from the big.LITTLE architecture that began truly shining in the past couple of years. With smart global task scheduling to decide the utilized core arrangement at any given time, chipsets under this setup can achieve some impressive multi-core performance. This is precisely what we see with the Kirin 950: its single core performance as reported by benchmarks is lower than the competitions, but multi-core performance surpasses Qualcomm’s latest and greatest. When it comes to CPU-centric tasks in benchmarks like AnTuTu, the Kirin 950 does an excellent job at beating the Snapdragon 820 found in devices like the OnePlus 3. Overall, the CPU side of things is one of the better aspects of the Kirin 950 and the Honor 8 in general, as this is one of the main items to look forward to when looking for excellent performance.

While the Kirin 950 does great in abstract tests with discrete computations, it also does an excellent job at real-world oriented tests such as basemark OS II and PCMark. It does not achieve as high a score as its Huawei-branded brethren, but it still shows respectable results — OS optimizations play a big factor in this benchmark, and the overall score surpasses the average achieved by devices like the Galaxy S7, but does not quite reach the level of the OnePlus 3. The average is weighted down by the writing and photo-editing tests, though, and the latter is understandable given the devices’ less-powerful graphics capabilities. BaseMark OS II shows a similar story, but all in all this phone can compete with some of the most expensive and decked-out phones in the market for half the price, which is nothing to scoff at.

Performance over time is particularly excellent on the Honor 8, but here we must begin differentiating between the two power profiles the Honor 8 comes with, “smart” and “performance”. The former offers a more-balanced approach to CPU scaling, whereas the latter focuses on squeezing out the Kirin 950 with less regards for battery life and thermals.

That being said, both modes output very solid results although with a different behavior: ‘smart’ does not necessarily peak under initial pressure, whereas performance maintains its peak potential for longer, and extremely well at that. On the CPU side, neither of the power plans sees significant throttling, and what’s more, the maximum temperature for the Geekbench endurance test was only 32.8°C | 91°F — far lower than what we saw on other chipsets. This is likely a result of both the A72 cores and the small process size, and the efficiency ultimately carries onto the real world as well, as the Honor 8 is extremely cool to the touch in every situation sans intense camera usage.

GPU & Gaming

The GPU side of things is sadly the more underwhelming aspects of this processing package. The Mali-T880 MP4 GPU outputs results that are more than enough to carry the Honor 8’s 1080p screen well, and on-screen tests reflect this well. However, when put up against devices with newer chipsets on either on-screen tests or benchmarks that natively render at 1080p, the Honor 8 is left far behind, not just by 2016 devices but also much of what we saw in 2015 as well. Truth be told, the Mali-T880 MP4 is hardly commensurable with the Mali-T880 MP12 or the Adreno 530, but once you travel back to the Adreno 420 found in the Snapdragon 805, you begin finding similarities in peak performance.

Albeit disappointing when looked at a flagship perspective, it ultimately means little for the real-world user experience due to the 1080p display. Unsurprisingly, though, the Honor 8 also fares rather well under pressure on the GPU side, but only on performance mode. Running a 10-consecutive 3DMark test on both power plans showed “smart” losing over 25% of its initial performance and reaching close to 37.8°C | 100°F in the process, whereas on ‘performance’ not only was the initial (and peak) score higher, but it also only lost 8% of it by the end of the run despite reaching nearly the same temperature. This is also something we noticed when running other benchmarks and while gaming. GFXBench, where the peak on “smart” was lower than the initial score on ‘performance’. Sadly, the latter loses closes to a third of its peak framerate.

Interestingly enough, we didn’t find the lower graphics performance to be disappointing at all when gaming and measuring through GameBench, neither in terms of framerates nor in throttling. In fact, the Honor 8 manages to mostly-top the framerate of most complex 3D games today, and in our tests we only saw very small and contained periods of severe throttling which lasted only around 5 seconds at a time per 10 minute gameplay session, predominantly on GTA: San Andreas. Other than those short-lived framerate losses, the Honor 8 is capable enough of performing excellently at most games out today even at maximum settings, a feat that is not limited to latest-generation SoCs like it once was. Truth be told, the level of GPU performance of late 2014 chipsets very-nearly allowed for maxing out games like Asphalt 8 then, and it still does today. If you do have any issues, the 720p mode will certainly give you the necessary boost to achieve a maximum framerate at the expense of effective pixel density.

Despite the more-than-acceptable gaming performance, though, the GPU of the Kirin 950 remains the weakest link of the processing package due to lower peaks and worse sustained performance during intense stress than other flagship chipsets, and gamers looking to remain future proof, or people who need the phone for other GPU-intensive applications, should first try and calculate the mileage they’d get out of this device. Last but not least, there is a 720p resolution mode for power-savings that has the by-product of increasing GPU performance, but as pointed out later in this article as well, it simply isn’t worth the pixel density trade-off, particularly when gaming or doing other visual experiences.

RAM & Storage

The 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM that this review unit ships with was more than apt at the kind of tasks that I threw at it. The phone can easily store around 12 to 14 applications in memory, and also multiple heavy 3D games, without killing background processes. Even then, cached reloads are rather fast thanks to the SoC and storage solution. I have experienced some quirks with memory management where applications had to reload from cache despite no interaction with power-saving prompts or features, and it’s worth noting that by default the system kills non-whitelisted background applications upon locking the screen, so be sure to tweak those settings.

These kind of practices and the trend of adding “system tuners” (often powered by companies like CleanMaster) shouldn’t exist in the Honor 8 or any of today’s smartphones, frankly, and you should most certainly ignore anything suggesting you to kill applications simply for using them (which has happened with Hangouts and other applications). Finally, while 4GB of RAM is still a standard in 2016, 6GB RAM devices like the OnePlus 3 and Axon 7 do come at cheaper or similar prices. Users outside of the United States can opt for a further-cheaper 3GB variant, but that might be too big a sacrifice for those looking to keep the phone for a few years.

The storage of the Honor 8 is barely commensurable with the higher-end solutions out there, and sadly, alternatives at this price-point like the OnePlus 3 and Axon 7 managed to offer UFS 2.0 for impressive theoretical and real-world file transfer speeds. That being said, only the latter has microSD support like the Honor 8, and the ability to couple 64GB of storage with up to 128GB on a microSD card is a good synergy for the dual camera on this device. There is no adoptable storage in the settings, though.

Real World Performance

The Kirin 950 is simply a remarkable SoC for real-world applications. One would think that the tremendous feature quantity of EMUI would mean that the experience would be bogged down, cluttered, and ultimately laggy. Luckily, reality couldn’t be further from such a grim scenario, a far cry from the all-too-familiar bloated ROM scenarios Android was known for in its infancy, and that some OEMs still continue today, with the recently-released Note 7 showing embarrassing performance in comparison. While EMUI on the Snapdragon 615 of the Honor 5X meant frequent stutters and odd delays, Honor must have done some optimization with Huawei’s in-house SoC, as EMUI flies no matter the power profile you choose, and regardless of the changes made to Android.

Scrolling lists is not just as good as any other flagship, but better, and I’ve found very few slowdowns or stutters while browsing news feeds or Play Store listings. GPU Profiling reveals rather solid scrolling performance all-around, both in the System UI and inside applications. Activities launch quickly, too, and the phone is very snappy not just because of the SoC, but also because of above-average screen latency. Lists flow fluidly under the finger, and actions respond instantly, so general in-app performance is a joyful experience.

The phone’s fluidity carries over to app opening speeds and app-switching. Both hot and cold app opening times are up there with the best of 2016 from competing chipsets, and the 4GB of RAM are able to hold, on average, 14 to 16 applications in memory at once. That being said, there is a dark side to EMUI’s memory management once the screen turns off: by default EMUI kills applications that are not whitelisted to run in the background while the screen is locked, likely to save battery. Once you tweak this setting, though, the phone behaves properly for your favorite apps. If you do get this device, it is paramount that you inspect these settings given that background notifications on standby can be indefinitely delayed,

During regular usage, the phone keeps a consistent temperature around or under 29°C | 84.2°F, and the bulk of the heat is concentrated on the top-left corner of the device (looking from the back), meaning you do not get in immediate contact with it would the phone happen to get hot. Once more, we must point out that there are two power profiles, “Smart” and “Performance”. For nearly every real-world application, both share the same level of performance. The bulk of my review period was done on the “performance” setting, and I haven’t noticed any significant issues with heat management nor battery drain. The Honor 5X needed to be under the “performance” plan to achieve reasonable speed, but the Honor 8 does just fine on the default setting.

There is also the previously-mentioned ROG power-saving feature, which lowers the screen’s resolution to 720p for increased efficiency. It is true that 720p would mean less stress on the GPU in particular, with lower-quality assets being rendered and cached. That being said, there is no real-world performance gain from this outside of gaming, and many 3D games allow you to specifically set rendering resolution from within their settings anyway. Moreover, dropping the pixel density to 282 PPI makes a significant difference in visual fidelity, which is immediately noticeable if you choose a crisp 1080p wallpaper for your homescreen. The option is certainly nice to squeeze extra performance or battery in a pinch, but for most applications both savings are miniscule.

Monitoring background activities and RAM consumption once again reinforces the idea that EMUI does not waste away its resources, nor is bogged down by useless processes. The processor scaled predictably with the A72 cores spiking upon opening applications working together while scrolling.

There is little else to detail: all things considered, the Honor 8’s real-world performance is remarkable for a device at its price-point, and for a phone running such a feature-packed and aesthetically-modified user interface. It offers flagship performance, hands-down, and it even surpasses other (much, much more expensive) flagships we’ve tried out this year. The impressive CPU, capable storage solution and decent-enough GPU coupled with Honor’s optimizations, such as a touted proprietary file system, result in a pleasant experience through the entire operating system no matter what goal you need to accomplish using your smartphone.

Camera

As you would expect from the Honor 8’s dual-camera setup, this is one of the better-aspects of the device. At the $400 bracket, it’s rather hard to find phones with above-average cameras, and the Honor 8 builds its hardware and software around trying to stand out in that space. While we’ve seen OEMs constantly try to catch up with camera giants like Samsung – who has slowed down its camera evolution, likely due to small competition – it is arguably a much harder task to do on a budget. Can the Honor 8 stand up against more expensive devices? Depends on what you look for, but the Honor 8 takes after the P9 to offer detail through capture hardware, and flexibility through software.

Let’s start with the camera UI and UX. The Honor 8’s EMUI features a very traditional approach with a shutter button on the right side as well as a gallery shortcut (and the gallery has a camera shortcut by sliding the image album down) and a “switch to video” button. To the left you will find extra options depending on your shooting mode, such as switch to the other camera, filters, flash, or the shallow depth of field mode (more on that later). There are also 3 “tabs” you can access by swiping around the viewfinder: one for shooting modes (including pro photo and pro video, beauty mode and video, panorama, HDR, Good Food, timelapse, light painting and nightshot). The other panel allows you to change resolution, enable a grid, configure a timer, enable smile capture and object tracking, and also default image adjustment like brightness, saturation and contrast (for auto-mode).

When it comes to camera speed, the Honor 8 doesn’t disappoint. The camera app opens really fast, usually in less than 400ms, and it can also be launched from the lockscreen at the same speed. There is also a quick snapshot feature, by double pressing the volume button when the device is off — the phone will instantly launch the camera and grab a picture of whatever it is pointed at, then display the time it took to capture it (typically less than a second). Focusing speed is also above average for the price, although automatic focusing still takes over half a second to find the new target. Taking pictures in both burst mode and through button spam is fast and reliable, with no odd delays. However, the camera does not have auto-HDR, which is what usually slows down other phones. One would argue that it would be a negative point for those used to intelligent HDR (or HDR+) that compliments auto-mode, but the dynamic range of the Honor 8 is already better than most of its competitors without enabling the setting.

Going further into image quality, the 12MP main camera is aided by a 12MP monochrome camera that assists in obtaining more information regarding light and contrast, which the Honor 8 uses by merging the two images and producing one sharper result. The company claims it allows for up to 3 times the light in low-light situations, and while we definitely see a low-light improvement over similarly-priced smartphones, it still is outperformed by devices like the Nexus 6P and Galaxy S7 Edge. Nevertheless, detail retention is good, macro/focusing distance allows for good close-up shots, and exposure management is one of the better ones I’ve seen — I’ve never had the kind of severe blowup that plague budget devices. Color is also very good, a notch on the saturated side, although HDR does make a noticeable difference.

Occasionally pictures show very apparent oversharpening (particularly with fuzzy textures or grass), and various shooting modes are simply not worth using due to post-processing issues. Every now and then, the device will ask you to keep the device steady to gather additional data and get a better shot, and Night Mode has you do this for multiple seconds, usually with blurry results. When compared to the OnePlus 3 and Galaxy S7 Edge, it’s rather clear that the Honor 8 fits in the middle. Low-light performance and light capture is better than on the OnePlus 3, like Honor’s claims would imply, but still not up to par with Samsung which has focused on this specific aspect for the past two years.

The camera can produce some seriously good-looking depth of field and background blur effects, though, virtue of its dual camera setup. Like we first saw with the HTC M8’s dual camera setup, this phone also allows you to alter the focus point and depth of field after the shot has been taken. Unlike other devices, though, this is done very, very well, and the results can be really surprising. There is no odd artifacting or contour issues around the target’s edges, the blur effect looks natural and better than what you find in OEMs’ software solutions. The selfie camera is sharp with a relatively-high 8MP resolution, and I found it better than what’s found in other phones in this bracket.

Video is decent on the Honor 8, although I did find some issues with image distortion when enabling object tracking. There is no 4K recording, but there is 16:9 stereo 60FPS video at FHD, which doesn’t look quite as smooth as you have to turn down the framerate in order to get stabilization. There is significantly less macroblocking than on the OnePlus 3, a direct competitor at this price-point, even at just FHD resolution, and audio is loud with a slight distortion. There is also X4 slow-motion recording at 720p, document scanning, and Pro Video, so you do have a few options to play with if you need them. But that’s about it, as video is the most unremarkable part of this camera. If you are looking for great stills, though, you won’t be disappointed.

Display

The Honor 8 packs an unassuming 5.2 inch 1080p LTPS LCD display, LCD being common solution in this price bracket. The 1080p resolution does just fine on such a small screen size (by today’s standards), and with the display being LCD and not an AMOLED pentile panel, you ultimately get a higher effective pixel density due to the equal number of red, blue and green pixels (instead of an uneven matrix of subpixels). While many of us have grown increasingly used to AMOLED displays on flagships, this screen solution is not inadequate for both the price and the screen size; opting for 1440p AMOLED would have increased costs for a small increase in effective clarity, and a 1080p AMOLED panel would have resulted in lower pixel density.

As it stands, the 423 ppi of the Honor 8’s display is a good balance, and a good way to avoid the criticism that devices like the OnePlus 3 received for their 1080p AMOLED panels (granted, pixel density on that device suffered more due to its larger screen). This display also gets plenty bright, enough to be readable in direct sunlight in most scenarios, and decent contrast also helps.

By default, this screen features blue whites and imperfect blacks. The latter is an issue you simply cannot solve, and sadly the blacks only get worse when viewed at an angle — not only do they get brighter as most LCD panels do, but it also gets a significant red tone to it. Colors are saturated without looking overly-vibrant, with reds and greens being much deeper than the sRGB standard. The gradient and transitions are well delimited on both colors and greyscale, though, with no noticeable banding nor other oddities.  Greyscale in particular could be better, but the limitations of the display technology mean it has to conform to sub-par performance here.

Viewing angles in general are OK: when viewed from the sides, there is little color distortion. It’s when you view the display from the top, bottom, or corners where noticeable loss is found, and at extreme angles the screen gets much warmer, with blacks in particular getting very red as pointed out above. This does not help the display get the “sticker” look that other panels achieve, but it’s worth pointing out that the display is quite raised in comparison to others, making it seamlessly blend into the bezel, and when coupled with its excellent latency, it makes the experience very pleasant as interaction feels precise.

The display is surrounded by a few millimeters of black bezel as seen on most other devices, but this is only noticeable on the white variant of the phone. It doesn’t quite interfere with the viewing experience, and it is not the worst offender around (especially at this price point).

Honor also focused a decent amount on the software options and customization of the display. Other than the much-dated daydream (picture screensaver), you can improve eye-comfort by filtering out the blue light of the display through “eye-protection”, very much like the increasingly-popular “night modes”. This mode also adjusts according to environmental light, similarly to Apple’s solution, in order to always provide a good viewing experience — I’ve personally used it for a while, and it grew on me better than other night mode solutions. You can also customize color temperature through a handy color circle, or choose from the warm or cold presets.

This is an average display no matter how you cut it. Color reproduction is decent, but not on target, contrast and blacks suffer from the ever-present backlight, and viewing angles are average. This is not a device built for media consumption, as those factors paired with the small display mean you’ll find a much better media experience somewhere else. When put into context and when considering the price, very few devices (such as the Axon 7) manage to bring a more impressive display. This one is no show-stopper, but at the very least one can argue that the form factor is not designed around media consumption either way.

Battery Life & Charging

The Honor 8 packs a rather-standard 3,000mAh battery, which might initially turn off those that are spec-hungry. However, and as we always note in our reviews, battery capacity is not a deciding factor for a phones’ battery life. For example this is the same battery capacity that the Note5 and OnePlus 3 brought to the table, both of which had good battery life despite bigger (or higher-resolution, in the Note5’s case) displays. Most importantly, the Honor 8 comes with ARM’s A72 and A53 core design, the former promises better efficiency (15% over A57) and the latter is specifically designed for minimal drain. Huawei might be an expert in modems, but it’s also true that Qualcomm’s modems are considered the cream of the market, and frequently sought after. How HiSilicon implementation performs will thus be another significant factor.

Running PCMark on low, medium and high brightness shows a significant delta between brightness, much larger than what’s found on other devices like the OnePlus 3. On medium brightness and the “smart” balanced profile, the device can reach 8 hours of endurance on this test, quite a solid feat for its capacity, much like the level of efficiency we found on the Galaxy Note5 under the same conditions. Lower brightness didn’t improve this number much, while maximum brightness put it at just above 5 hours. Temperature, scores and drained remained excellently consistent through, denoting no signs of throttling nor abnormal drain. Other battery benchmarks also put it above the average, most likely due to the ARM-based setup that is a step up from some of the most efficient chipsets of 2015 on the CPU side of things.

This efficiency truly carries onto the real world, as the Honor 8 can easily power through a day of my usage, no matter the mix of connections I go through nor the camera usage I make the device endure. I’ve commonly reached 5 hours of screen on time, and consistently achieved over 4 hours, with my typical usage of document editing, chrome browsing, social media like twitter and reddit, hangouts, GPS navigation and a lot of YouTube (although less than on other devices, due to the screen’s constraints). I have noticed, however, that while WiFi efficiency is excellent, the battery’s active drain is significantly increased during LTE usage, more so than with competing devices.

I’ve found no unusual wakelocks nor issues with awake times as seen in the graphs below, and it feels like Honor takes this very seriously — perhaps too seriously, as you’ll see. While idling, it wasn’t uncommon to find really low idle drain, between 0.3% to 0.8% per hour while left on either WiFi or LTE overnight. During more-active hours with more movement and less extended sleep time, though, idle drain can surpass 1.5% hour and well into 3% during a day of constantly-fetching notifications on LTE. It must also be noted that most of my review period has had a Gear S2 smartwatch connected to the device.

The Honor 8’s charging situation, though, is not quite as impressive and borders on standard affairs in today’s market. It has a 9V/2A charger that can take the device from 0% to 100% in about 1 hour and 40 minutes, with the traditional slow-down cutoff at around 80%. It’s a good-enough solution, and surpasses the offerings of much more expensive devices, although it is a step back from the $400 OnePlus 3 and its Dash Charge technology. If you haven’t experienced Dash Charge, though, you will find the Honor 8 to charge as adequately as any other smartphone.

The Honor 8 also comes with a plethora of power-saving options, some of which are actually worth checking out. First we have the power plans which we have discussed above, smart and performance. If the estimates presented in the menu are anything to go by, you won’t gain much by choosing smart over performance, but as we’ve noted, performance is much better at what it’s supposed to do, and I also found it better at handling background notifications. You also have an “ultra” power saving option, which keeps the basic call and messaging features but disables much of the smart portions of your smartphone. This can double your remaining battery life, but is meant to be reserved for sticky situations where an active phone is paramount. Finally, you have the ROG power saving mode which lowers the phone’s resolution to 720p, and thus also improves GPU performance. We don’t recommend this option for day-to-day usage as the drop in screen sharpness is significant, and battery savings will likely be minimal as well unless GPU-intensive tasks are at play.

Sadly, it also comes with intrusive power saving options (shown above) that you should disable or minimize as a priority. One of these features kills background applications when the screen is off unless they are added to a whitelist, which not only messes with your notifications, but also reduces real-world performance by having you reload commonly-used but not-whitelisted applications (for example, my Gear S2 would lose connection as the phone would simply kill the companion app until I picked up on it). There is a power usage firewall as well, although this one prompts you to close applications rather than doing it without you asking, and you can circumvent the notifications too. After proper configuration of these issues, I was able to get my extra services working properly and I still kept getting excellent sleep times and battery life, so like many OEMs, Honor probably went overkill in ensuring longevity with their device.

Audio

The audio of the Honor 8 is also one of the more-average aspects of the phone with no real merit nor downfalls. The bottom-firing speaking can’t get too loud when compared to other devices at this price-range, and its location makes it unappealing for media consumption. Then again, this is not a media consumption device, and thus the speaker is adequate for the form factor. Distortion at higher levels is clearly there, but subtler than worse offenders at this price point; the audio is a bit tinny, though. That being said, the peak volume itself is high enough, but overall the audio feels rather hollow.

The microphone of the Honor 8 is standard affair too, with no real issues for camera recording nor voice calls. The Honor 8 does not have much in the way of software tweaks for the audio itself, although there is the aforementioned playback controls extension for headphones. Wired audio quality through the 3.5mm jack is, once more, not very impressive. All things considered, this is not an aspect of the phone you should be excitedly looking forward too.

Thoughts on Development and Future Proofing

Development on the Honor 8 is a clear work in progress. While the Kirin 950 is great for performance, it is not very good for development. The kernel sources for the platform, the documentation and many other things that developers need to get working AOSP ROMs on Kirin devices are currently not available. This means that development on devices with the Kirin SoCs see very little original development, and certainly no AOSP ROMs. Very talented developers have tried and failed, and until something changes, we won’t see CyanogenMod or other popular ROMs like we get to see on Honor’s Snapdragon devices, like the Honor 5X. This is problematic given that EMUI is one of the biggest turn-off factors for significant parts of our userbase.

We are completely aware of this, and we are working with Honor to find a solution. The good news is that they are so far willing to cooperate and embrace the developer community, and we have forwarded them an extensive list of requests which is currently being reviewed by their research and development team. If all goes well, a turning point for the Kirin platform could be approaching, allowing development to expand on Huawei and Honor devices. These companies are HiSilicon’s direct beneficiaries and are also some of the largest smartphone companies in the world, with Huawei currently being the 3rd largest player in the smartphone market, only behind Samsung in the Android space. Working with Honor and Huawei towards opening the Kirin platform would then allow millions of users to access new customized software, and ultimately benefit our community.

Leaving the sources situation aside, the Honor 8 will be easy to unlock with an official method, the same used for other EMUI devices like the Honor 5X. I’ve done this process before, and it’s easy enough, but if you don’t like filling forms or waiting, do know that you can unofficially unlock the bootloader as well. After that, rooting and getting recoveries in place shouldn’t be too big of a problem — standard affair. Xposed, too, is available for Kirin devices. While there are ways in which the software of the Honor 8 can be modified to improve without outright replacing EMUI, AOSP ROMs will remain a goal for the rest of the device’s lifespan. We encourage developers to keep track of our efforts to convince Huawei and Honor to open up the Kirin platform to the world.

As for future-proofing, the Honor 8 comes with the necessary specifications to ensure a few years of comfortable usage, with only a couple of aspects like the GPU and storage sticking out. Moreover, Honor promises guaranteed updates for two years, with 12 months of guaranteed feature updates with the possible extension to the full 24 months, and then support for further critical bug or security patches after that. We hope that Honor stands true to this promise, as other OEMs recently have not, and do manage to deliver timely updates to the Honor 8 and other devices.

Conclusion

The Honor 8 comes at one of today’s most competitive price brackets, with devices like the OnePlus 3 and Axon 7 bringing serious heat to the kitchen. The existence of other affordable flagships of such caliber make it much tougher to recommend the Honor 8 universally, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a key demographic that the device can specifically target. Indeed, while the 3 phones share much in common – powerful internals, premium designs – they offer different experiences for different people, and this is ultimately what will be the biggest deciding factor.

The Honor 8 does indeed pack flagship hardware, and while the base model’s 32GB of storage and 3GB of RAM available outside of the US does fall short against OnePlus and ZTE’s mighty offerings, the more-marketed 4GB variants offers enough hardware to deliver a flagship experience. There is also one key difference that might allure different demographics, and that’s form factor. The Honor 8 is a small device, the bezels are adequate and in-hand feel is solid. For those looking forward to enjoying a smaller screen, the 5.2 inch screen Honor 8 will be one of the few attractive options in this bracket. Sadly enough, the smaller form factor has been increasingly abandoned and for $400, aiming at the 5.5 inch form factor is likely a much safer bet for OEMs.

If you are looking for a pretty phone, the Honor 8 should catch your eye. Those wanting for a powerful smartphone with plenty of features will find both good and bad in the Honor 8.

The design of the phone does achieve a premium feel, and it does not sacrifice usability nor much in the way of durability in doing so. There are good design elements such as the lack of camera protrusion, seamless transitions, interesting light-reflecting patterns which ultimately make the Honor 8 stand-out (and slide away) among competitors, but the glass back is prone to fingerprints on some variants, and while the device is sturdy, drops or significant scratches will render the device much uglier and/or less practical than it’s supposed to be. But Honor has achieved a good construction with traditionally expensive materials here, with a degree of execution that we wouldn’t expect until we reach the higher flagship price brackets. If you are looking for a pretty phone, the Honor 8 should catch your eye with no need for this review’s explanation of its design.

That said, those wanting for a powerful smartphone with plenty of features will find both good and bad in the Honor 8. The device is plenty fast, with one of the most efficient CPU’s in the market in both peak and prolonged performance. The Honor 8 is further optimized to be fast and fluid, and I can honestly say that it stands up to the OnePlus 3, Nexus 6P and other real-world performance giants in this particular regard. The amount of features that EMUI offers is indeed staggering, but the software is not for everyone. It is one of the furthest-from-Stock ROMs out there, and those who cannot tolerate OEMs meddling with Google’s vision would definitely find a lot to be offended about here. There are theming and customization options, but none of them can make the Honor 8 look quite like Google’s Android. Too many elements have been too modified to be restored through themes, and conflicting items and design languages remain even when pushing theming to its limits.

While the audio-visual experience of the Honor 8 isn’t particularly impressive – and nobody really expects that out of such a small screen – the camera is one of the most noteworthy aspects of this device. It is capable of very impressive stills, although video has some way to go. But the quality you get in your pictures out of the dual camera setup is competitive across the breach between its price bracket and the more expensive phones. The Honor 8 is simply one of the better devices out there for camera stills, and the many features it brings ensure you have enough options to play and create with.

But then we have the fact that, at the moment, the Honor 8 does not have the best development potential. This is simply a shame given the prowess of its processing package, its attractive and somewhat-niche form factor, and the fact the EMUI is one of the main deferring factors for enthusiasts. But we can confirm that Honor has been listening to our claims, and that they tell us they would like to embrace the developer community of XDA. We cannot make conclusive statements yet, but know that we will be working with Honor in order to make the Honor 8 – and subsequently, other Honor devices as well – more developer-friendly, easier to tinker, and a better canvas for the community. Once more, we have forwarded our requests for the opening and documentation of the Kirin platform, and we suggest you follow that development closely when considering the Honor 8 — we will keep you updated.

The Honor 8 is indeed worthy of the flagship title — it’s good looking, it’s powerful, it’s capable.

In summary, the Honor 8 is indeed worthy of the flagship title. There is no clear-cut shortcoming in the hardware that would make the average consumer give it a second look — it’s good looking, it’s powerful, it’s capable. It’s what runs through its silicon that makes the Honor 8 less of an instant pick when the competition aims to target similar audiences through other means. The OnePlus 3 in particular has garnered a spectacular and merited response, but its userbase does not fully overlap with the Honor 8’s. If you are looking for a smaller form factor with capable specifications and a solid camera, the Honor 8 is one of the few options left at that bracket, and certainly the best one you can get. It’s when users prefer bigger form factors or have no preference, or really value Stock Android or the already-established development potential of other brands, that the calculation becomes muddier for the Honor 8.

I can personally say this: it is a nice device with very little to hate as far as hardware goes, and while I am not the biggest fan of EMUI, it has become more tolerable and flexible than in the past — enough to entice me to keep using this phone after my review period, particularly due to the small form factor. It’s not a phone I would pick for work or as an all-purpose smartphone precisely due to the small screen, though, but it’s certainly a good mostly-uncompromised smartphone. EMUI was and remains one of the more controversial points about this device, as is development. But for the price, the Honor 8 is still extremely competitive, in many ways surpassing its fiercest opponents, yet sadly trailing behind in the key aspects that make phones like the OnePlus 3 such a hit with our community. Development for the Honor 8, and all future Kirin devices, is something we will be working towards with Honor; as it stands, the Honor 8 is still a great piece of hardware that is worthy of the flagship title. But as we say in every review: whether it is worthy of your wallet is only something you, the customer, can truly decide.

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HTC has had a rough year, leaving the company desperately needing to prove its worth to both its old followers and general audiences. The HTC 10 thus comes at a breaking point for the smartphone legend, and it’s clear that they are trying to grab your interest and secure your pocket.

But among all of its competitors, can the HTC 10 be as brilliant as they come?

In this review, we’ll take an in-depth dive into the HTC 10. Rather than listing specs and talking about how the experience felt, this feature attempts to provide a thorough look with contents relevant to our reader base. At XDA, our reviews are not meant to tell a user whether a phone is worth buying or not — instead, we try to lend you the phone through our words and help you come to the decision by yourself. Before getting started, let’s get the specification sheet out of the way:

 Index

• Design
• Software – UI
• Software – Features & UX
• Performance
• CPU & System
• GPU & Gaming
• Memory & Storage
• Real World UX
• Camera
• Display
• Battery Life
• Audio
• Development & Future Proofing
• Final Thoughts & Conclusion

Design

While last year’s M9 was criticized for not spicing up the traditional HTC design, and specifically for looking too much like its predecessor (to the point where HTC itself confused them), the 10 strays from that comfort zone and spices up some design elements, while still looking very much “HTC”. Both the front and the back feature a “different” design with some stand-out accents that make for much of the HTC 10’s personality.

The back of the HTC 10 is perhaps the most iconic new aspect of this phone’s design, specifically because of its arguably-oversized chamfers. These are wide and shiny, and accentuate what would otherwise be a much duller back. Most importantly, though, they serve as a distraction for the increased thickness of this phone, which now feels much beefier without feeling heavy. These edges shine beautifully against all sorts of light, and combined with the very subtle curve of the actual back, make the phone easier to hold. The in-hand fit of the HTC 10 is pretty good for a phone with such thickness, and it’s plain comfortable as well.

The back also houses an HTC logo that’s not painted on top of the metal, so there is no fear of it wearing out over time like on other phones. Then you will find the flash and laser autofocus, and the camera which does protrude a couple of millimeters, but given it is centered there is no rocking when on a flat surface, and while the camera sensor is protected by being on a slight depression, it’s also coated with sapphire glass that’s less prone to scratches. Because of this, the protrusion arguably helps the phone’s durability as scratching the bare aluminum can lead to some annoying scars on the phone. In turn, this adds some slight durability to your metal phone’s back, as well as the camera sensor.

The sides of the phone are rather thin without accounting for the edge, and host a volume rocker and power button on the right side, and then one SIM tray on each side, one of which also doubles as a microSD slot. Something I noticed from the moment I loaded up my microSD and SIM cards is that these SIM trays don’t sit completely flush with the rest of the edge. Indeed, my unit has the trays either sticking out, or depressed a millimeter inside the body. I can also push the tray sticking out in order to sink it in, but at no point does this affect functionality, and other units we’ve tested haven’t had this issue.

The volume rocker and power button are both extremely clicky, and the power buttons’ ribbed texture meant I had no trouble adapting to the new layout. The tactile feedback is thus phenomenal, but while the buttons feel great to push, the volume rocker surprisingly rocks a tiny bit, sometimes making an audible click. Getting these buttons to feel entirely solid is a hard task and I wouldn’t hold it against HTC, however — I recognize I am very picky with buttons. Over all these are very good and in a good layout for the size, with your thumb lying almost entirely on the volume keys making them comfortable to access.

There are a lot of plasticky antennae bands going around on this phone, but none are distracting from the design. The segment at the top doesn’t stick out to the eye as the centered 3mm headphone jack takes the attention away from it; the hole is only centered on one axis, however, and it carves into the back edge of the phone, but with no tactile repercussions unlike, for example, the sharp headphone jack of the Nexus 5X. The USB Type C port sits at the bottom in-between a microphone on the left and a speaker grill on the right, which compliments the speaker piece at the top of the front. We’ll go deeper into how these speaker synergise and whether the placement means better sound output later on in the review.

The capacitive back and recents keys sit at the same height as the fingerprint sensor, giving ample room between their input surface (which is rather constrained) and the screen, meaning very few accidental bottom-screen presses. The bezels on the HTC 10 are quite large, with the sides hosting thick edges due to both the black frame and the metal edge. It has similar all-around dimensions to the Nexus 5X, but I’d argue it fits better in the hand and that it feels much sturdier (because it is). Finally, there is a slight edge-curve to the glass wrapping the display that also catches light in interesting ways.

I would not call this design innovative, but it hits the right notes to update the design and still look like an HTC phone

In summary, the HTC 10 has a masterful design with well-executed hardware. The construction feels top notch, and one only needs to hold this phone to tell that it is extremely beefy and sturdy. Unlike other aluminum phones, the HTC 10 is unlikely to bend in any way, and the metal has endured our 2.5 weeks of daily-driving and testing very well. HTC has managed to produce a design that is both familiar and fresh, with its over-accentuated chamfers stealing the show by being not only functional but also helping masquerade the increase in thickness, and making it look different to boot. I would not call this design innovative, but it hits the right notes to update the design and still look like an HTC phone that properly pushes their traditional design language forward.

Software — User Interface

HTC Sense has long-been considered one of the sleekest OEM skins in terms of aesthetic design. The new and plain “Sense” in the HTC 10 is very similar to that which we saw on the HTC One A9, which debuted on Marshmallow as well, and it brings a similar experience to what Sense has always offered, but without the most consistent implementation with Google’s vision for Android. After some healthy stripping-down, HTC created a very pleasant UI.

Sense has been thoroughly cleaned of clutter, and with the A9, HTC opted for less-aggressive changes (which in turn would mean updates would be easier to implement as well). HTC sense, thus, feels more like a re-skin than a re-structure of Stock Android, but not one without glaring consistency issues. For example, the icons for “wi-fi” are different in the toggles, the toggle’s expanded wifi menu (which remains material), the status bar itself and the actual wi-fi settings. The battery icon in the status bar also doesn’t align with the other items, which looks and feels slightly unpolished. There is also no battery indicator/shortcut in the Quick Toggles, a decision that might ire those who use it frequently.

Make up your mind, will you!?

Luckily, themes can change the status bar icons in order to address part of this. And nitpicking aside, the UI is ultimately very reserved with a Stock Android color palette that will ease the transition for Android purists. Alert boxes and other prompts do look oddly out of place (and are also inconsistent, with some being left unchanged), but the UI is ultimately rather lightweight. The suite of HTC apps also look clean, with solid colors and some material elements, although with less apparent depth and shadowing. Some of these apps’ color can also be customized, which is neat for those aiming at a specific theme consistency.

You can also quickly re-order the app-drawer with a custom order (drag and drop), alphabetical and recent. Another addition of the launcher is HTC’s touted “freestyle” configuration of colorful landscapes and stickers. There are many options to choose from on the freestyle theme store, but you can design your own as well.

A few design decisions stuck out to me during my testing period. For one, the default text size was too large at first, but you can easily adjust it in the settings (I suggest “small”!). HTC also opted once more to selectively remove certain animations, perhaps in an attempt to make the phone feel different or faster. An example would be that returning to the launcher does not have an animation, only launching and switching apps, and this specific transition is very fast. But the recents menu’s animation is still slow to trigger and operate, so I suggest lowering the animation speed to make the system feel not just faster, but more consistent (the animation options are hidden inside a menu inside of developer options).

Many familiar Android UI elements remain mostly unchanged, like the multi-tasking menu which includes a “clear all” button at the bottom, and the toggles setup (although HTC made some changes, like including a calculator shortcut “toggle”). HTC’s lockscreen is also uncluttered, with the quick-access apps (docked apps by default) sitting at the bottom waiting for you to slide them up.

Delving into the settings lets you turn off “interest-based ads” in HTC Sense — if you get the phone, I suggest making sure that these are disabled. You can also personalize the phone with themes, including color layouts and fonts, but colors don’t stretch onto some system UI elements like the notification panel. The default keyboard’s color can also be customized, and overall Sense gives you plenty to play with and tweak. It’s still a shame that you can’t tweak the colors of various key UI elements, but as far as customization goes, it ranks as one of the more-tweakable OEM skins out there, even if it’s not the deepest.

Overall, Sense is a neat UI that does not impair the user experience in any way. As we’ll see in the sections below, it is relatively lightweight and its speed compliments its UI design (in a way, the experience is designed to feel fast as well). HTC has consistently offered a reserved, and perhaps even mature, alternative in comparison to those of other OEMs. As far as design goes, Sense could use some polishing to achieve better consistency, and its theming is nowhere near as deep as that of other software alternatives. Nevertheless, it is somewhat extensive, and it gives the user enough flexibility to make the phone his own.

Software — Features & UX

Past customization, HTC sense offers a healthy (and by that I mean reserved) set of extra features, some of which are tried-and-true while others are neat little surprises HTC decided to pack in.

First of all, let’s get the bloat out of the way: luckily, there is not much in the way of pre-installed applications in the HTC 10. This phone comes with over 23GB of storage open to the user upon the first boot, with duplicate apps kept to a minimum and some third-party apps bundled in, most of which are not offensive to the general user. Among the bundled applications, we have News Republic, Facebook & Facebook Messenger, Instagram, a standard set of Google apps, and a few HTC tools including Boost+ (a junk cleaner that can also lock applications and “boost game battery life” by lowering resolution –trash, basically), a flashlight app (why?), a weather app and a surprisingly helpful Help app.

The Help app let’s you access “troubleshooting” tools, which include answers to common problems as well as their probable cause according to the current phone status, hardware diagnostic tests so that you can see if anything is faulty on your device (as well as quick shortcuts to various menus), and the option to call HTC. There are also some helpful manuals and a button to check for software updates. I don’t normally care for applications like this, nor would I likely use it, but it’s one of the more polished and helpful apps an OEM could pack for the general (and often clueless) consumer. While many at XDA might find little use for it, just remember it has quick hardware checks that might come handy in the future.

The lack of clutter and gimmicks puts Android itself is at the front and center

As far as applications go, there is not much else. By default, you will find Google Calendar, HTC’s Mail app as well as Gmail, Google Photos for the gallery, the HTC Clock app, Chrome, Messages, and the HTC dialer. There are very few apps that share the same purpose, and HTC managed to pick the one that works the best and makes the most sense. Going into the individual HTC apps, we can find a very neat and tidy Phonebook with every feature you’d expect, and an extremely simple messaging app. Both are quick and easy to use.

The default launcher in the HTC 10 has Blinkfeed – a News reader – in its leftmost page. The service has been around for a few iterations now and not much has changed. It’s still useful, but I suspect much of our audience will swap out the launcher altogether.

A returning fan-favorite is double-tap-to-wake as well as other screen-wake gestures. You double tap to wake & sleep, swipe up to unlock, swipe left to go home, swipe right to launch Blinkfeed or swipe down twice to open the Camera (perhaps the most useful gesture). You can also allow apps to recognize 3-finger output gestures for media controls, linked with HTC Connect to play media on various services and devices (Airplay, AllPlay, Blackfire, Bluetooth Speakers, Chromecast and Miracast).

The fingerprint sensor of the HTC 10 is well-integrated and will satisfy any user when it comes to speed and responsiveness. While many might be against the idea of placing it at the front, the device’s dimensions don’t make the scanner too hard to reach without re-adjusting the hand. If you have average-sized hands, you won’t be doing much hand gymnastics with the HTC 10 at all, and that includes the fingerprint scanner.

There is really not much else in the way of features for this latest version of Sense, and stripping down the least-favorite components undoubtedly makes for a cleaner experience. Many of HTC’s services can be downloaded from the Play Store and are updated independently, like Zoe and other staples of the series. What’s in there is useful, though, and various features I have omitted from discussing as they are mentioned in other sections.

Overall, Sense offers mostly-thoughtful little additions that one can opt out of using without being pestered by them. The lack of clutter and gimmicks means that Android is at the front and center when using the HTC 10, and that’s a great thing. Too often we see OEMs pack their software with useless gimmicks, many of which are hidden behind nonsensical menus. Those looking for a toned-down system will find solace on HTC’s latest Sense.

Performance

The Snapdragon 820 SoC in the HTC 10 comes to amend the issues that last year’s Snapdragon 810 brought upon its predecessor. HTC’s last flagship went under the spotlight for being one of the first devices brandishing the controversial chipset, but with a new beginning and a fresh architecture, there is nothing tying the HTC 10 to the M9’s performance failure. The 14nm Snapdragon 820 sees a smaller, more efficient (FinFET) process size and Qualcomm’s Kryo CPU cores, as opposed to last year’s “off-the-shelf” ARM Cortex A57/A53 design, and a more powerful GPU with the introduction of the Adreno 530 GPU. We’ve detailed the Snapdragon 820’s hardware before, as well as its relative performance in the Galaxy S7 Edge. How does the Snapdragon 820 in the HTC 10 fare?

CPU & System

The 14nm Snapdragon 820 features a 2×2 CPU configuration, with two Kryo cores clocked at 2.15GHz and another two in an efficiency-centered cluster clocked at 1.6GHz. As we’ll see below, the lower number of cores does not translate to a net loss in performance (and nobody should have assumed it would), and the single-core performance of the Snapdragon 820 is excellent, with multi-core performance not managing to beat every competing smartphone chipset, but remaining in the upper-tier nonetheless.

Running the Snapdragon 820 through our usual set of tests puts it at the top single-core performance in GeekBench only second to the iPhone 6s, yet below the Kirin 955 P90 and the Exynos variant of the Galaxy S7 in multi-core results. The AnTuTu 6 benchmark, more comprehensive as far as components go, tops the chart, making for one of the highest-scoring Android smartphone we’ve seen so far. BaseMark, a more holistic test, puts the HTC 10 below other Snapdragon 820 devices and the Galaxy S7, but above the rest of Android smartphones. PCMark, another holistic test more commensurable with real-world results, puts the HTC 10 in a very good place too as seen in the graphs.

Performance-over-time sample, as well as an example of heat distribution throughout the HTC 10’s body.

As far as CPU throttling goes, when running these tests repeatedly we do find a decrease in performance, albeit this drop is more linear than the clearly-stratified drops we sometimes saw on Snapdragon 810 devices. The throttling going on with the HTC 10’s CPU is less aggressive, but we saw close to 15% drop in scores in various CPU-centric tests and metrics after numerous consecutive tests. These tests did not really increase temperature to the point where operating the device would become uncomfortable, though, with Geekbench topping at 38 degrees C in room-temperature. As far as app performance goes, the HTC 10 is one of the fastest devices we’ve tested, and general UI navigation does not suffer substantially while the CPU is very slightly throttled. As we’ll see in further sections, outside heat sources can seemingly affect the HTC 10 more than any CPU load we’ve put on it.

GPU & Gaming

The Adreno 530 GPU is one of the stand-out points of the HTC 10’s specification sheet. As we’ve seen before, the scores you can obtain on this mobile GPU are fantastic, and it once again puts the Snapdragon 820 at the top of the game when it comes to GPU performance. In most instances, you can expect the resulting performance to be as good as or better than anything else on the market, but the decision to upgrade the screen resolution means that devices with 1080p screens and the same chipset will see an advantage in graphics performance. You can find such example with the Xioami Mi5 (Snapdragon 820 and 1080p display) achieving significantly better performance than the HTC 10 and other Snapdragon 820 devices in on-screen tests. It’s also worth noting that, just like we found in the Galaxy S7 Snapdragon 820, this device sees higher throttling on GPU benchmarks (same behavior we observed in the S7 Edge) than it does on CPU benchmarks, over 30% after many consecutive GFXBench tests.

These large differences disappear in off-screen tests, where the HTC 10 leads in graphics performance. Non-Snapdragon chipsets have taken a particular beating this generation, with the latest Kirin chipsets offering measurably less performance than the Snapdragon 820 in the HTC 10 (more comparable to a Snapdragon 805’s and 808’s).

Consecutive GFXBench Manhattan tests can lower performance quite dramatically.

These differences and also throttling, surprisingly, somewhat diminish when looking at actual gaming, where the HTC 10 does a fine yet unspectacular job compared to previous devices we’ve reviewed at XDA (all games at highest possible settings).

Asphalt 8, for example, fluctuates between 30 and 55 frames per second with a resulting average above the usual 30 frames per second lock some (and not all) devices experience. Dead Trigger 2 saw an average of 34 frames per second, somewhat close to the 40 frames per second achieved on 1080p Snapdragon 810 devices — it’s safe to say that the resolution plays a big factor here. GTA: SA, one of the more taxing games you can find on mobile, had a resulting 28 frames per second on average (in a couple of instances, the framerate average of the session dipped below 27 FPS, but 29 FPS samples were common too). This is one of the highest averages we’ve found on a prolonged session of GTA: SA, showing the prowess of the Snapdragon 820.

A very positive aspect I found during testing the HTC 10 for gaming is lessened throttling. Across multiple 5, 10 and 15 minute tests of the aforementioned games, performance remained mostly good and there was no sharp or clear drop in CPU nor GPU activity, albeit the framerates did fluctuate more than in other devices in some games, and the fluctuation slightly increases over time. The averages remained high, however, and outside temperature of the device didn’t reach 41° C while gaming, at which point I personally consider phones to begin feeling uncomfortable. For reference, the OnePlus 2 and other 810 devices went past this mark during the same level of intense usage. While the performance is not as consistent as some Samsung Exynos phones, the results are stellar even after scores and framerates begin getting lower. Long sessions of benchmarks such as GFXBench’s battery benchmark test still show significant score drops (over 30% as show above) after over 30 minutes, and gaming sessions longer than 15 minutes will likely lead to more framerate drops — so I still recommend you are cautious in your usage.

RAM & Storage

The 4GB of DDR4 RAM found in the HTC 10 surpass the setup in the One M9 in both capacity and speed, and so far we have not tested smartphones sporting more RAM than this, although we know they are coming. While we will see 6GB RAM devices soon and later this year, the HTC 10 will remain future proof in part due to the sheer efficiency at which it utilizes its RAM. While other devices are notorious for holding less apps than their spec sheet suggests, the HTC 10 has no issue of the sort. The real-world demonstration below will serve as an example.

Storage performance on the HTC 10 outputs around 250.5MB/s in sequential read tests (higher than the M9’s ~160MB/s), and 103.5MB/s in sequential write tests (higher than the M9’s 33MB/s). Random read (30MB/s) and random write (15.5MB/s) are both higher than last year M9’s and close to the average Android smartphone’s.

While these numbers are lower than the current storage king’s (Galaxy S7/Edge), they are very similar to much of the competition’s barring the LG G5. You won’t find the storage in the HTC 10 holding you back, and it’s also worth noting the expandable storage found in this phone benefits from one of the fastest slots available, allowing you to add over 200GB of goodness.

Real World UX

The HTC 10’s Snapdragon 820 shows its prowess in the theoretical tests, where it scores above most Android devices to date. But as we all know, benchmarks don’t necessarily translate to real-world performance. HTC phones like the M8 have gotten praise for their snappy responsiveness, as the company had even attained some of the best touch latency in Android at the time as well. Part of the performance’s strength has traditionally come from Sense being a relatively-lightweight piece of software with design decisions that amplify the perceived responsiveness. With that out of the way, how does the HTC 10 perform in day-to-day operations?

Knowing that no odd service is bogging down your performance or affecting your battery life is one of the highlights of Sense’s lightweight experience.

Out of the box, it was hard for me to not notice that the HTC 10 was quite zippy. As far as app opening goes, and as mentioned above, it’s one of the fastest – if not the fastest – phone we’ve tested. This speed is complemented by a solid multi-tasking experience that’s above the average 4GB phone’s. That being said, it’d be unfair for me not to point out that the HTC 10’s animations are set to be faster than the average phone’s by default, and that many transitions (such as returning to the Launcher) are removed to give the UI an artificial sense of speed. This isn’t bad at all, but it has not been applied across the board, so you will likely want to change window transitions to make the multi-tasking menu and other animations speed up to par.

The HTC 10 is very good at handling scrolling lists as well, and performance is smooth — noticeable micro-janks are few and far between, making scrolling janks mostly imperceptible. You will rarely find delay while operating an application, and the 10 doesn’t keep you waiting. But this is during normal conditions only: while the HTC 10 does not get too hot from regular usage, it does seem to catch a lot more heat from outside temperature and sun than other devices (likely because of the metal body).

As a result, using the HTC 10 in high-temperature environments can make this device severely underperform, as seen in the example below. We’ve seen this effect across multiple areas in multiple hot regions including Florida, Minnesota (hey, it’s Summer) and Iowa. It is by no means a deal-breaker, but it has been a hassle to us at XDA as it undermines what’s otherwise a very good performer.

CPU usage/profiling applications like Trepn show very close to no CPU usage by undesired background processes during normal operation, an issue that we found on some more-bloated devices from Samsung and company. The clutter-cleaning that the HTC 10 underwent shows when you look at the CPU cycle consumption of background apps as well as memory usage (now easily accessible in the settings). Knowing that no odd service is bogging down your performance or affecting your battery life while using the phone for daily tasks is one of the highlights of Sense’s lightweight experience.

Some of the design decisions clearly aid achieving this goal, but much of it has to do with the remarkably small amount of background processes and the toned-down nature of Sense. Those factors allow the Snapdragon 820 to shine, as well as the below-average touch latency of the HTC 10, but at the same time users should be way that this device can get uncomfortably hot during warm seasons and in warm regions of the globe, and in turn, performance takes a dramatic hit.

Camera

The 12 MP sensor in the HTC 10’s camera follows the recent trend through which OEMs opt for lower MP counts, yet focus on aperture and pixel size to maximize important aspects such as low-light performance. With HTC’s “ultrapixel” technology back at the helm, and with optical image stabilization (in the front camera, too!) on top of Laser Autofocus, one would expect the HTC 10 to perform excellently. While the DxOMark score it received puts it neck-and-neck with giants like the Galaxy S7, our testing and comparisons gave us results which we consider below the best Android has to offer, but excellent nonetheless.

The HTC 10’s pictures are notably less saturated than those coming from many competitors, including Samsung’s. The colors look very good and natural in most pictures, making for “true to life” picture memories. Despite the laser autofocus, the camera is not particularly fast to focus (and it can have a particularly hard time to focus during video, on both cameras), and it’s also not particularly fast to launch either. In the video below you can find a sample of what the user experience is like on the HTC 10’s default camera app.

Note the way the device handles changes in focus points, and exposure adjustments (rather well if you assk me). Pictures can take more than you’d expect to process — if you are used to snapping and going on with your usage, make sure to wait until the picture appears in the gallery at the corner. Not doing so might result in you not keeping your picture — incredibly frustrating when you want quick snaps!

Exposure is well-handled with somewhat of a tendency to whiten the picture, making for the occasional white-washed photo or selfie. The camera can focus at rather close distances, and while it doesn’t frequently get stuck trying to focus, when it does this process might last longer than usual. Another small issue I found is that it’s very easy to cover the laser autofocus, and every time it happens (often when launching the camera) the message informing you so stays for a second or two and blocks your viewfinder. That being said, the pictures the HTC 10 outputs vary from good to excellent, with very few pictures in regular to good lightning needing to be scrapped. I found myself able to trust this camera.

Moving over to low lighting, though, and the story is different. While HTC has arguably been one of the first to really focus on low-light shots with its ultrapixel technology, and while the camera hardware inside the 10 suggests it’d be stellar in these scenarios, the results ultimately disappointed me (perhaps because of the hype behind it). Both selfies and rear-camera shots seem to often be mishandled by post-processing, which can give the picture a really unrealistic look in exchange for some extra visibility (clear example being the wine above). Detail, too, is often lost in the process, and the results are particularly underwhelming when compared to the Nexus 6P, running slightly lesser hardware and Google’s software camera software, yet managing to retain more detail.

The pictures can look pretty good regardless, but I personally expect more out of the 10 in this context. I do wish that it could present some finer detail in general, as grass and other objects can become rather mushy. The composition of the picture, however, is very good in most cases, and those looking for natural-looking pictures might even prefer it over the S7’s.

When it comes to video, the phone comes packed with various standard modes including the popular slow-motion and the tried-and-true 30FPS 4K and 30FPS 1080p. The slow-motion videos are about what’d you would expect and in line with competitors, while the 4K video recording can output some excellent detail, with some decent focusing up-close (as shown in the example). The front-facing camera had the most trouble keeping focus while selfie-recording and walking, which is surprising given its specifications.

In summary, the HTC 10’s camera is well-equipped in terms of hardware and it also packs decent camera software, both combining to make for a very solid shooter. I do think that HTC still has problems to tackle with its image post-processing, an issue they failed to nail in previous devices (I’ve even had pictures come out with odd artifacts). An early software update did improve things, as previous software updates on the M9 did, so we might see the resulting package evolve over time.  There are some nice manual control options as well as RAW shooting for those wanting to get the most out of the hardware, though, and in every other respect, the HTC 10 does hold up against competitors.  

Display

HTC’s Super LCD panel continues the trend of excellence on HTC phones. While AMOLED is increasingly becoming one of the most popular choices for many manufacturers, the HTC 10 managed to prove once more that LCD technology can still hold its own. This is a 1440p panel with a pixel density of 565 (one of the highest pixel densities virtue of the fact that this is “only” a 5.2 inch screen). Going into the various parameters we’ll find that HTC has managed to include a very pleasant display in this device without having to resort to AMOLED as they did on their One A9.

First, let’s start with the not-so-great: brightness on the HTC 10’s display is well-below the output of both Samsung’s latest AMOLED panels, and also the LCD technology featured in the LG G5. That being said, it’s still readable under sunlight and the auto-brightness experience has been satisfactory too. The backlight in the HTC 10 is very evenly distributed and none of our tested units have shown any sort of light-bleed. Another low-point is that the screen cannot get very dim either, something I found very detrimental when operating the phone in pitch-black environments.

Something that greatly enhances the reading experience on the HTC 10 – particularly outdoors – is its excellent contrast ratio, definitely one of the best LCD display has to offer. This display also offers very good black levels (some of the best we’ve seen, too, and even better than the LG G5’s judging from experience) and this slightly makes up for the dim brightness when operating the phone in the dark.

The HTC 10 comes with two color profiles on stock software, Vivid and sRGB. The former (and as its name implies) offers a more saturated look with greens and blues being accentuated, with a higher coverage of color space. The vivid mode is also colder than sRGB, but luckily you can tweak the screen’s temperature to get the kind of whites you are most content with. The sRGB mode is fairly color-accurate and very similar to the sRGB/Basic mode of latest-gen AMOLED displays

I can’t say I have had anything short of a great viewing experience with the HTC 10. You might find yourself wishing for an extra hair of brightness, or that you could dim the display some more, but excluding that, this is one of the best displays outside of AMOLED. With deep blacks levels, excellent contrast and neat customization options, you will be hard pressed to find a better LCD panel on a smartphone, especially non-LG flagships. The black bezels of the 10 and the slightly-curved glass further accentuate this fantastic panel, and from our tests detailed in the battery section of this review, it’s also not a battery hog (more below).

Battery Life & Charging

It’s not rare to see 3,000mAh batteries on sub 5.5-inch smartphones nowadays, and the HTC 10 thus stands with a middle-of-the-road battery package. While many would initially assume that its standard battery size would bring standard battery life, the Snapdragon 820 inside the HTC 10 promises improved efficiency that should translate to better results over last generation’s chipsets. This is particularly important given the Snapdragon 810 specifically offered less battery efficiency than Samsung’s Exynos 7420. We put the Snapdragon 820 through both battery benchmarks and real-world usage, and here’s how it fared:

As you can see from the scores above, the HTC 10 manages an impressive score on PC Mark, competing with devices such as the Galaxy S7 and last year’s Note 5, as well as A53-based devices that understandably score rather well on these tests. The resulting battery life is above last year’s Snapdragon 810 devices, but also below Qualcomm’s own 2016 Snapdragon 650 featured in the Redmi Note 3 — understandable given the A53 core arrangement inside it. When put into context, the HTC 10 fares very well. Most interestingly, we ran this test at lowest, medium and maximum brightness to assess the effect of screen brightness on the test; the differences are lower than what other devices with LCD panels like the OnePlus 2 and the Honor 5X have shown us, suggesting that the HTC 10’s screen is not one of the biggest power-sippers here

Indeed, during regular usage, we didn’t always find the screen as the top drainer. A normal day for me has had the HTC 10 last about 3 to 4.5 hours depending on my usage and location. My typical usage pattern involves at least an hour of Youtube, Hangouts throughout the entire day, some document editing on Google Docs and through Google Chrome, light puzzle gaming, music, and around 30 minutes of GPS. By my standards as judged on other phones, the HTC is just average — it offered me less screen-on-time than the Note5, Nexus 6P, and Honor 5X, but usually more than the OnePlus 2 and others.

Luckily, standby time on the HTC 10 is decent with about 0.8% to 1% drain per hour while idling without Doze. Overnight drain has been minimal for me. As for the examples above, keep in mind that I am also a heavy LTE user, so most of my screen time in any given day is while on LTE.

Charging on the HTC 10 is, in theory, as good as it gets given it comes with Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 3.0 standard. While it is indeed very fast, I have not found it to be as much as an advantage as Qualcomm pretended it would be.

The HTC 10 charges from 0 to full in around 1 hour and 25 to 30 minutes, with the bulk of the charging speed residing in the first 80 percentage points of battery capacity. Do mind that Quick Charge 3.0 is technically not compliant with the USB Type C specification, but nonetheless you shouldn’t expect to see any issues with the included or official chargers through regular usage.

One last thing that I want to note is that I did not use battery-saving modes throughout my testing. That being said, on top of the default battery-saving mode you do have an Extreme Battery Saving mode, similar to what you find on most other flagships today. If you really need your phone to last for important reasons, these features can be a life-saver.

Overall, the HTC 10’s battery life stood out as one of the more mediocre aspects of this device. While I can safely say it provides enough battery life for a casual user, I have found myself worrying about finding an outlet more than I wish while daily driving this device. It’s surprising to see that the resulting battery life is not as good as battery benchmarks suggest it is — perhaps it’s time to find better standardized testing methods for 2016 devices, or perhaps the device simply doesn’t handle real-world operations with the same grace. Whatever the case, battery life can be satisfactory, but just about there for someone focused on heavy usage. The included examples should provide you a rough idea of my user patterns and results.

Audio

The speakers on the HTC One series of flagship phones have been some of the best to ever grace Android, and also helped popularize front-facing speakers in other phones. With the One A9, HTC moved away from the front-facing speaker setup that netted it good fame, but the HTC 10 aims to provide substantial speaker quality once more, as well as an outstanding headphone experience. While it succeeds in the latter, the new implementation of HTC speakers misses some targets in its approach and execution that every front-facing speaker lover should be aware about.

Speaker Samples (Maximum volume, same distance from Blue Yeti Microphone)

The 10 has a front-facing speaker located where the earpiece speaker typically is, and a bottom-firing speaker as well. Long gone are the duo front-facing speakers, but HTC has nonetheless stood for this implementation by claiming that each speaker has its strengths, with the top speaker focusing on treble-heavy playback while the bottom one on bass. I can vouch for each speaker doing what HTC does — the bottom speaker has a good amount of bass to it, while the top speaker does seem to focus on treble, but only because it doesn’t play much bass at all.

Microphone Samples (Same distance from speakers, HTC 10 followed by Nexus 6P)

This is where the differences begin playing against the HTC 10. These are asymmetric speakers in both orientation and sound quality, meaning that the same song or movie might sound completely different depending on the speaker it is being played through, depending on the properties of said media. This is a problem that’s further amplified by the fact that, while each speaker has a “designated specialty”, it’s still stereo output, meaning that a sound coming from your left will sound different once it passes onto the right speaker. Another issue with the implementation is that the orientation does not help this asymmetry, but this is only an issue on landscape mode — if you are using the sound on portrait, but of your ears should pick up the same sound at the same volume.

Going past these structural issues, the phone’s speaker quality is actually really good. When tested against other flagships, it comes ahead of every other speaker-focused device in terms of clarity, with the exception of the HTC M9. While the sound on the HTC 10 is very clear, though, it’s not very loud — the Nexus 6P and previous HTC phone managed to get much, much louder than this device, making them much better audio playback whilst the phone is not in close proximity. The good news is that the HTC 10 does not distort sound throughout volume increases, but phones that do can play audio at around the same volume as the HTC 10 and be well under the point where said distortion becomes an issue.

Onto the headphones, I believe that you’ll be hard-pressed to find a better headphone experience than on the HTC 10. The discrete 24-bit DAC is noticeably better than any chipset’s built-in solution that we’ve tried, and also better than Samsung’s generally-excellent DACs. If you have a good pair of headphones and a decent FLAC library, the HTC 10 will not disappoint you. The Boomsound software also helps in this regard by providing you with different audio profiles, which make much more of a difference through the headphones than they do on the speakers.

Finally, call quality has been very enjoyable, including wi-fi calling. The top speaker being more fleshed-out than the average earpiece definitely helps the HTC 10 achieve excellent call quality.

Future Proofing & Development

HTC phones and XDA go way back, with a long history of unforgettable XDA experiences. As far as development goes, the HTC 10 has many incentives going for it. For one, HTC is much more open to development than other companies. While unlocking the bootloader is not as easy as it is on a Nexus, HTC provides unlock keys at their HTCDev website (works with T-Mobile HTC 10) through a short, 5 to 10 minute procedure. Alternatively, you can use Sunshine to turn your phone into a dev phone, without wiping your data (S-OFF/unlock/root also available for the Verizon HTC 10, in case you are stuck with Big Red). The unlockable bootloader is not the only thing the 10 has going for it, though:

Not only do you no longer need a developer edition phone for flashing goodness, but now, HTC’s warranty will cover your phone even if your bootloader is unlocked. Of course, claims that were caused by mishandling such responsibility will not be covered. But nevertheless, this is something everyone considering the phone should be well aware of.

Development for the HTC 10 has already begun in terms of ROMs and Kernels, and you will be able to find TWRP for your flashing needs, as well as a healthy set of tools including the aforementioned Sunshine. There are already good resources and guides on the HTC 10 XDA forums for you to learn everything you need to know about rooting and flashing this device, and the friendly and savvy community will likely help you in case you have any questions (but please use the Search button first!). Furthermore, there are some good and insightful discussions going on there, so be sure to check them out if you are planning on buying this device.

If you head over to the HTC 10 ROM, Kernels and Recoveries subforum you will already find a healthy selection of tweaks, ROMs and Kernels, with some familiar names like Elemental X and LeeDrOid for those wanting an easy and trustworthy first experience.

As far as future-proofing, the HTC 10 comes with the best processor and RAM configuration at the moment, and things like expandable storage are undoubtedly useful to XDA serial flashers. HTC’s warranty is also one of the best in terms of coverage and deductibles, and when it comes to updates, we know that the phone will get Android N (which was expected). HTC has been dodgy when it comes to releasing statements about updates for some of their older devices, and we did see them miss their own deadlines a few times in the past. But you should at the very least expect Android N and some future updates.

Final Thoughts & Conclusion

Addition by Subtraction

HTC has managed to make something great with the HTC 10. While there is a lot to be critical about, the things there are to praise are some of the things Android phones need the most. I have had a terrific time testing the HTC 10, and while the beginning was rocky, it grew on me in ways that very few phones have.

It’s rare to see phones that focus on the user experience to the degree that the 10 does. When HTC began advertising this phone, they hit all the right talking points — battery life, camera, performance. Their product ended up hitting the right notes too, even if not with overwhelming success. But that doesn’t matter here, because unlike some of its most-recent predecessors, the HTC 10 is not a compromised phone, nor a flawed one. Even its worst-performing aspects are mostly satisfactory, and at the very least, the HTC 10 really shows that HTC tried much harder here than it did with the M9.

The things that make the HTC 10 stand out are its superb LCD display, its refreshed design, and the user experience that the software-hardware package end up giving the user. A great part of this comes from Sense, with an UI that I am sure no enthusiast will find offensive. It is not stock, mind you, and I’d even argue that it’s not as close to stock as some portray it to be — yet it doesn’t have to, because the core of Android is still at the front. The HTC 10 is an exercise in moderation, as it strips down the things that take away from the smartphone experience with brain surgeon accuracy.

This isn’t to say there aren’t things to improve — I very much would have hoped the company would have stuck with its traditional speaker setup. I also wish the camera software would live up to the hardware specifications, but in the end I got some good shots with the HTC 10’s cameras. But these are minor complaints in contrast to what HTC achieved here, which is a very good phone that shows the company at least listened to the most vocal critics. The phone even puts the “black bar” to death, for a change! Improvements like that are hard to dismiss when they have been criticized for so long, even if they come a year too late.

I also hope to see vibrant development for the HTC 10. Previous HTC phones have had some very amazing ROMs and the HTC 10 comes with easy unlock methods and ready to crack open for those willing to dig deeper and fine-tune their experience. Time will tell whether the phone will pick up the kind of development we want out of a device with such spectacular hardware, but for now we’ll keep our fingers crossed and our recovery ready.

In summary, I think that HTC is in a good path towards reclaiming its former glory. If the HTC Nexus rumors are true, then I can absolutely see myself upgrading to one (or two!) Nexus phones this year. The HTC 10 masters many of the aspects inherent to hardware manufacturing and smartphone design, and with Google’s software running the show, I can not expect the results to be anything short of spectacular. The 10 is, at the very least, a testament to HTC’s smartphone-building capabilities. It might not make the best use of that hardware, but the package is impressive nonetheless, and the HTC 10 is ultimately very compelling device that gives the user a brilliant Android experience.

Thank you for reading!

Special thanks to XDA’s Daniel Marchena and Eric Hulse for the additional data points and perspective they provided for this review. Team effort!

Google’s newest incursion into the smartphone market is upon us, and the Pixel and Pixel XL aim to offer top-notch hardware and the perfect realization of Google’s new vision for Android. Most importantly, perhaps, it is key part of a bigger push for a redefined Google ecosystem.

With so many great Android phones around, how clearly can the Pixels stand out?

In this review, we’ll take an in-depth dive into the Pixel XL. Rather than listing specs and talking about how the experience felt, this feature attempts to provide a thorough look with contents relevant to our reader base. At XDA, our reviews are not meant to tell a user whether a phone is worth buying or not — instead, we try to lend you the phone through our words and help you come to the decision by yourself. Before getting started, let’s get the specification sheet out of the way:

Index

 DesignSoftware – UISoftware – UXPerformanceReal World UXCameraDisplayBattery LifeAudioDevelopment & Future ProofingFinal Thoughts

Hardware Design & Build Quality

The design of the Pixel XL is one of the factors that will likely get disputed the most among enthusiasts, owners and potential-buyers: in many ways, it is a deviation from the design language of the Nexus line as seen on the Nexus 6P and 5X, but the new shell gives credence to the idea of a discrete Google product. The HTC-manufactured body follows a mix between tradition and oddity, ultimately achieving a look that’s unique even if unconventional. While Google likely tried to make something different with its first new phone, given some of the recent revelations it’s unclear whether they really had much time at all to nail the body of the Pixel and Pixel XL, and some think that it might not even be a truly Google-designed device. None of that changes the merits and downfalls of the actual device that is already produced, though, so we’ll leave those arguments for the editorials where they belong. Let’s take a detailed look at each part of the Pixel XL.

The front of the Pixel XL is what I referred to as “conventional” when describing the makeup of the phone’s design. The “quite black” color option actually tones down the “black slab” motif of previous Nexus given its more of a deep grey, something worth pointing out due to the AMOLED screen the device packs. Nexus 6P owners will candidly recall the way in which the bezels merged with the screen on black background and images — not perfectly so, but well-enough to give the illusion in most lighting conditions. Unless you are in a dark environment, you will find a clear distinction between screen and bezel in the Pixel XL no matter which variant you pick. Something that I believe has been largely ignored, though, is that the Pixel XL has one of the absolute-thinnest black border around its actual display, which makes the white and blue variants of the device look more pleasing than they otherwise would, and than other white phones

The fact that you will notice the bezel is relevant given the phone’s below-average screen-to-body ratio, with average side bezels and sizeable top and bottom bezels as well. While the device is quite tall, its surface dimensions are largely the same in proportion to the Nexus 6P’s, as the screen-to-body ratio is 71.4% versus 71.2%. Due to the Pixel Xl’s slightly-smaller screen, it ultimately makes it a more-compact device with slightly-bigger bezels than an average 5.5-inch phone. An issue many will take with the frontal design, however, is the asymmetrical distribution of top and bottom bezel. We found the larger bottom bezel to be slightly more noticeable on the white front Pixel variants, too, as the pitch-black navigation bar makes a clear contrast with the bezel. It is a little disappointed to see that space unused given that last year’s Nexus phones had bottom-firing speakers, and that HTC (who ultimately manufactured this phone) has been renowned for its speakers too. However, I have found the ergonomics and nav-bar-reachability to be excellent on the Pixel XL precisely because of the bottom-heavy bezel, which ends up pushing the navigation bar higher and making it easier for the thumb to reach it. At the top you’ll find the usual camera, sensor and speaker.

A similarly-neat positioning is found on the sides of the phone: the 8.5mm-thick frame hosts both the volume rocker and the power-button on the right side, in such a way that they are easy to reach with either hand. Right-handed usage results in the thumb perfectly landing on the power button and only slightly above the volume rocker, while left-handed usage has the index finger reach the power button, and the middle finger land on the volume keys. I adapted to the new setup instantly, and the textured power button feels great and aids in giving tactile contrast between the two control pieces. It also shines differently at various angles when hit by light due to its geometry, and it ultimately feels extremely sturdy and clicky. The volume rocker, on the other hand, has been wobblier on all the units we’ve tested, and we’ve also seen numerous reports of other users finding their volume keys wobblier than the power button (and they can sound differently, too). That being said, they remain extremely clicky as well, and we’ve had no issues with asymmetric feedback when pressing either key either.

Other than that, the sides are pretty barren except for the SIM card slot on the other side of the device, which sits flush with the rest of the frame. The bottom of the phone contains the USB Type-C port as well as two grills, only one of which is a speaker as the right grill is a microphone instead. At the top of the phone, you’ll find the 3.5mm headphone jack. Around the edges you’ll find both the glass front and the back of phone fused with different curvatures: the 2.5D glass transition of the screen is extremely subtle, whereas the curvature merging the frame with the back is very pronounced and sudden, and the antennae bands follow around it.

Getting to the back of the phone is where we find some of the more interesting-aspects of the device’s design. The Pixel XL has a two-tone back with the aluminum chassis featuring a glass overlay at the top, which reportedly helps with signal as well (I haven’t found signal to be particularly better than on other devices, though, and I know friends abroad have had signal issues). It gives the design an unconventional look that makes it stand out from the crowd and it’s ultimately a more-prominent “Google phone” marker than the Google logo at the mid-bottom. The two-tone back is certainly a curious addition that brings unconventional side-effects, such as uneven heat distribution, different scratch and shatter properties for uneven durability, and an interesting difference in light reflection. The glass panel is glossy and due to the background under it, it ends up looking not-quite-transparent, meaning it can look like slick black glass or like a more matte grey texture depending on the lighting and the angle. I personally think it’s an interesting choice and I’ve grown to like it, but there are some nitpicks worth mentioning as well:

First of all, the glass is slightly raised above the metal, making the glass window prone to scratches when laid on certain surfaces. Our units have all been scratched as a result, with the edges in particular showing many microscratches. Second, we found a positioning mistake in multiple units where the window’s microphone hole is actually not aligned with the microphone under the glass. We’ve also heard reports of slightly uneven fusing of the glass and the metal across its four edges, but our units have been fine. Ultimately, cases and skins can help mitigate some of the potential durability side-effects.

The new redesign certainly borrows some structural similarities from other manufacturers, but the execution is very solid in itself. The phone feels very sturdy (in part due to the thickness), the materials feel premium and the ergonomics are very good for a large and thick device, with good button placement and reachability. A final nitpick would be that the device doesn’t feel properly balanced in terms of weight, although the center of gravity lays only slightly past the middle. I personally think the design is unassuming and unspectacular, but I also feel like it’s the kind of design one won’t get sick of after a year, or rather, the kind of functional smartphone design one can enjoy for more than a single year.

Software Design & User Interface

With the Pixel phones being Google-branded, we are actually seeing Google customize the system UI of their devices with an “exclusive” theme, but given that the Pixel is also running Android 7.1 we also see some UI changes that will eventually arrive to all Android devices. Google’s changes to the system UI are ultimately tame and lighter than the changes in OEM skins, but they are worth documenting because they either represent the foundation for what we can expect out of future Pixel phones, or the future of Android as the changes trickle down to all devices. And, perhaps most importantly, these modifications give the Pixel some extra character and uniqueness, not unlike what other OEMs intend with their modifications to stock Android.

Starting with the one change you’ll see on nearly every screen, we find that the navigation bar has now filled its icons and deviated from the standard imposed by Android 5.0 Lollipop now two years ago. The new buttons behave identically to the standard AOSP navigation bar for the most part, with the exception of the home button which has a short animation upon pressing it and long-pressing it. The Google colors make for a nice visual cue that signals the presence of Google Assistant as well, and the way in which they react to touch serve as visual aid to make long-pressing for the shortcut more intuitive.

Moving on to the Pixel Launcher, which you can download for your device, we see two important changes to the Pixel’s UI design language. First, we find the circular icons that are now a system-wide standard and not relegated to the launcher only, and that are enabled by Google but also can be enabled by any OEM who wishes to adopt the standard for their future Nougat releases. It’s an odd deviation for sure, but we’ll leave the subjective interpretation to you. The second big change is the use of transparencies across the launcher, perhaps most notably in the homescreen dock found at the bottom which presents a white, transparent rectangle that also merges with the navigation bar. There is a purpose to this rectangle, as swiping up transforms it into the application drawer. Another transparency is found in the message one finds when clearing all recent apps, as illustrated.

That transparency seemingly mimics the transitions by other OEMs into an UI with more transparencies and “glass-like” behavior, something which is also apparent in Google’s choice of default wallpaper, as the dynamic “Aurora Time lapse” background has the kind of blurred aesthetic we’d expect from other OEMs. The launcher also presents a weather widget that expands into an app with playful colors and transitions, and the “Google” pill which expands into a Google search bar when pressed. Swiping to the left expectedly reveals the Google Now feed, and that about rounds up the Pixel’s launcher. One of the nicest aspects of the Pixel homescreen experience is behind the launcher, though, as the built-in wallpaper picker offers beautiful photography and much of it is dynamic, reacting not just to your swipes and actions but also the time and weather.

What about the rest of the UI? There are no radical changes to the recents menu, but the notification panel sees an extra slot in the quick toggles after the first swipe. Here you will also find a hint of blue in the brightness slider, now replacing the stock Android green, and this color is the new accent color Google chose for the Pixel. Indeed, this accent color is found in various places across the UI including the camera, downloads and settings icons, the settings menus themselves (toggles and trims) and the new dialer also includes a vibrant and attractive blue theme.

Moving onto the settings, the blue theme is present on the material iconography; however, there is a prominent new tab to accompany the traditional settings, which takes the user into customer support. Under this tab, one can initiate phone or chat customer support as well as quickly access help resources, tips & tricks, and an option to send feedback. I don’t personally believe that such a feature deserves an entire tab in the settings menu instead of a submenu or an app you can hide, and I don’t see people using the feature frequently enough to warrant such an important shortcut. But at the very least it’s impossible to miss, which isn’t a bad thing for this kind of feature.

There aren’t other changes worth noting as far as aesthetics go, and I haven’t found any issues with the stock experience. The features under the System UI tuner, however, haven’t been properly updated: the “Do Not Disturb” toggle for the volume menu doesn’t scale with DPI which makes it look oddly big and unaligned, and the slide gesture for multi-window doesn’t work.  These are small nitpicks in what’s otherwise a stellar Android user experience that offers a close to Stock UI with just enough character to differentiate it from the Nexus experience. The move towards rounded features, transparencies and blur might not develop prominently like what we see on other OEMs’ modifications, and I believe they are done rather tastefully. The new launcher and wallpapers steal the show, with the latter being excellently accessible to the mainstream consumer given they are part of the default homescreen experience. Overall, the UI of the Pixel phones has been delightful, though I wish that there were more ways to customize it — early reports suggested accent theming, and a dark theme has not made it here either, but hopefully future releases will keep making the experience better as currently, theme engines and available themes don’t see very good compatibility with the system UI.

Software Features & User Experience

The Google Pixel and Pixel XL are the first phones to come with Android 7.1 out of the box, which means that they bring the latest in terms of Android features. At the same time, however, the changes that Google made to the Pixel’s software (the aesthetic ones being documented above) also mean exclusive features and changes beyond mere cosmetic accents. Some of these “exclusive” features didn’t remain Pixel-only for very long thanks to the talents of the developer community. But nevertheless, it’s clear that Google tried to bring extra oomph to the Pixel’s software past what a regular Stock Android device running Nougat would offer. And it’s important to look at the Pixel’s resulting software UX because it signals the underlying intentions and direction that Google has planned for Android. So what’s new in Android 7.1 Nougat, and in the Google Pixel and Pixel XL?

Google has leveraged its services to entice Pixel owners into using cloud storage, as Pixel owners get unlimited photo and video backup to Google Photos, and unlike the regular “unlimited” service, this one keeps the quality of the content pristine as Google otherwise compresses your pictures if they are above a specific threshold. This feature is complemented by Smart Storage which automatically removes already-backed pictures and videos from your device if they are old enough and if you are running out of space. Considering there is no storage option in between the Pixel and Pixel XL, this option might prove useful for those that opt for the 32GB variant.

Another quick feature related to photos and video transfer is the quick switch adapter which lets you restore your files from another Android or iPhone device.

The Pixels also bring “Moves”, which has its own menu within the settings. Under that menu you will find a few shortcuts that you can toggle, including “Jump to Camera” by double tapping the power button from any screen (like the Nexus 6P and 5X) and then “Flip Camera”, which allows you to switch in and out of selfie mode with a quick double-twist of the phone, similar to the Moto X’s lines’ camera jump shortcut. The fingerprint sensor of the Pixel XL also supports gestures, which the phone implements as a “Swipe for Notifications” shortcut, very much like what we’ve found on Honor devices like the 5X at the start of this year. This is a very welcome feature, and it works very well, but we would have hoped some extra functionality and/or customization; other devices with this feature include more options already, and Google could have pushed the envelope even further by allowing list scrolling or other nifty features.

There is no Dark Mode/Theme, and System UI tuner is almost as limited as always. There are power notification controls for setting an app’s notification importance (managing peek, sound, vibration, interruptions, etc), the Do Not Disturb shortcut for the settings menu, and then Status Bar controls. There is also a Multi-Window slide-up-recents gesture toggle, but it currently doesn’t work. Night mode is present and it’s as pleasant as ever, although not very smart and it can cause blinding flashes after it changes on you with no gradual adjustments (especially if it’s done automatically without you expecting it).

Multi-window itself, however, is a great addition to Android and something I’ve personally waited for a long time. Given that the feature is debuting on Nougat, and that the Pixel is one of the few devices running official Nougat out of the box, I’ll give a brief description and thoughts. You can enter multi-window by long-pressing the recents menu, or by dragging a recents menu card to the top of the screen. The top of the screen will be reserved for that app and there is no way to quickly switch it to the bottom panel like on Samsung devices, but the screen persists while browsing through recents and, while it disappears when on a Launcher, it pops backup atop whatever app you then launch. If you launch an app through an app shortcut (such as Settings from the notification panel), it will go to the bottom irrespective of which screen you are focused on. The dividing bar has a hinge separating the two windows, but it can only be dragged to select heights, and the 3 levels conveniently allow you to display a full video on top while browsing an app on the bottom. Dragging the hinge all the way up or down will exit multi-window and focus on the app thatremains

The fact that the Pixel has a status bar and navigation keys that are not hidden means that a chunk of the usable screen space is unavailable to the user on multi-window — while this is something we are all used to most of the time, that extra space becomes more valuable when multi-tasking this way. Samsung’s implementation (which will dramatically change under Android Nougat, according to the Android compatibility document) hid the status bar, and capacitive keys helped maximize usable space. The combination of a thick divider bar, status bar and navigation bar means the space is not maximized on the Pixel, and in reality all that used space is taken from one app’s interface. Luckily, the built-in DPI tuner of Android Nougat makes this less of an issue by shrinking the ratio of status/navigation bar to usable content, as well as increasing the content density within each application. The stock implementation is ultimately very fluid and useful and while features such as quick-swap between the top and bottom aren’t there, there is a lot I appreciate such as the ability to open two instances of certain apps like Chrome or the Settings menu.

So, what about Google’s flagship Pixel feature, Assistant? I’ve used Assistant throughout my review period, in great part because I actually use Search (and even Google Now) a lot for my day-to-day usage. Google Assistant is, quite clearly, in its early stages and we’ve noted as much in an editorial where we documented many of the oddities and inconsistencies we found when testing the service. There is clear feature disparity with not just Google’s current Search service, but also other Assistant versions such as what’s found on Google Home. That being said, Assistant comes to specifically tackle a problem that likely caused Google many headaches, and that’s the difficulty in marketing its services when they are disparately distributed in various parts of the UI.

Assistant ultimately tries to marry three core services – Google Now, Google Search and Now on Tap – which are currently (outside the Pixel) found on three different areas of the user interface (the leftmost homescreen, the search bars across the phone, and the home button long press). By making Assistant accessible through the home button, and capable of all of what Google services can do, the simplification of Google’s useful services would come about in theory.

The reality is that, in its current form, Assistant’s lack of feature parity make it a less-suitable alternative to actual search bars – or even Google Now, which you can get back with a simple build.prop edit –  and other Google services. For example, the Pixel can’t currently recognize Songs, and its information display is separate than that of Search. An example that I found in my usage is that asking Assistant for or about math-related formulas or concepts doesn’t return the relevant formula or description to rekindle my memory, but instead initiates a search. We also found inconsistencies when making shopping lists across Assistant, home, and Allo’s neutered Assistant. Above you can find an example, and it seems that the same happens with Google Home. Then there are the issues with inconsistent command recognition and other problems we’ve been used to for a while.

Due to the feature disparity between Assistant and Search, the experience was ultimately not polished to the point where I could use Assistant exclusively

That being said, when it works, it works very well. Google Assistant is only a glimpse of what’s to come, I believe, and just like Google Now on Tap got better over time, so will this ambitious feature. The better aspects manage to shine through and suggest a really interesting future for voice assistants. For example, the ability to have Assistant recognize the subject of the next query tacitly rather than explicitly helps in making the service feel more conversational. Further expansions to context-awareness could push this even further, and currently it remains useful for fetching information, searching for images of more-specific objects (and of specific colors), or even launching music even if you don’t remember the specific song title. There is definitely a lot of impressive technology in Assistant, but I also know many of my colleagues have disabled the feature entirely given they didn’t see the additional benefit (also, you can go back to Google Now on Tap as well by removing the Pixel identifier from your build.prop). I have personally used it a great deal given I have been used to these types of services anyway, but Assistant was not solid enough to the point where I could use it exclusively. Part of that is due to the feature disparity, but the inability to input text for example hurts the more-technical search queries. Pro-tip: Assistant is great for finding items in game wikis, though.

There is also a live-support feature, which put us on the phone with a real-flesh assistant on the other side of the screen, but we only used this feature once. One last feature that you will only require about 12 times a year is the background updates system. Android 7.1 Nougat on the Pixel mirrors every partition of the device to form an A/B system similar to what’s found on Chromebooks. What this means is that updates can be downloaded and installed in the background, allowing you to then simply reboot into your updated state. This makes updates faster and safer (less prone to issues when updating), and you can actually see the activity that’s installing the update while you are using your phone (note that it will get slightly toasty). I’ve only experienced the system once through the November patch, but it was a quite short and satisfactory experience. 

Performance

The Google Pixel XL has Google flexing its performance muscle once more: while the Nexus 6P packed the still-flawed Snapdragon 810, it’s worth remembering the Nexus 5’s excellent Snapdragon 800 experience, and the subsequent Nexus 6 with the unsung masterpiece that was the Snapdragon 805. Qualcomm’s misstep with the 810 stood in contrast with the jewels of its past, but with the 820 the company has managed to put out a really compelling chipset that some manufacturers have implemented extremely well, such as OnePlus with the OnePlus 3.

Others, however, have had less success with the processor as we’ve seen in our tests and reviews, but given this is Google’s chance at better control over both hardware and software, we’d expect this Snapdragon 821 to be very well-implemented.

Before we dig into the details, we must remind our readers that Google’s Snapdragon 821 is a variant clocked at 2.15GHz on the performance cluster, and 1.6GHz on the efficiency cluster — in essence, that means the Pixel XL can be expected to perform like a device running a regular Snapdragon 820 in most benchmarks. The same goes for the GPU, and we can confirm that our results show the Pixel XL very similarly to other devices in 2016 as far as theoretical performance goes. However, there are some difference when it comes to thermals and throttling which we’ll detail, although not as extensively as we did in our separate Pixel XL throttling and thermals analysis (so head there if you want the specifics). We’ll also compare the Snapdragon 821 with the recently-released Kirin 960 in the Huawei Mate 9, so that people get an idea of the processor’s relative standing at the very end of 2016. As a final note, the Snapdragon 821 in the Pixel XL might perform at the same level as the 820 in other devices released earlier this year, but Qualcomm told us there is a smaller advantage in battery savings at the same clockspeeds of around 5%, so ultimately the inclusion of this processor is not unjustified.

CPU & System

In most aspects, the Pixel XL behaves just like the Snapdragon 820 devices we are used to. Luckily, this isn’t a bad thing, as the Snapdragon 820 is the most powerful chipset that is also widely-available, and those SoCs that are more powerful in specific aspects are also exclusive to Samsung and Huawei which offer user experiences particularly antithetic to stock Android. Perhaps most importantly, though, the Pixel XL not only scores higher than your average Snapdragon 820 device (if only slightly), but it also shows low score variance and very good thermal consistency when stressing the CPU.

While we’ve seen some Snapdragon 820 devices like the HTC 10 begin throttling within 10 Geekbench 3 consecutive tests, the Pixel XL joins the ranks of the OnePlus 3 and other thermally-consistent devices by not having a visible downward trend in its scores over those first 10 tests. With the A73 cores being implemented in newer chipsets and with Qualcomm’s 10nm future, we’ll likely be either extending the runtime of our CPU stress test or redesigning it altogether; it was good enough at revealing throttling in the 810 era and in early 2016, but the commendable performance of recent chipsets means we need to find more stressful CPU endurance tests more akin to our GPU endurance suite.

As you can see, one year makes a tremendous difference for sustained performance.

The Pixel XL ultimately does a great job in both the synthetic benchmarks with more-abstract tests as well as those that try to mimic real-world performance using system resources. PCMark and Basemark OS II scores are very respectable, and the phone manages to hold its own in various sub-tests even against the latest A73-based Kirin 960 found in the Huawei Mate 9. It’s worth noting that the Pixel XL suffers the most in the memory tests, which bring down the overall score, but are not a CPU-centric burden.

While Qualcomm’s CPU does perform worse on these tests than A72 and A73-based processors like the Kirin 950 to Kirin 960 as well as Samsung’s Exynos 8890 with M1 cores, the Kryo has ultimately shown it can achieve respectable performance while keeping a good thermal profile and minimize throttling. Sadly, the OEM’s application does seem to have a big impact on the results, but Google did a good job with the Pixel XL.

GPU & Gaming

The Snapdragon 821 brings the famous Adreno 530 GPU, which offers excellent performance in the one realm Qualcomm still has not been beaten in. The Pixel XL is also a shining example of what the Adreno 530 can do, and with very good reason too — this is a phone that Google needs to both powerful and efficient for their Daydream VR platform, which will stress the GPU the most, but it’ll also make good use of the Snapdragon 820’s peripherals like the Hexagon DSP. This makes the Snapdragon 821 the best choice for graphics performance, and consequently gaming and VR as well. Our usual set of graphics-intensive benchmarks emphasize this like we’d expect.

The Pixel XL manages to slightly edge out Snapdragon 820 devices on GFXBench off-screen tests and 3DMark’s Slingshot ES3.1, which renders at 1440p and then scales the image to the device’s resolution (effectively making it resolution-independent). When factoring in resolution, 1080p Snapdragon 820 devices like the OnePlus 3 do perform better in terms of peak scores and also performance-over-time in on-screen tests other than 3DMark, but off-screen results are very similar and in-line with what we’d expect out of an efficient 821 device.

The Pixel XL is also very good at sustained performance when testing both 3DMark and GFXBench (30 iterations), showing lower differentials and less throttling than other Snapdragon 820 devices as we’ve analyzed in previous features, as well as less throttling than what we’ve found on the Exynos Note 7. While the Pixel XL throttled significantly less than Galaxy devices on 3DMark, its final temperature was around the same, ranging from 43.1°C | 109.6°F  to 43.6°C | 110.5°F. This isn’t unconventionally hot for these kinds of tests, but we must stress the fact that this is the temperature on the fingerprint scanner, and the rest of the body feels cooler to the touch. The sustained score is not as big of an improvement over last year’s Nexus 6P’s 3DMark performance over time, which actually did surprisingly well despite the Snapdragon 810 inside it. That being said, not all Snapdragon 810 devices were created equal, and the OnePlus 2 saw a drop in score of ~21%.

When running GFXBench at 1440p, I did not find a consistent throttling pattern however; those who read our Snapdragon 820 vs Exynos 8890 Note 7 comparison might recall that the throttling pattern for those devices was extremely replicable throughout various tests, but even when controlling the starting conditions, the Pixel XL shows wildly-different results — I made sure to run this 30-minute test many, many times. Even if I couldn’t get a clear and satisfying pattern down, all of my results were above the average. Indeed, the Pixel XL actually beats the Snapdragon 820 Note 7 and the HTC 10, the former shedding up to half its score and the latter losing close to a third. The Pixel XL, by comparison, saw drops between 5% and 20%, with most results sitting around a 10% drop in performance at most. Temperatures never rose past 44°C | 111.2°F very much like in 3DMark. While some subtests in gaming-mimicking benchmarks weigh down the score compared to other chipsets with faster CPUs, graphics and rendering-related scores ultimately put the Pixel ahead.

Moving on to gaming, this phone is simply one of the best options currently available. Framerates in games like Asphalt Extreme can come close to sustaining the 30FPS mark with slight variations in certain scenes (and the obligatory drop when reloading a level, which should be ignored). Dead Trigger 2 and GTA San Andreas also show excellent performance that can be sustained for 15 to 20 minutes with no significant throttling, and thermals remain tame at a maximum of 43°C | 109.4°F located in the fingerprint scanner. (Special thanks to Gamebench for providing us with a solution to Gamebench not being able to run on the Pixel XL, thus enabling us to test!)

Overall, the Pixel XL offers excellent gaming performance, and even if the device does go over 40°C | 104°F (the point at which I consider the heat noticeable), having the hottest point on the fingerprint scanner means you are unlikely to touch the hottest point. However, the phone does suffer from uneven heat distribution that is top-heavy, so very long gaming sessions could turn uncomfortable.

Real-World Performance

The Nexus devices held a tradition of being some if not the fastest devices implementing their respective chipsets, and even the Nexus 6P was able to deliver outstanding performance despite its Snapdragon 810 processor (and all the issues that implied). With the Google Pixel and Pixel XL, you’d think that the company that created Android being in control of the hardware would be able to deliver an outstanding experience, one worthy of “vertical integration” levels of praise that Apple has been showered with for years. I’m happy to report that, for the most part, that is the case indeed: the Pixel XL is a fast and smooth device in its operation, but surprisingly enough, it falls a bit short in a few areas that ultimately prevent it from claiming the performance crown in my eyes.

Beginning with app opening speeds, the Pixel XL is an extremely snappy phone. While changes to Android Nougat and 7.1 squashed our chances of looking at objective measurements through Discomark, we methodically tested app opening speeds in comparison to other high-end flagships and found the Pixel XL was as good as other 820 devices. We’ve confirmed it to be slightly faster than our LG V20 and as fast as the OnePlus 3 running Oxygen 3.2.6, and the overall app-opening speed is fast enough that its boost is noticeable to the naked eye, although devices like the Exynos Note 7 are likely still faster (but take this with a grain of salt as we are inferring it from our Discomark data and experience) at opening apps. Another great part about the Pixel XL’s performance is hot app opening speeds, as the phone is able to swiftly fetch apps from memory with great responsiveness. Operating the navigation keys of back and home, too, show no delays and it can make for some impressively-fluid juggling of apps and home screens. Keep in mind the clips above bear the burden of the screen recorder software as well.

Now, while the resulting experience described above is very good, there are two caveats that influence what we’ve observed. First, the RAM management of the Pixel XL is below what we’d consider to be the average for a 4GB RAM device. The device can hold over 14 small applications, like we’d expect, but throwing games into the mix quickly kicks old apps out of memory (for example, in the clip above, it could hold 3 out of the 5 games at once). One of the most frustrating consequences that stems from it is the occasional launcher redraw, which we wouldn’t expect out of such hardware in hands of Google. As for the app opening speeds, it’s worth noting that the effective responsiveness is magnified by Android 7.1 due to its improvements to input latency. The way Google achieved this (as described to us by Chet Haase at the BABBQ 2016) is by changing the order and priority of registering and rendering inputs and frames, which results in up to 40% reduced latency (although, this varies depending on the rendering cycle and the time it takes to render a particular frame before being queued for display). This improvement is tangible, and it affects everything from opening apps to starting in-app activities and scrolling through lists. We were not able to measure the precise input latency nor the roundabout lag as our WALT would not get consistent results, but needless to say the improvements are there, and they are tangible.

When it comes to fluidity and framerate, the Pixel XL is stunningly smooth barring some discrete exceptions. While we noticed dropped frames in the Pixel Launcher that we managed to install onto non-Pixel devices ahead of release, we really didn’t expect those dropped frames to show up in the final product. Alas, they did, and swiping to the left-most screen visibly stutters rather frequently — not as bad TouchWiz’s flipboard integration, but it is not as smooth as we’d expect and even not as smooth as the Google Now launcher. Other than that, scrolling through the interface and lists is very smooth, and jumps in activities rarely feature choppy transitions, even in resource-heavy applications. This isn’t to say that in-app performance is entirely consistent: we did notice some odd slowdowns on YouTube, Hangouts, and Chrome, but those faults could be attributed to these particular Google app themselves.

Throughout one of our three review weeks, we saw particularly unstable performance on YouTube, and we’d often meet app force closes. This is hardly what we’d expect out of a Google phone, but in the Pixel’s defense, the fault lies in with the apps — Google apps, nonetheless.

Ultimately, though, the Pixel XL is an excellent phone when it comes to performance and I’d say that in terms of responsiveness, it is not only Android’s best performer, but also as close a competitor to the iPhone as we’ll get this year. While responsiveness is a combination of touch latency (which was thoroughly improved with the Pixel’s software) and actual speed, the latter is also excellent on the Pixel XL, with better app opening times than most Snapdragon 820 devices. That said, the aspects that bring down the experience a couple of notches are bad enough to be both noticeable in real-world use, and replicable without much trouble: the occasional framedrops in select areas of the UI are bad enough, but having a consistent stutter on the leftmost panel is particularly puzzling. Likewise, having occasional launcher redraws on a 4GB device with software and hardware in Google’s control is a tad disconcerting. I strongly believe that the benefits outshine the negatives here, though, and it’s also worth noting that the Pixel XL is pushing a 1440p display, meaning that regular Pixel owners will see a small performance improvement in actions related to graphics rendering. Overall, this device is a joy to operate.

Camera

Written by Daniel Marchena

Prior Google phones have been lackluster in the camera department, in particular up until the Nexus 6P, and usually behind the curve that other flagships set. However, when factoring the lower cost of a Google Nexus phone in comparison to the competition, many of those issues could be written off. With Google targeting a considerably higher price bracket than last year and going toe-to-toe with some of the best hardware in the industry they needed to step their game up considerably.

So when Google announced the new Pixel phones as being the highest-rated smartphone cameras ever from DXOMark it was both a point of excitement and a cause for caution. So did Google finally put out a phone that has a class leading camera, or is it relegated to the “it’s a great phone, but if the camera is important then look elsewhere” stereotype of old? In short, it is almost everything Google said it was plus some, but it is not without drawbacks. Do consider that the Pixel packs an impressive Sony IMX378 sensor which we’ve detailed in a previous in-depth article, and although it does not have OIS, its EIS for video is a work of wonder which we’ll look at below. The first step for any camera, however, is the experience.

Carrying the “double tap power” feature from Nexus phones and AOSP, the Pixel camera is one of the easiest to access, although the delay is a little short and you may find yourself turning on and off the screen instead of accessing the camera. Moving on to the actual application experience, Google has adjusted the camera app a few times in recent years but some core elements remain the same. It is a sparse interface that serves as an advantage and disadvantage. On top of the screen lays a series of toggles for various camera options. The traditional timer and flash options are present but there are a few more toggles power users will love. One of my personal favorites is the adjustable 3 way grid system that includes 3×3, 4×4 and the Golden ratio, ensuring you can frame your shot however you want.

Also present is a white balance selector that sadly leaves out the ability to set it manually. There is also the HDR toggle which we will discuss later. The Pixel ships with its camera in a 4:3 ratio for the maximum of 12.3MP which leaves blank space on the right for your shutter control, camera switcher and the ability to view prior photos. A swipe off the left screen brings in the options for Slow Motion, Panorama, Photo Sphere, Lens Blur and your settings menu. Finally, swiping to side puts you into video mode. While it would be nice to have the record button on the main screen, it is difficult to do with a native 4:3 sensor since hitting record crops the image to 16×9 and may cause you to lose your original framing. I have found that swiping the screen with little to no indication that is an option can leave users confused, including my wife.

Inside the settings menu are the basics such as adjusting the front and rear camera resolutions for both video and photos, burst settings panorama controls and video stabilization. Here is where I have a bone to pick with Google. Things like FPS controls that should be in this menu as well as the OSD but are not, as should be further controls for things like high frame rate options and so on. It is understood that Google was going for a more simple approach, but most stand alone camera have settings found through options menu and those options available for quick toggling through the OSD. It is a small thing to pick on, but it can affect day to day usage. Generally you will find yourself toggling through menus more often than you should trying to find where a specific option might be located at.

A second issue that the Google Camera has is the lacking of full manual controls for things like ISO, shutter speed and focus and RAW image capture. It has been a few years since the Camera API2, which allowed many of these things natively, hit the scene so to see Google still fail to implement them is annoying. It is clear that Google set out to target the the iPhone instead of a more powerful application like the one that Samsung provides which clearly is ahead of both in terms of form and function.

The lack of settings and adjustments is clear indication that Google wants you to go full auto with your photography and leave the settings to the phone. The shocking part is how well this actually works. The simple fact is that the Pixel consistently out performed my expectations. It does not get any easier than pointing and shooting with the Pixel. Due to the HDR+ Auto enhancements you can even point the camera directly into the sun and still capture the colors and details in grass and foliage, and what you see in the viewfinder is ultimately misleading due to how well it handles capturing detail from differently-lighted scenes.

The exposure difference between the viewfinder and an HDR+ photo.

In bright lighting, low lighting and anywhere in between the Pixel delivers above average photo quality despite its disadvantages on paper such as the lack of OIS and its F2.0 aperture, but Google has made tremendous leaps forward; they have made good use of the Snapdragon 821 and the Hexagon DSP in particular and unlike with the Nexus 6P, you can queue many pictures for processing with no delay in the actual UX. This is, in part, because the Pixel is constantly recording the data and the pressing the capture button pulls the last few frames the phone had already recorded for the sampling — do keep in mind that when processing an image, it cannot be shared or otherwise manipulated, and the image processing itself takes a fair few seconds so taking pictures and sharing them right away is slower than on other phones.

Video is also surprisingly excellent, although it does not appear to benefit from the sort of HDR video support like we have seen on this years Galaxy phones, and this is despite the sensor’s enhanced capabilities for 4k 60 Hz HDR video (but there are bottlenecks to be considered outside the ideal world). This can cause some of the highlights to be washed out during video and keeps it more or less in line with the competition. Personally a sticking point for me this year has been the forgoing of optical image stabilization for electronic image stabilization. While Google’s accomplishments in this area are impressive to say the least, even the best electronic stabilization is no match for optically stabilized video. Google’s algorithm delivers a floating “reactive” approach to stabilized video instead of the “active” stabilization that OIS brings. At its extremes you can get a “jerking” motion while panning the camera that can be unpleasant.. Google does provide the option to turn this setting off, but then you are left with no sort of stabilization which is simply unacceptable on a phone that carries this sort of price tag.

The benefit though is that the Pixel is one of the only phones out this year without a camera bump, if the omission of OIS is the cause of this we don’t know, but it is a case of “pick your poison”. Personally, I will deal with the bump in every case if that meant my photos and videos would benefit from it. All of that being said though, the electronic stabilization is very impressive and most users will not notice any of the side effects it bringsand generally very happy with its performance. It’s impressive enough to fool most people into believing there is some strong hardware influence at play, and the gyro-based solution is ultimately very serviceable even if a bit unnatural.

As I mentioned earlier, if you are looking for a camera experience where you can literally point and shoot and get the shot, the Pixel is likely the best phone on the market today. But that does not mean that the camera itself is above the competition, or even toe-to-toe with camera leaders in specific areas. The camera sensor that the Pixel uses is a very close relative to the 6P sensor boasting only PDAF over its older sibling (on paper). While Phase Detect Autofocus is far better than laser or contrast, it is not the dual pixel technology Samsung was using this year, or like that of the Sony IMX398 sensor the OPPO R9 uses which also has that advantage. Further, the Pixel is one of the only flagships this year to ship without optical image stabilization. Between the enhanced EIS and improved HDR+ Auto, Google argues that OIS is not needed… and I’d argue that for the money it should be there to further improve an already-stellar experience. In short and leaving price aside, Google’s camera is now one of the best for people who just want to capture a great moment in time and without fidgeting, and their improvements over the past two years in this department are more than commendable.

Display

The Pixel XL brings a 5.5-inch AMOLED display with a resolution of 1440p, currently the perfect pixel density for both VR and a large phone screen. Given that Google has had full control over the Pixel XL’s design, we see their choice of display technology as a bit of an endorsement, and it makes sense given the tremendous strides AMOLED has made in the past few years as well as its screen properties (like low persistence, excellent contrast) which also make VR more enjoyable. The screen is flanked by an extremely subtle curvature along the edges, as well as thick bezels. One last physical characteristic worth mentioning is the absolutely minimal black border around the actual display, which makes the white and blue variants more attractive to the eye. Now that we’ve gone over the superficial aspects, how does it actually perform?

Starting with brightness, the Pixel XL caps at around 400 Nits, and ultimately performs very similarly to the OnePlus 3 and other AMOLED devices in regular usage. The Pixel XL is not above average in this regard, and I’ve found that its brightness output is actually very underwhelming under direct sunlight. This problem is further amplified by the fact that the Pixel XL does not come with a sunlight-boosting mode or feature built into its adaptive brightness, like other AMOLED devices do. Not having that extra boost to maximum brightness (which came at the cost of some color distortion) makes it difficult to look at media or images on sunny days, and I especially missed the brightness boost while taking pictures out and about; that being said, AMOLED’s excellent contrast makes it so that reading isn’t too much of a problem should the text clearly stand out anyway. 

It’s worth mentioning that not all AMOLED devices share the same features, but the similarly-bright OnePlus 3 has a dual-polarizing layer that ultimately makes sunlight legibility slightly better. Luckily, if you are into rooting your device, custom Kernels, Xposed modules and even root apps will most certainly let you get some extra lumens out of your Pixel XL. As for adaptive brightness, I found it to be very serviceable, and the display can actually reach further minimums when the setting is toggled — this allows the Pixel XL to actually get dimmer than the OnePlus 3, for example, but otherwise it doesn’t.

The whitepoint of the Pixel XL is on the colder side on the regular display mode, and slightly greenish when toggling sRGB. When it comes to greyscale, the Pixel XL actually doesn’t look to be as accurate as other AMOLED devices like Google’s own Nexus 6P, and this is only made worse when switching to the sRGB color profile. I haven’t found those issues to negatively affect my media consumption experience, though, and I only noticed the difference when comparing special templates side by side against more accurate devices. There is also no odd banding or other unexpected issues, either. The AMOLED display’s perfect blacks also make for a much more enjoyable media experience in my opinion, and even with an inaccurate greyscale AMOLED has come a long way from the days of impossible horror-movie watching and purple ghosting (an issue still noticeable on some AMOLED displays, like the OnePlus 3’s). Also (and as expected), the Pixel XL also displays excellent viewing angles with no color distortion.

Moving on to color, the Pixel XL targets the NTSC color space which is a poor choice for an Android device. As we’ve explained in an in-depth article, Android has no system-level color management, which means that the information is sentto the display without accounting for the color space of the source and the color space chosen by the OEM. Most of the content you’ll consume is sRGB, and NTSC is a larger color gamut, so the system sends relatively untagged color data to the display, ultimately conforming them to its standard and displaying them inaccurately. Luckily and not unlike the Nexus 6P before it, the Pixel XL offers an sRGB mode to more-accurately represent your content and media like it was intended. Finally, keep in mind that Google targeted NTSC by design and they did not aim for color accuracy with the Pixel XL in its default state anyway; while Google knows how to offer a color-accurate device like the Nexus 5, it most certainly knows that people don’t necessarily like the admittedly-tamer sRGB mode and accurate calibration.

With that in mind, we can look at color: reds are bright and punchy, green is extremely vibrant (and the most inaccurate color), and blues are deep. The screen ultimately stands out quite a lot, but it is also very color-inaccurate (again, by design). I did enjoy the multimedia experience on the default screen mode, though, and I presume most users will find it to be very good as well. For those that want accurate color rendering, the sRGB mode does a pretty good job at that. That being said, whites become oddly greener and the greyscale accuracy becomes slightly less accurate.

That covers most of my findings, but I want to reiterate a few points as well: the color accuracy debacle does not mean you will be unable to enjoy this display; quite the opposite, I am sure Google’s research indicates that this was a more pleasant configuration for the mainstream public, and we regularly see popular smartphones with leading screen technology ship with inaccurate calibrations and odd color space targets as the default (like LG and DCI-P3). The fact that this screen does not skimp on pixel density is good for Google’s Daydream VR push but also for media consumption, as the chroma resolution of a Pentile AMOLED display is lower due to its uneven number of subpixels, and can be effectively halved under certain conditions. As a final note, I’d like to say that the experience has been quite nice and the only shortcoming I was made conscious off multiple times throughout my usage is sunlight legibility, as I wish Google would have either implemented an brightness-boost feature or made the screen less reflective some other way.

Battery Life & Charging

The Pixel XL made no sacrifices to endurance in exchange for thinness, as the 8.5mm-thick device packs a substantial 3,450mAh battery. Given the phone has a 1440p screen, it makes sense that such capacity (15% more than the “standard” of 3,000mAh) was their choice — the same target they hit with the Nexus 6P, which had a more power-hungry processor as well. So with a respectable battery size, a Snapdragon 821 and a revamped Doze courtesy of Nougat, one would expect the device to fare quite well in both synthetic tests and in the real-world. Luckily, reality meets expectation with the Pixel XL, but it doesn’t shatter them. The Pixel XL makes good use of its battery capacity and leverages its circumventing hardware to ultimately output rather efficient longevity. Our first sign of this can be observed with PCMark:

PCMark on the Pixel XL shows an above-average level of efficiency, with over 7 hour runs at medium brightness, putting it relatively close to the Mate 9 in terms of minutes per mAh considering the latter packs a bleeding-edge CPU and a larger battery. Performance is consistent throughout, which is expected out of a relatively light benchmark meant to emulate real-world usage, and internal temperature doesn’t peak past 30°C | 86°F. The rate of drain also looks healthy and linear, and the deltas between brightness are are near identical at around 2 hours and 30 minutes, with the test at maximum brightness being a bit short of halving the runtime of the minimum brightness run. While PCMark is a nice representation of real-world performance, do keep in mind that it doesn’t drain battery like real-world usage actually would given the digitizer and radios are not doing their share of drain the same way. As such, real-world results are typically lower than what we observe on these cyclical benchmarks, and the same is true for the Pixel XL.

Real-world usage across our team has brought us results ranging from slightly above-average to excellent. I personally see an average of 4.5 to 5 hours of screen-on time with my mixed usage of a lot of Hangouts and Gmail, plenty of Chrome for work and play, Google Docs and Sheets, an hour or two of YouTube (some with screen off), a few minutes of GPS and calls and about an hour of screen-off podcasts. This is above the average for the phones I personally test, but at the same time it is a bit disappointing considering the battery capacity on it opposed to that of devices on which I’ve gotten close results (OnePlus 3) or substantially better (Exynos Note 7). Other team members have gotten much better battery life than I have, though, with Daniel Marchena getting above-average endurance and Eric Hulse getting what he calls “the best battery life he has ever gotten [on Android phones]”. Above you can find some examples of my experience.

When it comes to idle drain, the Pixel XL has been very good to all of us with below 1 percent drain per hour while idling during the day on WiFi, and even less than that – below half a percent per hour – while dozing overnight. LTE drain doubles up to 2% idle drain and even more when moving out and about and receiving notifications. Finally, dozing on WiFi with no SIM provided an neat lack of drain over more than 6 hours of idling despite notifications coming in. It must be noted that we all use Hangouts and the full suite of Google Services on our devices, so seeing this kind of idle drain is not very surprising. Knowing that you can forego charging your device overnight with a respectable amount of battery left, and wake up a couple of percentages under, is a satisfying feeling that few phones have nailed like the Pixel and Pixel XL did for us.

Charging on the Pixel and Pixel XL does not use a proprietary solution nor Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 3.0, despite the device having the necessary components. Google opted for the USB Type C spec-compliant USB Power Delivery, with the Pixel XL charger itself listing 5V/3A and 9V/2A (for 18W, although the regular Pixel only supports 16W while both pack the same charger). We tested the actual charge times as well as the dynamic current and battery temperature, and actually found the USB-PD solution in the Pixel XL to fall flat in every way (we’ll have an extensive comparison on this very shortly) — the device got warmer and it ultimately charged slower than Quick Charge 3.0, Huawei’s SuperCharge and OnePlus’ Dash Charge. Charging the device while running a loop of PCMark, a light benchmark we used to mimic real-world usage to some extent, made the differentials even more catastrophic, with the average current being only 2.1A as opposed to Dash Charge’s 2.9A, and the Pixel also displayed some slight thermal throttled and heated up to 40°C | 104°F on average throughout the charge, compared to 35°C | 95°F for the OnePlus 3.

Luckily, the Pixel XL’s battery life was good enough to make the slow charging not be much of a problem, but we do wish that Google offered better power-saving options or power profiles, something which has gotten very popular and even effective on OEM skins nowadays. Stock Android’s battery saver feature is serviceable, though we still don’t understand why Google insists on turning the navigation and status bar orange when toggled — if anything, it should force them to stay black due to AMOLED battery savings. That’s a miniscule nitpick, though. In the end, the Pixel XL offers strong battery life with clear capacity for greatness, both due to its battery size but also its high-end hardware. It’s not a remarkably power-efficient phone even if Doze has been very good to us, but I am sure that with updates and customization through the power of root access, most dedicated customers will be getting a decent day and half of usage (or more) of strong usage out of the Pixel XL.

Audio

Audio is admittedly a weak point for the Pixel XL: there is a single speaker left of the USB Type C, a clear step back from the stereo speaker setup of the Nexus 6P. The Pixel XL’s monospeaker is also positioned in a spot that makes it extremely easy to cover when holding the device in landscape mode, unlike some devices that are harder to muffle even when accidentally covering them in part. The speaker sound itself is actually pretty loud for a monospeaker, and the clarity is sustained even at higher levels. While it a speaker that you can easily drive for the occasional YouTube video, it’s very hard to get excited about it especially when recalling that the Nexus 6P offered one of the best speaker setups, and when considering the price of this device. If anything, I’d say it’s one of the worst speakers of any device in the $700+ range.

Headphone audio on the Pixel XL is not quite as mediocre as it supports Qualcomm’s Aqstic audio codec. For 32-bit quality, headphone output sounds fine on regular earbuds and cheaper headphones. If you are an audio enthusiast and own high-quality headphones, though, the Pixel XL will likely disappoint you — it doesn’t seem to be in the league of the HTC 10 or the LG V20, the former also making use of the Aqstic audio codec and the latter featuring a quad-DAC for those ultra-premium headphones. The Pixel XL also doesn’t have any sound profiles that you can choose from or customize, making it harder to adjust or compensate headphone biases for better control over your listening experience (but to be fair, neither does the audiophile-targeting LG V20). While it’s not a device suitable for those looking for rich headphone audio, those consumers that care more about a decent experience with their humble earbuds will find no issues with the Pixel XL.

As for the device’s microphones, I’ve had no issues with calls over the phone, VOIP or while videochatting. Interlocutors had no trouble hearing me nor did I have trouble hearing them through the top earpiece, which can get plenty loud (though not loud or clear enough for the inevitable stereo sound mod, if you ask me). I’ve had experiences with slight feedback on Nexus devices (namely the 6, and to a much lesser extent, the 6P), but there is no such issue on the Pixel XL — it’s a very clear and satisfying phone for audio and video (Duo?) calls.

Future Proofing and Development

For the longest time, we believed the Pixel phones were actually going to be Nexus devices — from the fish codenames to the early rumors of HTC’s involvement, all the information we had pointed towards an HTC Nexus device. When the Pixel was revealed to be a phone “Made by Google” and designed to showcase Google’s ecosystem and services, some people still held to the idea of the Pixel as a developer-friendly phone. We reported soon before release that the Pixel would have difficulties with root due to changes to Android 7.1 that Google would opt to enable, and we were correct. Chainfire managed to claim victory anyway, but root on the Pixel phones comes with new constraints, and it’s worth noting it wasn’t until this very week that we received both TWRP to kickstart development and the proliferation of custom ROMs, as well as a TWRP-compatible root method for the Pixel and Pixel XL.

One thing we can assess at this moment in time is that the Pixel and Pixel XL are not picking up the mantle of the Nexus line, as they don’t look to be as developer-friendly as the Nexus phones were. With SafetyNet increasingly cracking down on modifications by now locking open-bootloader devices out of many key services, we can infer Google is not to keen on their services coexisting on our customized platforms. And with the Pixel phones being Google’s maximum exponent of what their services can offer, we’d expect that philosophy to carry over to this device.

While the development of these devices is uncertain, there already many clever mods to enhance the user experience by enabling old features, disabling unwanted annoyances, or simply improving day-to-day operation and longevity through custom kernels. We see a modest amount of activity on the Pixel and Pixel XL forums, but it might be wise not to expect the level of openness and customization, nor the level of mod and ROM variety, that the Nexus devices did. We also reached out to a few prominent figures in our community to hear their thoughts on the Pixel and Pixel XL, which we’ll quote below:

Pulser G2: It’s worth keeping in mind what Google is trying to do with the Pixel range. This is Google’s attempt at being the “iPhone” of Android phones. That means the good points of a tightly engineered product, including custom hardware and software design and integration, as well as the bad – which for many will be Google’s attempts at a more controlled experience. It is worth keeping in mind that Google wants to make a phone that will tempt the average smartphone user to switch – the goal of the Pixel isn’t necessarily to be developer friendly, or even at a price-point that will interest developers. That was the goal of the Nexus range. The Pixel is first and foremost about showcasing the full Google experience. If that’s not for you, then the Pixel is probably not the phone for you. If you live and breath everything Google, then the Pixel will probably be worth considering. Remember that until recently, many people have said iOS was the best platform for using Google Services. If Google wants to change that, this is the first step on a long road towards bringing their platform and Android apps up to speed

Bumblebee: If the price were lower, they would sell more to developers. Depending on the type of developer asked you will likely see 2 main assessments:

1) APP Devs : Google in the passed used the “Nexus” line of phones to get the latest version of android to the app devs on some standard HW , this was the main test bed when app devs would move forward in API versions. The pixel (being priced where it is) puts it out of reach of some the indie devs (unlike the N5X where most devs own them), that coupled with 7.1 being time exclusive to the pixel (you cant assume the dev previews on the 5X / 6P are good development targets) will be alienating some the indie devs

2) Hacker / ROM Devs : Instead of releasing an “PURE GOOGLE” Nexus phone the pixel has been made with some pixel exclusive features, this is another step in the long line of google removing features from AOSP (started with abandoning apps like music / browser and moving these to google apps). From a rom developer point of view pixel is just another (expensive) OEM phone and 7.1 can be built for other devices (see Sony Xperia AOSP) . One other sticking point for the pixel devices is the new updater process that remove the separate boot / recovery image (instead having 1 image to chainload from /system) this will cause some teething pains for the rom building / rooting community ranging from systemless root and recovery projects.

Nicolas Chum: Development happens based on the rate of accessibility. How do you cater to “developers” attracts real developers much differently. For example, “developers”, or self-claimed “developers” without much proven work would like the Pixel because it looks good, but real developers who truly develop would question HOW it would benefit their development – would what they develop ON the Pixel differ from developing FROM another device running it’s exclusive software?

To add on to that, the price is not accessible to the common user, so why would we develop Pixel exclusive features on a device that not many people have?

As for future-proofing, the device itself packs extremely-capable hardware and will be getting the same – or even better – treatment when it comes to software updates straight from Google. If anything, the Pixel phones have priority over the Nexus line as indicated by the fact that they shipped with 7.1 while Nexus devices merely received a preview at the time of writing. You can expect at least two years of Android updates for the Google Pixel and Pixel XL, and also an extra year of security patches. The hardware itself nicely compliments the future-proofing of this device given many of the transitions we’ve seen in the past two years (64-bit, USB Type C) have already been established, and the Pixel and Pixel XL already ship with the ability to make use of Google Assistant and Daydream VR, both of which we’ll likely be seeing a lot more of in the next few years.

Conclusion

Google’s Pixel XL represents the brink of a new era for Android smartphones — we are less than a year away from Google’s ambitious “Andromeda” project, and we are also over a year past the last Nexus release. I couldn’t help but compare the Pixel XL with the Nexus 6P throughout this review, in part because of the indirect inheritance, and in part because the Nexus 6P was one of my favorite phones of all time. Finally, while this phone is proudly advertised as “made by Google”, there are good reasons to believe this might be undue hyperbole on Google’s part. This doesn’t really make much of a difference to the end consumer, but it also ties in with the possibility that the Pixel XL was made in about nine months. I believe that last bit should be taken into account when analyzing the Pixel as a product, and the Pixel brand as a flagship smartphone series. Lastly, there’s one last thing that I have attempted to reduce mentions of throughout the review, and that’s the price.

Starting at $770 for the 32GB Pixel XL, this device sits at the very high-end of the premium market. Choosing a storage upgrade further adds to the price, for a total of $870… after taxes, you are looking at over $900 dollars, and I personally ended up paying more than what I paid for the Galaxy Note 7, a device that was thoroughly-criticized and picked apart by the media due to its price. While the Pixel brand does start at $650 for the regular size Pixel with 32GB of storage, Google is not offering an “in-between” storage option for the Pixels; I happen to believe, for example, that 32GB is too little storage, but I’ve also never used close to 128GB. Not having the increasingly-common 64GB configuration means users are stuck choosing between two extremes, and I am doubtful either gives the average consumer the most effectiveness for their buck.

The Pixel phones are not fighting against cheaper phones, however. I don’t believe that affordable flagships compete for customers with the Pixel outside enthusiast circles, and Google’s commitment to advertising and forging partnerships (beginning with Verizon) will likely make the Pixel brand more successful than a large portion of Android smartphones. The question is whether that success and recognition is actually deserved, and whether the Pixel phones can offer enough not only to satisfy consumers, but also lay the foundations for future Google phones. This and Google’s push for Assistant – essentially a unification and simplification of disparate Google services, all handled through one intuitive interface – across an ecosystem of Google products will define the first generation Pixel’s future and the trajectory of Google’s upcoming hardware. How does the Pixel XL fare in this regard, and what has it managed to achieve?

After over three weeks with the Pixel XL, and after using a variety of tools to measure and quantify many results of Google’s efforts, I can safely say the Pixel XL is an excellent smartphone that I’d have no qualms recommending to any friend or relative in need of a new phone. The experience is ultimately polished bar a few minor inconsistencies, and while I expected more minute attention to detail from Google’s personal incursion into the smartphone market, I think that as a whole the Pixel XL is an excellent product able to capture the mainstream. But as much as I see the Pixel XL as a great smartphone with no real compromises, I also don’t see it as a phone that’s more than the sum of its parts. In my opinion, the design is uninspiring, the exclusive feature set is not particularly strong at the moment, and the hardware ultimately feels extremely safe. If anything, it feels like the Pixel it’s too expensive for its own good. Despite its few unique traits, I never felt like I was using “a Pixel” phone, but rather just a more-polished Android smartphone, which I’d welcome any day.

The Pixel XL is excellent at core smartphone functions, and for that I commend it: it’s one of the most responsive devices I’ve tested, and it feels snappy in almost every situation. Fluidity is consistent enough in most scenarios, although the occasional stutter stands out due to the device’s otherwise-stellar fluidity. The camera of this phone is also one of the most satisfying ones I’ve ever used, even if and when it doesn’t offer the best results. That video stabilization, for example, completely redefined my expectations of what EIS is capable of, and I must also commend Google for their thoughtful and ultimately pleasant modifications to Stock Android on the device. None of this shatters smartphone paradigms, but the Pixel XL is a smartphone for the day-to-day, and it is perfect for the person that cares more about Android apps than they do about Android itself — the people who want to use the phone without thinking about customization or worrying about troubleshooting. It’s a no-bullsh*t smartphone, for people that want a no-frills experience.

And this leads us to the Pixel’s future on XDA and our community; from the start we knew that the Pixel would have issues with root and possibly custom recoveries; we now have those tools. As of yet, the future for the Pixel’s future looks to be rather uncertain, and that alone is a worrying matter for those expecting a continuation of the Nexus line. The truth is that the Pixel is no Nexus, and I believe that people will have that very clear by the next release cycle. Developers we’ve reached out to cite the price and, in part, Google’s new approach to Android as reasons why the Pixel is not as appealing as preceding fish-codename devices. I will be keeping an eye on the Pixel’s development future and whatever mods and ROMs become available, and I’ll be reporting back every now and then to let our readers know our thoughts.

To summarize, the Pixel XL is an excellent phone that I’ve enjoyed using throughout my review period; it’s also a phone that I’ll enjoy keeping tabs on in order to see where development takes its potential user experience. I don’t believe it’s more than the sum of its parts, but it doesn’t need to be — with a great camera, a nice screen, smooth performance and above-average battery life, it’s a phone I can recommend to anyone looking for a new phone that won’t make them want to pull their hair out. In that regard, I think Google’s Pixels are some of the most mainstream-friendly smartphones out there as well. But there are many decisions that make me question Google’s efforts on this first, foundational release… The glass accent is a smudge and scratch magnet, the construction of our devices hasn’t been as precise as we’d expect, and the exclusive offerings are neither truly exclusive nor have they hit their true potential.

I see the Pixel XL as a perfect investment into a new Google ecosystem, though, and thus also a device that’s exciting for tech enthusiasts. It might not be the best phone for customization and optimization, but knowing that Google will have its back for a few years in terms of updates is comforting. I hope that Google does things differently for the second release, and they’ve reportedly already started work on the upcoming Pixels — this is great, because it’d mean they’d have the experience of the first device and more production time this Pixel had, if reports are to be believed. The Pixel XL is a great consumer smartphone, but not the Google flagship I expected. Nevertheless, it sets the foundations for something bigger, and as Google ecosystem matures, the Pixel and its Assistant will get wiser with it.

If you’ve made it this far, we thank you! Special thanks to Mishaal, Aamir, Daniel, Eric and many developers for contributing to this article!

The OnePlus 3T quickly became a controversial release for OnePlus — while the company has managed to make a great smartphone even better, many wish they knew ahead of time that the best was yet to come, especially those who bought the OnePlus 3 very recently.

Most importantly, perhaps, is the fact that OnePlus 3 sales are being discontinued, meaning the OnePlus 3T will be the company’s flagship moving forward. While OnePlus assured us the OnePlus 3 will still get software updates right alongside the OnePlus 3T (after they synchronize the schedule), it’s this new set of hardware and these improved specifications that OnePlus customers will receive moving forward. So the question in everyone’s mind (and especially OnePlus 3 owners) is whether the OnePlus 3T offers a substantially better experience than what the previous variant offers. Not everything is new, but the changes that it brings do impact key areas of the user experience — the cameras, the processor, storage and battery capacity. Do these elements manage to shine through, and is the OnePlus 3T a replacement worth the controversy? After about ten days with the phone, I can report back on some of the key differences and the conclusions I’ve arrived to.

Before we get started, note that this review will not be as lengthy nor as extensive as our usual XDA reviews. This is simply because other than the specified changes we’ll cover below, the phone is basically the same as the OnePlus 3. Those who do want more specific on factors like audio and the display can head over to our original OnePlus 3 review. As always, let’s get the specification sheet out of the way first (changes will be highlighted):

Design & Build Quality

The design of the OnePlus 3T is the same as that of the OnePlus 3 down to dimensions and weight, despite the slight changes in internal hardware. The OnePlus 3T will be available in two colors, Gunmetal Grey for the 64GB and 128GB variants, and Soft Gold will also become available for the 64GB variant later on. We got to use the 128GB Gunmetal variant, which sells for $479. OnePlus says that part of the reason for this new color is to differentiate the new OnePlus 3T from the OnePlus 3 which came in Soft Gold and Graphite variants, especially as the Graphite color option is being discontinued with the OnePlus 3. However, it does make me wonder why this would be a reason for the change if there will be a shared color option between the OnePlus 3 and the 3T anyway.

Leaving that aside, the OnePlus 3T’s Gunmetal color is actually a welcome change. I originally had the OnePlus 3 Graphite, but then ended up getting a Soft Gold OnePlus which I thought looked better. The Gunmetal OnePlus 3T has actually become my favorite of the three, and it’s a hard preference to describe to those not looking at it in person. Indeed, promotional material doesn’t show the difference between this color and the previous Graphite OnePlus 3 very clearly, and other OnePlus 3 owners I’ve met in person had trouble recognizing I was using the new phone (under embargo, this isn’t quite a bad thing).

The Gunmetal back looks like what you’d expect — essentially a darker Graphite color option, and not quite black (which seems to be a new trend among OEMs). The edges, too, are slightly different and the chamfers shine as brightly as they did one the OnePlus 3 all over the edges and ports, but they stand out a bit more in my opinion because of the overall-darker tone of this new device. Another accent that I’ve noticed is different is the ring around the camera, which is still shiny but not quite the silver chrome look of the OnePlus 3; it’s a tad darker which helps it match the overall aesthetic of the device. Also, do keep in mind that all OnePlus 3 cases will work with this phone as they share the same dimensions, and I’ve had no issues with fitting the phone in my old cases (but as users of the official cases would know, getting the phone out is a different story). As a final note, frequent readers of my reviews know loose buttons are my pet peeve — but this unit has, hands down, the sturdiest buttons I’ve tested. Sadly, the vibration motor is still weak and puny.

Software Design & UX

Perhaps the saddest part about booting up the OnePlus 3T was finding that it doesn’t run the “Stock-like” kind of OxygenOS that the OnePlus 3 shipped with and currently supports as official, stable firmware. With the OnePlus 3T, the software in the community builds becomes the main ROM for the device moving forward, with all its new features and the new aesthetics as well. OnePlus has undoubtedly received a lot of feedback regarding the community builds (they have a dedicated app for that) and they’ve been incorporating the changes and fixes that the community requests; if you don’t like the fact that OnePlus is straying from the more Stock Android approach to the UI, do send feedback their way and make yourself heard.

Above and below you will find galleries comparing the user interface of the OnePlus 3 (non-community software) and the OnePlus 3T. As you can see, there are many changes to the UI in terms of color palette and iconography (luckily, not all of it), both of which deviate in great part from the Stock Android design language. This isn’t terrible in itself as the user interface does end up looking decent in its own right, and at the very least it’s one of the better OEM skins out there. Some changes, such as the Android N-inspired notification pulldown, are actually quite well-realized and functionally useful. However, there are many aesthetic and functional inconsistencies, some of which carry on from the community builds; I’ve passed them along to OnePlus and they assured me the phone would receive a firmware update in the following days that will improve the ROM in general for those receiving the device.

Some of these inconsistencies are: the brightness slider has the “material green” color even when UI accents don’t (default theme) and the option isn’t offered; on left-most screens, stock wallpapers  incorporate the infamous “gaussian blur” many OEMs (particularly from Asia) are incorporating, and this is sadly tied to the wallpaper (like a live wallpaper) across other launchers as well; the reboot menu is always slow no matter your animation settings and does not adjust to landscape orientations. These are some of the more glaring inconsistencies, and I’ve forwarded them along so they will likely get addressed in the future.

What about features? Those not used to the community builds will find many of these features to be new, but OnePlus 3 owners who ventured into that beta software will find a lot to be the same. In fact, the OnePlus 3T ships with Oxygen 3.5.1, and although the community builds have gone past 3.5.5, the device comes with features from the latter builds. In the UI, these features include the aforementioned custom notification menu and status bar (system UI tuner is also present, for those that like that) and a recent apps “clear all” mode option (either close apps or also clear background processes and cache).

Then there are new gestures such as “flip to mute” (flip device to stop mute an incoming call), “three-finger screenshot” (swipe with free fingers for a screenie), and the ability to block unwanted contacts. Also, expanded screenshot functionality will come in a future update according to OnePlus, and options such as screen calibration and the dark theme remain almost as good as always (the accent options aren’t particularly appealing, if you ask me).

Another feature that came to the community builds and that I’ve greatly enjoyed is the ability to lock apps behind a PIN or fingerprint scan; this isn’t anything new in Android, but it’s very well implemented and the screen is aesthetically attractive too. Overall, OxygenOS expands on the feature set of the OnePlus 3’s versions but also makes some radical changes to the user interface; I personally got used to the new UI and eventually came to accept it, but part of me still wishes it looked more similar to what the OnePlus 3 offered at launch. That being said, OnePlus’ software has been iterating rapidly so perhaps Nougat will bring a UI refresh.

Performance

The OnePlus 3 was one of the best smartphones when it came to real-world performance, and it still happens to be one of the fastest and most consistent Snapdragon 820 devices we’ve tested. To recap some of the devices achievements off our review, it not only scored higher than other Snapdragon 820 devices in synthetic benchmarks, but it also had very impressive thermals and showed no signs of throttling; even under very intense endurance tests, including over 30 minutes (and up to an hour) of continuous GFXBench Manhattan 3.1 loops, the device throttled less than competing Snapdragon 820 devices. If you’d like to read more about that, head over to the performance section of our OnePlus 3 review, or the dedicated thermals & throttling analysis we did for the device as well.

The OnePlus 3T’s only real change in terms of horsepower comes from the Snapdragon 821 processor bump. Ultimately, that’s only the increment you are looking at: the CPU’s performance cluster goes from 2.15GHz to 2.35GHz, but the power-efficient cluster stays at 1.6GHz (which is not the maximum for this set, as it can go up to 2GHz like Qualcomm originally listed, but that’s not a bad thing) and the GPU does see a bump in frequency as well. Because this isn’t quite the configuration advertised by Qualcomm, their listed performance percentage improvements are not going to show in synthetic benchmarks. This much is true, and the OnePlus 3T does bring improvements to synthetic benchmarks scores, but these are very slight — less than 10% in most cases. Above you can find a list of benchmarks comparing both devices. All in all, and as far as Snapdragon-featuring devices go, the OnePlus 3T is the best  performer in synthetic benchmarks that we’ve tested, and that makes it slightly more future-proof in the end.

When it comes to throttling and thermals, the OnePlus 3T has quite a legacy to live up to. And unsurprisingly it does endure just fine, as we’ve run our 3DMark and GFXBench endurance tests under controlled conditions on both devices at the same time and found that, overall, temperature remained nearly identical with a fluctuating difference of about ±0.5°C, and overall throttling was also similar and below 5% on both devices. The OnePlus 3T did ultimately sustain a higher score in these tests, as expected, meaning that the extra bump in graphics performance doesn’t vanish the moment you stress the processor. In fact, they typically throttle at about the same point, and even when throttled the OnePlus 3T performs better than the OnePlus 3 at its peak. In real-world, day-to-day usage I haven’t felt the OnePlus 3T get even close to toasty. As for gaming performance over time, the OnePlus 3T expectedly maxes out games with 30FPS caps and sustains that framerate as well as the OnePlus 3 did — in today’s Android gaming scene, there’s no reason for you to need that extra bit of graphics performance anyway, as the OnePlus 3 has plenty of GPU prowess left unused.

What about real-world performance? Perhaps the most shocking part of reviewing the OnePlus 3T is that this area is more of a mixed bag. Let’s start with the good part, though: OnePlus claimed that the OnePlus 3T would be faster at launching applications, something I was very skeptical of at first given the phones ultimately pack the same storage solution, and that the boost in CPU and GPU performance would most certainly contribute very, very little to app opening speeds. Surprisingly enough, OnePlus wasn’t lying about the performance boost to opening apps and despite the similar hardware, the OnePlus 3T can be up to 20% faster at opening certain apps.

To put this to the test, I measured app opening speeds of Chrome, Hangouts, the Play Store and Gmail using Discomark on both devices, after a factory reset, on the same network and at the same time. You can find the results above in a boxplot to see the variance as well. Opening games like Asphalt 8 is also noticeably faster on the OnePlus 3T, and these changes are reportedly coming from an improved filesystem OnePlus implemented on this device. These are essentially changes to software algorithms and it’s not unlike what Huawei and Honor employ on their devices, which also show extremely good app opening speeds.

I reached out to OnePlus and asked if these filesystem changes would eventually arrive to the OnePlus 3’s main firmware, and I was told that it would indeed make it to the OnePlus 3, although the timeline isn’t certain. However, I was made aware that the improved filesystem is actually present in the community ROM. Ultimately, this improvement builds upon what already was one of the fastest devices of the year anyway, and I’m sure many people wouldn’t perceive the speed improvement in day-to-day operation… but the optimization is there and it’s measurable; if you are a gamer, it’s even more noticeable too.

While app opening speeds have been great, I haven’t been too impressed with actual real-world fluidity and smoothness on this device (particularly when halving animation speed) after experiencing the OnePlus 3. While the original OnePlus 3 on the original OxygenOS felt surprisingly fluid from the start, the OnePlus 3T hasn’t felt quite as smooth for me. It’s not laggy by any means, but it’s also not hard to find microstutters when swiping through long lists and they are even found across certain UI elements like the notification panel, although these are small and infrequent. Furthermore, comparing (using GPU Profiling) the OnePlus 3T side-by-side to the OnePlus 3 running the official, Stock-like Oxygen firmware reveals very similar performance patterns as the location of the bars are typically the same for the same actions, but the the spikes and stutters are usually slightly worse on the OnePlus 3T.  I do attribute this to the stark changes in software OnePlus has been making, but also due to the fact that this is a new device and it’s running pre-release software. As I said earlier, OnePlus says they’ll release an OTA shortly after the device goes on sale so that users will have a “release build” available right after they unbox their phone. For now, the OnePlus 3T is perfectly usable, but it feels slightly less-optimized than the OnePlus 3 was at launch.

Camera

While OnePlus was vague about the changes to the camera user experience in press releases, I was able to confirm that the back camera of the OnePlus 3T is the same as the OnePlus 3’s in both hardware and software for pictures. The OnePlus 3T does pack EIS 2.0 for shooting video, and you can find a comparison below, but as far as actual pictures go the OnePlus 3 is the same as this new device. You can find a comparison of the OnePlus 3 and OnePlus 3T, with the former running the latest community build for the latest camera software, below this paragraph — as you can see, there really isn’t any stark difference in the image processing, and the resulting images look very similar (any variations could be attributed to the slight different in positioning and focus point). The only advantage the rear camera has on the OnePlus 3T outside of video is the “sapphire glass” lens, a welcome addition given many people had complained the basic glass on the OnePlus 3’s rear camera was easily scratchable.

The new EIS 2.0 for the back camera’s video is not something you can toggle (always on by default), and I’d say it’s noticeable even in the viewfinder similar to that of the Pixel XL — in fact, OnePlus confirmed to me that it is a gyro-based solution similar to what Google implemented. That being said, it is nowhere near as extreme as the Pixel XL’s, and also not as effective. This is both a good and a bad thing, because while it’s not as impressive it’s also more fluid than what the OnePlus 3 offered, and overall subtle enough that there is no real need for a toggle anyway (although, an option would be nice anyway). You can find comparisons between the OP3T and OP3 as well as the OP3T and Pixel XL below, note the 1080p 60FPS shooting mode on the OnePlus 3T in particular and how it’s different from the Pixel XL’s results. Finally, I was told by OnePlus that the updated EIS would find its way to the OnePlus 3 in the future, although no specific timeline was given.

Not unlike other EIS solutions, it can cause some slight distortions on the sides of the video as well. Overall, though, the feature is a net positive and it improves the video experience over that of the OnePlus 3, which to be fair has improved quite a bit anyway since we originally reviewed it. I also notice that video on the OnePlus 3T seems to handle exposure changes and saturation slightly differently, but these modifications in particular are likely coming in a future update for the OnePlus 3.

Selfie Sample

The biggest change in the OnePlus 3’s camera experience is found in the front camera, which upgrades to a Samsung 3P8SP sensor with a resolution of 16MP instead of 8MP. I’ve seen incorrect opinions floating around stating that just because this is a Samsung sensor (and specifically not a Sony sensor like the previous one), and because of the aperture being the same and the pixel size being smaller, it’d perform worse in low-light. I’m happy to report that that’s not the case, as seen in both the staged tests below as well as regular selfies.

Ultimately, the camera is both sharper and better in medium to low light, colors are better in my opinion as well, and the resolution bump makes it even more of a thorough upgrade over the previous camera. I am not sure just how much of the improvement come from the sensor and how much comes from the software tweaks and optimizations that come alongside it, but overall I’ve been satisfied with the front camera more than I was on the OnePlus 3. I am not a selfie guy, though, and I presume that most of our readers aren’t either.

Battery & Battery Life

This is perhaps the most controversial aspect of the OnePlus 3T release, because battery life is always something people almost-universally want more of. Last time we were only able to confirm the voltage change (from 4.35V to 4.4V) on the OnePlus 3T’s battery, and that the battery remained the same size. People quickly jumped to inductive reasoning and made a few dangerous inferences (please don’t tweak your battery’s voltage), but now we can clear up some misconceptions. OnePlus has confirmed to me that the battery chemistry and electrolyte solution is indeed different, so this is not the exact same battery despite being the same size. Moreover, peak energy capacity (not considering nominal voltage) is now 14.96Wh (people wrongly assumed it had remained constant, in part because I couldn’t disclose changes to battery chemistry and energy density) and, as listed in the spec sheet, this is a 3,400mAh battery. So, with that out of the way, we are working with a battery that’s ~13% bigger in terms of mAh, the metric we are all most familiar with (for better or worse).

What does this mean for endurance with the OnePlus 3T? Above you will find the scores of PCMark Work Battery Life 2.0 benchmark running on both devices, after a factory reset with disabled background services and at minimum brightness. Just like expected, the OnePlus 3T drains at a similar rate but lasts longer due to the added capacity, and perhaps the slight boost in efficiency due to the SoC change (but I doubt this makes a difference in most use cases). In fact, the boost of 13% battery puts the OnePlus 3T’s time score per mAh very close to that of the 3,4500mAh Pixel XL, as seen in our review. In any case, the battery increase is indeed there and it’s palpable when looking for it through benchmarks, but it also makes a difference in real-world usage as we’ll see below. As for Dash Charge, I was able to confirm that the charging rate and the breakpoints remain the same; it’s the same algorithm, basically, but it does take slightly longer to charge given the battery has a larger capacity. That said, each percentage point represents more battery life time anyway.

I was actually pretty impressed with the regular OnePlus 3’s longevity, and in our review I noted that it wasn’t hard for me to hit 5 to 6 hours of screen-on-time on a relatively normal day with above-average WiFi usage. With the OnePlus 3T, I see up to 7 hours of screen-on-time on WiFi, and about 5 to 6 with medium-to-heavy usage with periods of LTE. On very heavy usage days, such as the kind of days I went through this week at the Snapdragon Summit, I still got a surprising amount of use out of this phone — taking notes on docs, while recording the talks and managing the team through Hangouts and Slack all on LTE still allowed for 4 hours of usage, even if I had to charge earlier than I expected.

Overall, I have had better battery life than on the OnePlus 3 and even than on the Pixel XL (despite the difference in PCMark scores, which doesn’t take into account radio drain, digitizer usage, nor the particular quirks of real apps and actual usage).

Storage

Finally, we arrive to storage — a rather simple thing to describe, really, as both employ UFS 2.0 storage but the difference lies in maximum capacity. There is a 64GB variant selling for $440, but the real story here is the new $480 OnePlus 3T with 128GB of storage. I personally find that much storage to be overkill for my usage, but given that the lack of microSD support was a qualm many had with the original OnePlus 3, I am sure some people will welcome it. Also keep in mind that because the software component of various levels take up a chunk of space, the usable storage is a bit higher than double on the OnePlus 3T. The OnePlus 3T has 113.22GB of total storage, while the OnePlus 3 has a total storage of 52.67GB.

You don’t get to choose, sadly

With the OnePlus 3 being discontinued, the OnePlus 3T is what people looking into purchasing a OnePlus device have as their only option for the foreseeable future, unless they want to go for a third-party reseller or opt for a new device. We are aware that many people are upset at this release, and truth be told we have a lot of OnePlus 3 owners in our staff that had negative feelings towards the decision. If you are interested in knowing why OnePlus created the OnePlus 3T, you can check out our article on the matter. Before I present my closing comments, I want to reiterate I only covered the differences between the OnePlus 3T and its predecessor because re-reviewing the entire device would be a waste, and for a comprehensive look at other aspects you can check out our in-depth review. Finally, I am also aware that this review is perhaps best understood by someone that has had experience with the OnePlus 3 before, and I admit it’s in great part aimed at OnePlus 3 owners here on XDA but also on other communities like OnePlus’ official forums and reddit. Nevertheless, I hope all readers got some good information out of it.

If I had to summarize the OnePlus 3T in one statement, it’d be that OnePlus managed to make a great thing even better. Either directly or indirectly, the improvements that the company applied to the 3T are also things that many people complained about with the first release. For example, the extra storage should please those discontent with the lack of microSD, the sapphire camera glass will ease the concerns of those critical of the camera-bump by reducing the glass’ fragility, the front camera is a welcome improvement and the faster processor and bigger battery are both aspects that people looking for OnePlus phones universally appreciate. In terms of hardware, the OnePlus 3T is one of the best devices of 2016 regardless of the price, but it’s an even sweeter deal given it’s still nearly half the price of the Pixel XL with the same storage configuration (after taxes, to be fair)

At the same time, the OnePlus 3T solidified OxygenOS’ trajectory which strayed from the Stock-like approach that captured our attention so many months ago (well, perhaps not so many). I personally hope that Nougat brings the more-Stock approach once more, or at least an option to make Oxygen look like Stock Nougat which is pretty in itself and doesn’t need any adulteration. But that’s my opinion, and you are free to disagree: OxygenOS on the OnePlus 3T is perfectly serviceable and its features remain thoughtful and well-executed. Real-world performance is good although not as impressive of a package as the OnePlus 3 was at the time, although this could easily be addressed with a software update, and the hardware in there is more than capable of handling anything out today from applications to 3D games.

I might be partially breaking our long-standing review tradition of not telling customers what to buy, but if you were to ask me whether you should upgrade from a OnePlus 3, I would say no — well, not unless you have a ton of disposable income laying around. The OnePlus 3T doesn’t make the OnePlus 3 any worse, but it does put it a step down from “the best” out there, at least certainly the best from OnePlus. I do think it would have been a good move to keep the OnePlus 3 around, although I understand that handling two different demand channels with two different sets of orders for manufacturing components would likely be troublesome (the company has enough trouble meeting demand as it is). There is something psychologically appealing about a $400 price-point, and the $440 OnePlus 3T deviates a bit from that even if you could argue its bang-per-buck is slightly larger. But for $440 and $480, the OnePlus 3T is an excellent device that thoroughly improves upon many aspects of its short-lived predecessor. 

A final point of concern is that the developer community will be divided by this release. Prominent and respected developers like flar2 and Sultanxda had stated that they won’t support the OnePlus 3T, and their reasons are valid as well — it’s a lot of trouble for an unexpected move by OnePlus. Do know that XDA administrators will work with OnePlus and the community to make sure the fissure is as small as it can be, and help in any way we can. We will likely be talking more about this in the coming weeks and months.

What do you think of the OnePlus 3T? Will you be getting one? Let us know your opinion below!

Check Out XDA’s OnePlus 3 Forum >>

Smartwatches have been on a steady decline for what feels like ages, at least in terms of the interest they garner. It has been a while since analysts even acknowledged the smartwatch as a market force, likely due to their failure to predict the so-called “Year of the Smartwatch” time and time again.

With the death of Pebble, an iconic pioneer into the modern smartwatch scene, and the delay of Android Wear 2.0, smartwatch lovers (the few out there) have seen short-term prospects of their wrist platform dwindle into irrelevance. This is further amplified by the fact that other smartwatch makers like Huawei and Motorola haven’t been refreshing their smartwatches, and there don’t seem to be any current plans of doing so either. Meanwhile, Samsung’s wearable platform keeps rising the stakes and expanding its ambitions with MST payments and more features than you’ll ever need on your wrist, but even this approach receives little fanfare and enthusiasm from the tech-enthusiast community at large.

Smartwatch makers have tried all sorts of things to attract a wider crowd — premium and luxurious designs, over-the-top feature sets, mimicking old timepieces, going full-techie, implementing e-paper displays, round watchfaces, shortcuts, gestures, sensors…. Alas, as compelling as these smartwatches can be for the notification-riddled tech-enthusiast, there is still no killer-feature to be found. This doesn’t stop companies like ASUS from trying to iterate and innovate, though. Their latest ASUS ZenWatch 3 is, in this sense, the last ambitious Android Wear watch before the inevitable round of Wear 2.0 devices.

Before diving into this review, it must be pointed out that the ZenWatch 3 was originally slated to released with Android Wear 2.0. With the launch of the watch, we learned that instead it is running Android Wear 1.5, coinciding with the delay of Wear 2.0 and the extension of the respective Developer Preview. The ZenWatch 3 will most certainly obtain Wear 2.0 in the future, but although this watch doesn’t bring the radical redesign of the new wearable Android version, it still brings a plethora of modifications and features that make the experience potentially different — that is, if the user cares to use the added features.

Hardware, Aesthetics & Fit

Android wear smartwatches actually offered quite a bit of variety and diversity in terms of hardware design, which allowed consumers to opt between all sorts of wearables from the gadgety-looking to the traditional premium timepiece. The ZenWatch 3 is not quite the run-of-the-mill smartwatch, but it also doesn’t look like something only a mother would love. The outer shell design can very well be described as “steampunk”, for a few reasons I’ll note below, but not even that is quite an accurate description. Let’s explore each of its elements and how they influence the overall design before making a final assessment:

Starting with the front and face of the watch, we find a sort of “solar eclipse” design with a prominent gold trim around the display, and a sleek black stainless steel (316L) finish all around the body. The display is coated by Gorilla Glass 2.5 (and not sapphire glass) and the bezels around it aren’t super thin, but the soft gold ring and the curve right outside of it help give the watch a slicker appearance. The top and bottom are flanked by two oversized band-holders, still slick and black but not quite as shiny and polished as the rounded sides of the watch. Unlike other smartwatches like the Huawei watch, I found these to be conveniently placed and angled — they don’t hug your wrist too much, but they also don’t hover over it awkwardly. Moreover, the height is appropriate so that it doesn’t grant the watch an appearance of being thicker than it is, like the original Moto 360 did precisely because the bands held the wrist so tightly, with the entire watch rising above that.

Moving onto the sides, you’ll find that the the ZenWatch 3 comes with three prominent buttons that stick out of the body very noticeably. They all look like buttons you’d find on a classic timepiece rather than a modern watch, giving the side of the phone an industrial look that compliments that “steampunk” vibes accentuated by the bronze-like motif of the gold trim. The middle button itself bears a hint of gold in the form of a small ring around it as well, and all three buttons are solid and springy, but not clicky, which is a perceptible difference in the tactile feedback of other smartwatches. The three buttons are programmable, which we’ll discuss in the software section, and they are arguably one of the stronger selling points of this hardware package.

Hopping onto the back, we find a solid plate and speakers as well as the charging pins for fast charging (discussed in the user experience section), and while these are magnetic (they work well, though), you still get the night-stand clock functionality prominently featured in the Moto 360 smartwatch line and their wireless charging cradles. As you can see, there is no heart-rate monitor here. I must also point out that the watch is rather thin at 9.95mm, and it certainly looks and feels thinner than many competing smartwatches. The included bands are made of a very dark brown stitched leather that passes off as black under most lighting conditions, and I found it to be very comfortable and serviceable, although it’s worth noting that the band attachment mechanism is proprietary, meaning finding replacements is not as easy as looking for a standard 18mm band.

I ultimately found the hardware to be an attractive if unconventional alternative, and I’ve gotten many compliments and inquiries regarding the watch as well. Some software decisions neatly complement the aesthetic, in particular the included watchfaces, and I must say it’s one of the most comfortable smartwatches I’ve worn. I haven’t had issues fitting it into sleeves and it doesn’t look too over-sized on my admittedly-thin wrist, and it can even pass as a regular watch to many people depending on your watch face. The steampunk vibes might not fit all styles, though, and it’s certainly not as widely-appealing of a design as other smartwatches, which are easier to match clothes to if that’s something you care about.

What about functional and internal hardware? Most items on its specification sheet are what you’d expect out of your average Android Wear smartwatch. First things first, it does count with IP67 certification for dust and water resistance, up to 1 meter and 30 minutes. The screen is a 1.39 inch AMOLED panel with a relatively high 400×400 resolution, at 287 pixels-per-inch, with no flat tire despite having a handy ambient-light sensor. I found the screen to be colorful and bright under most lighting conditions, although the ambient light sensor wasn’t as quick to act and adapt as I’d hoped, meaning I found myself manually adjusting brightness a few times — it tends to be to set brightness too low for my eyes as well. 

Finally (because this is a smartwatch, after all), this device is one of the first to pack the new Snapdragon Wear 2100 chipset, which promises up to 25% lower power consumption (we’ll discuss performance in the following section), alongside a standard 512MB of RAM and 4GB of internal memory. It does not have, NFC, GPS or cellular connectivity, but supports WiFi and Bluetooth Low-Energy v4.2. It also does not have a heart-rate monitor despite ASUS’ emphasis on fitness with their dedicated ZenFit app.

Software and User Experience

The ZenWatch 3 is packed the to the brim with features, in a way that most smartwatches are not. While Android is an open platform, Android Wear is not — this is something with faults and benefits we’ve debated before, and ASUS isn’t the first OEM that wanted Wear as a platform to be better-tuned to their product. But those minor changes aside, the experience is very much what’d you’d expect out of Android Wear, and I’d argue it’s the additions that ultimately make the user experience stand out. ASUS’ leveraging of their hardware assets, such as their masked ambient light sensor and three-button configuration, are some of the key differences (and perhaps advantages) of this smartwatch.

Starting with the UI, we find that this version of Android Wear still functions just like you’d expect and it sadly doesn’t bring the features we were promised with Android Wear 2.0. The ZenWatch 3, however, manages to run the core functions really well — performance is on par with other Wear devices (bar the original Moto 360), the gestures actually work better than older Wear watches too, and it generally ticks at a fast rate. The screen is a little on the warm side, something that makes some white icons and white text look out of place, but other than that the screen works really well with Android Wear. The display experience has been above the average for two reasons, in my opinion: first, it is a fully circular AMOLED display with an ambient light sensor (no flat tire like we saw on multiple other watches), and second, because ASUS’ included watchfaces make good use of the rich display by not “gimping” the ambient mode.

Screen brightness is appropriate outdoors, but sunny days will give it a challenge

That last point might be one that turns off wary customers afraid of burn in or battery life duration, but so far I haven’t experienced neither of those two issues. Granted, the former would take far longer than two weeks to manifest itself, but the always-on mode of the stock watchfaces hasn’t really made the device’s battery life too bad for my use case. The ambient version of the stock watchfaces still doesn’t update as frequently (i.e. no seconds hand or ticker, or moving elements), and they make the phone look even better when idling. There are over 50 watchfaces after downloading the companion app, most of them with classic watch designs featuring brown, dark grey and gold accents to compliment the watch’s physical aesthetic, and then there are some more abstract watchfaces similar to Moto’s rotational watchface as well. Below are some of my favorite included watchfaces:

Of course, you can also pick your favorite watchface from the Play Store and make one through facer, but I do think ASUS did a good job with the bundled options as they make good use of the screen in conjunction with the watch’s design language. And that’s the literal surface of what Asus offers on top of the base Android Wear provides, as the company bundled in multiple features, most in the form of watch apps, and a dedicated watch manager app can be downloaded to further customize and add functionality to the watch.

Beginning with my favorite feature, the buttons on the ZenWatch 3 are programmable to launch applications via the included watch app (after downloading ZenWatch Manager, you can customize both buttons). By default, the top button launches ZenFit (ASUS’ fitness tracking app) and the bottom one allows you to enter ECO Mode (more on that later), but being able to customize both can lead to some useful shortcuts. For example, I set one button to launch the Hangouts app in order to quickly check my group chats and messages, as well as reply to any pending chats. I’ve also used this feature to keep track of my location through Google Maps while going through new bus routes and streets, and it’s also useful when set to launching your calendar or agenda. Moreover, I can imagine other useful situation for certain people or under certain days, such as quick access to a stopwatch, calculator or Google Translate. The watch does a good job at keeping those watch apps in RAM, too, making the transition fast and fluid.

To unlock the full feature potential of the ZenWatch 3, one needs to download the “ZenWatch Manager” app from the Play Store. This grants you access to over 50 exclusive watchfaces, most of which aren’t very attractive, but many of them do fit the aesthetic nicely — some even reinforce the “steampunk” vibe by displaying moving cogs (albeit at a slow framerate). Some of the key features include grouping your favorite watch faces, a selection of watch apps (by ASUS), the ability to cover the ASUS clock on your watch to mute alarms, watch finder (uses vibration and sound), better remote call control, an SOS app (can be tied to button shortcuts), forgotten phone warning, and a flashlight app (which the Play Store is riddled with). Finally, there is a remote camera app to install, and a watchface designer that allows you to configure ambient mode in watchfaces as well. They also include a shortcut to smart lock and call it a feature, but it’s really just a shortcut.

I haven’t used many of the ZenWatch manager’s features, but I did like the watchface customization screen to configure my information widgets (fitness metrics, battery stats, etc). The ones that worked the best for me are the ones integrated into the UX passively, like the call manager which worked better than the default solution while answering calls out and about. I haven’t used the speaker for calls, although it gets surprisingly loud when playing alarms or music.

As for battery life, I managed to get over 24 hours out of the ZenWatch 3 with no real issues, and that’s being a notification-heavy user. I also ran the detailed ambient mode, and none of my watchfaces featured deep blacks for AMOLED battery savings. I did leave my watch on overnight every time, so I could have probably squeezed close to two work days of usage by turning it off at night — I just haven’t felt the need to, because the ZenWatch features really, really fast charging. This is one of my favorite features: ASUS claims that you can charge up to 60% in 15 minutes, and my testing confirms it (a full charge takes about 40 minutes). It does indeed charge very fast, fast enough that 15 minutes in the morning are enough to power a solid work day.

I haven’t felt that the battery life was exceptional, but the fact that there is an optional battery shell (which does add thickness, but adds charge nonetheless) means there is at least an option to extend battery life on the go by about 40%. Finally, on top of the default battery saving functionality there is an “ECO mode” that ASUS claims can double your battery life (with the penalties you’d expect out of an “ultra stamina” mode). Having those options available can probably help with battery anxiety, but I honestly haven’t felt limited by the watch’s endurance, in part because of the convenient charging speeds.

A Serious Competitor

The ZenWatch 3 is a nifty Wear device, and I’d go as far as saying that it’s the most complete Android Wear package out there. ASUS provides a good-looking watch with extensive software options, some of which are actually very useful and synergize well with the hardware. It doesn’t compromise the screen’s circumference for an ambient light sensor, it has useful hardware shortcuts… it’s light, thin, and comfortable. It does outclass previous generations by packing the Snapdragon Wear 2100 with a standard battery, although the gains are not necessarily noticeable in day-to-day usage. The charging mechanism is comfortable to use, too, and wicked fast — I only wish the included charger’s cable was longer, or that it wasn’t fused to the cradle. In terms of hardware, the main shortfall is the exclusion of key sensors like a heart-rate monitor, a GPS and NFC, the latter likely becoming a compromise once Android Pay inevitably hits Wear.

The premium design is well-realized and certainly like something you’d expect above the $229 price tag, which not only is lower than most competitor’s launch prices, but also lower than their current market prices. This makes the ZenWatch 3 extremely competitive in a market that is lacking renewed options, but there are a few aspects that might detract potential customers: the design doesn’t flow quite as well with all styles and I’d say it has more-limited appeal than that of other smartwatches. And while it packs many hardware advantages, we are on the brink of a new smartwatch generation that’s bound to up the ante even further. Nevertheless, the price is what makes it for me — it’s a very compelling option for those looking to buy a smartwatch at this moment in time. Admittedly, there isn’t a huge market for Wear smartwatches right now, and even tech bloggers and reviewers are increasingly freeing their wrists from another buzzing machine. But I am not, and I’m being fair when I say I’ve enjoyed the ZenWatch 3 more than my Gear S2 and Moto 360, even if none of these devices add indispensable value to my life.

Check Out XDA’s ZenWatch 3 Forum >>

The Ulefone Metal is an entry level smartphone with a premium finish, that just can’t quite stick the landing. It comes incredibly close to being a phone with good price-performance (especially thanks to Ulefone releasing the kernel sources and trying to support developers), but some issues with polish and a couple “What were they thinking?”-style design decisions create a questionable user experience (for now).

In this review, we’ll take an in-depth dive into the Ulefone Metal. Rather than listing specs and talking about how the experience felt, this feature attempts to provide a thorough look with contents relevant to our reader base. At XDA, our reviews are not meant to tell a user whether a phone is worth buying or not — instead, we try to lend you the phone through our words and help you come to the decision by yourself. Before getting started, let’s get the specification sheet out of the way:

Index

 DesignSoftware – UISoftware – UXPerformanceReal World UXCameraDisplayBattery LifeAudioDeveloper RelationsFinal Thoughts

Design

The feel in-hand reminds me of my old HTC Legend. It’s got that same “heavier than it looks” feel to it and relatively-sturdy looking construction. Its body doesn’t feel “premium” like an HTC 10, but it feels nice in the hand in it’s own right. The solid metal construction and chamfered edges come together nicely. The only problem with the frame itself is that it is not properly supported at the MicroUSB port, allowing you to easily bend the thinner metal between the MicroUSB port and the display into the device with just a small amount of pressure.

The feeling in-hand doesn’t extend beyond the frame however. The buttons aren’t loose, but they feel squishy and are quite silent. There’s no satisfying tactile feedback, there’s no click, it just sort of moves out of the way. The SIM tray is a similar story. Yes, it works, but it doesn’t quite click into place the right way, and it can be a tad bit hard to open at times. It often catches on the way in, and you’re left unsure as to whether to push harder (for fear of breaking it), or to take it out and try again. The MicroUSB port is again the same story, and you feel like you’re almost going to break it.

Speaking of buttons, the capacitive buttons show some… interesting… choices as well. Not only is the back button on the right (which to be fair, despite what Google recommends, is preferred by some), but the multi-tasking button is instead bound as a menu button, and a long press of home is how you access multi-tasking. I couldn’t find a way to rebind them either. Oh, and they’re a mix of Holo and Holographic style buttons too (except with a blockier back button, and a chimney on the home button).

Interestingly enough, the buttons in the manual don’t match the buttons on the device. In the manual they instead show the home, menu, and back buttons that appeared on the Samsung Galaxy S II, and don’t list how to access the recent apps list.

The Ulefone Metal also shipped with some complimentary accessories, which is nice. Unfortunately the accessories themselves are not so nice.

The case is advertized as being leather, but doesn’t feel like it… that’s fine though, leather isn’t needed for this. It’s a windowless flip cover which fits the phone pretty well, and it wakes the phone when you open it. Unfortunately it doesn’t shut the phone off when you close it. Instead, it puts the phone into a media control mode (which you can’t use through the cover, although it appears that the cover for Ulefone Future can use it) and waits for the screen to timeout before shutting down (which could be a while depending on your settings).

The device also shipped with a tempered glass screen protector, which is a great addition, as it can be hard to find good screen protectors for some smaller brands. Oddly enough, my device came with two screen protectors pre-applied, the usual shipping one with information about the phone on it, and a second one beneath that which felt like a standard plastic screen protector. I’m not sure if it was meant to be a permanent addition, however it definitely wasn’t applied properly, so I was thankful for being able to switch it out.

The tempered glass screen protector is supposedly curved to fit the 2.5D edge of the screen (although, upon inspection, the edges look rather flat), and supposedly blocks blue light to “protect your eyes” (completely missing the point behind blue light filters). Rather than mentioning the effects of blue light on our circadian rhythm and sleep cycle, Ulefone’s advertising claims that blue light is “a kind of high-energy light that can increase the toxin in macular region of human eye balls” and that “such a protective glass is indispensable to mobile phones.” (nevermind that if that was actually an issue, they could just tune the display to reduce the amount of blue light generated, either through hardware or software).

Ignoring the toxins bit (what “toxins” exactly?), it’s a bit concerning that Ulefone either seems to think that non-ionizing radiation (more specifically, visible light) is dangerous at the levels created by a phone, or they are playing to that crowd in an attempt to sell more devices. Worse still, their marketing implies that they actually went and made their product worse (by including a screen protector that is designed to reduce colour accuracy instead of a normal one) in their half-hearted attempts to attract that crowd. Thankfully, despite what their marketing claims, the screen protector appears to be just a normal screen protector anyway, and won’t damage colour accuracy.

Software – UI

The UI is nice and clean with an approach that stays relatively close to stock Android. The quick settings menu is almost unchanged, with the only major differences being a change in logo for the cellular data symbol and the addition of a toggle which launches a pop-up for audio profiles (separate from the do not disturb toggle).

The settings menu saw a more drastic change however. In place of Android’s settings list (with toggles), there is a four-by-eight array of icons which are sorted into categories (“Wireless & networks”, “Device”, “Personal”, and “System”). These icons are bright colours that feel a bit out of place next to the the rest of the UI, especially when compared to the relatively muted camera and settings icons that Ulefone used. The bright colours don’t carry further into the settings menu however, as once you pick an icon, the page it links to is usually largely the same as it is on stock Android, with the notable exception of the prominently placed “Turbo download” menu, which allows you to use Multipath TCP to simultaneously download over WiFi and cellular connection.

Ulefone also has a persistent notification giving you a quick link to the app permission management page. The only way to get rid of it is to disable permission management (which Ulefone makes nice and easy to do for some reason), and even then it comes back every once in awhile (like when you reboot).

The default launcher comes with two pages dedicated specifically to music and photos, with a giant record player on one (with no visible playback controls), and a small photo gallery on the other (which only lets you see up to two photos at a time, and both are rather shrunken at that with a substantial amount of wasted space). Thankfully both pages can be removed in the settings menu.

The camera UI is relatively basic, but really doesn’t fit in with Material Design. The menus and shutter button in the camera have a distinctive Gingerbread feel to them, with certain parts taking on a bit more of a transparent Holo-esque design.

The sound recorder similarly feels out of place. The flat title bar simply doesn’t fit with the gradient on the timer, or with the slightly skeuomorphic VU meter for that matter. The UI just feels like a mishmash of different styles. It doesn’t have an identity.

While it was clear from day one that the Metal wasn’t licensed by Google (as it was missing almost every required pre-installed app, except the Play Store, Search, and Gmail), Ulefone solidified that position in the first software update I received from them, where they lifted the icons from multiple Google apps for use in their ROM, including the logos from Google Play Music, Google Photos, and Google Messenger (the latter of which they modified by turning some of the lines from white to transparent, removing the depth that the icon normally has). That may fly under the radar while Ulefone is a small company, but doing things like that now leaves them open to copyright lawsuits later on if they grow. Yes, the logos fit well with the majority of the UI (and certainly fit better than the old Gingerbread-style stock Gallery app that Google has abandoned), but there are other options that also would fit, and without being copyright infringement at that.

That being said, the logos that they designed themselves are actually not half bad (I’m assuming that they were designed in house). The camera icon follows Material design fairly well, and fits with the rest of the UI. It really is a shame that Ulefone felt that copyright infringement was a better path than continuing to create their own logos.

Software – Features & UX

There is a floating shortcut button, reminiscent of Facebook’s Chat Heads and Paranoid Android’s Halo, that gives you quick access to some useful features, like a clipping tool for screenshots, or a floating calculator, or quick access to settings. I’ll be the first to say that I can be extremely picky about how this type of UI element is implemented (I absolutely adored Halo, but Chat Heads never really caught my attention), and something about this method just doesn’t sit right with me. It might have been the inability to hide it (even when watching video), or how slow the animation to bring it up is, I’m not quite sure, but whatever it was, I promptly started looking for a way to disable it, and I couldn’t find an option. I understand the appeal of a floating quick actions tile, but I never really found any benefit in this one, and it only ended up getting in the way for me.

I normally take a few tries to get my phones to learn my fingerprint, and the Ulefone Metal is no exception there. What was an exception was that the Ulefone Metal has the ability to bind the fingerprint sensor to open different apps for different fingers. This can be a very useful feature, but in this case it brought a major issue. Ulefone didn’t properly set up the bounding boxes in the fingerprint menu, making it extremely difficult to access the menu for renaming and deleting a finger. The settings gear to access it is very small and hard to hit with my big clumsy hands, with most of my attempts to access it resulting in me opening the menu for choosing which app to activate with that finger instead. It got to the point where I just gave up, and left the phone without a working fingerprint sensor, which is really a shame. Thankfully, it is an issue that could be relatively easily fixed with a software update. HTC, Sony, Xiaomi, ZTE, etc. all have a way of handling this without issue. You just make the bounding box be a square from the top of the row to the bottom of the row (and the same width), instead of just barely covering the target object itself. You can even place a small visible separator to help people identify where the button ends and the rest of the row begins. It’s a tiny little thing, but it can make a world of a difference.

While the device does let you hot swap SIM cards, it can be a bit slow to recognize the change, resulting in a bit of a wait after you put a SIM card in before you can use it, or a bit of a wait after you take the SIM card out before the data connection stops.

The Ulefone Metal also has a weird design choice in that any time you come within range of an open Wi-Fi network, it notifies you. If your phone is set to vibrate, it vibrates. If your phone is set to ring, it rings. As with most features that Ulefone added, there doesn’t seem to be a way to turn this one off. The only way I found to disable this “feature” is to disable the Wi-Fi network notification completely, which results in you losing some functionality in order to disable Ulefone’s “addition”, just like with the permission management notification.

Performance

While phone SoCs have come a long way, there is still a substantial performance gap between a flagship SoC like the Snapdragon 820 or Exynos 8890, and an entry level chip like the MediaTek MT6753. The eight A53 cores running at 1.3 GHz are distinctively low-end, and the three cluster Mali-T720 GPU isn’t a powerhouse either. The experience is designed with the intent of competing with Qualcomm Snapdragon 4xx and 61x series chips, and it shows. While the MediaTek MT6753 won’t win any performance titles, the A53-based design should have fantastic energy efficiency, at least in theory.

CPU & System

While the A53 isn’t very powerful, it does take up a tiny amount of die space and is incredibly efficient, allowing MediaTek to shove eight of them into the entry level MT6753 chipset. As a result, the Ulefone Metal suffers heavily in single core tests, but the eight A53 cores allow it to perform reasonably in multi core tests.

This shows up very clearly in Geekbench, where the phone is barely able to hit 600 in single core testing, but multi-core testing from idle sees it hitting a respectable score of 2468, about half of what the flagship chips are putting up currently.

The Ulefone Metal has a weak showing in PCMark however, with competing devices like the Honor 5X, Nextbit Robin (both of which we reviewed earlier), and the ZTE ZMax Pro handily beating it in every category except for the Web subscore, where the Ulefone Metal pulled even.

AnTuTu tells the same tale of woe, with the similarly-priced ZTE ZMax Pro leading in every category (and doubling the score for 3D). Some of the subscores for AnTuTu stay relatively close though, with the Ulefone Metal not trailing by too much in the RAM subcategory.

After seeing the results of the other benchmarks, Basemark held no major surprises either. While the Ulefone Metal pulled even with the ZTE ZMax Pro in the System subscore, it fell behind in every other subscore, with only half the graphics score of the ZTE.

In our sustained load test, the Ulefone Metal gets incredibly hot, with my Seek Compact Pro reading the surface as hitting a scorching 52°C | 125.6°F, and still climbing by the end of our test. Surprisingly, single core performance did not drop despite those high temperatures, but multicore saw a ~10% drop in Geekbench score from the first run to the last. This test barely fazes most devices that we review, and this result shows substantially higher temperatures than even the Snapdragon 810 devices that were known for throttling as a result of overheating. It should be noted that while the Ulefone Metal hits 38°C | 100.4°F after just one run (more than most phones’ peak temperatures in this test), the device started at just 26 degrees in our pre-test measurements.

This phone doesn’t throttle much, but it really should. There is no excuse for a phone getting so hot that you can barely hold it. Even temperatures in the high 30s, which the Ulefone Metal hits after just a couple minutes of use, can a be a bit uncomfortable. Something in the 50s is outright hot to the touch.

GPU & Gaming

The phone’s GPU is incredibly weak: a three-cluster Mali-T720 simply doesn’t keep up with any Qualcomm chip currently on the market, and it really shows. The Ulefone Metal’s low resolution helps to mitigate the issues that the weak GPU brings, but even that can only do so much.

3DMark Slingshot is barely even a slideshow (with certain sections being listed as having a frame rate of “0”), Manhattan has single digit frame rates, and even the age old T-Rex brings the Ulefone Metal to its knees.

Thankfully, despite getting quite hot in our sustained graphics test, frame rates didn’t drop further with continued usage. Although it was already pretty close to 0 anyway. In our 3DMark throttling test, the Ulefone Metal hits 43 degrees after just its first run, which also happens to be the temperature that the Google Pixel XL peaked at in this test, and it continues to climb as the test goes on. Towards the end of the test, performance drops a little bit, but you really should expect more throttling from a device that is getting this hot (and continuing to get hotter as the test ended).

GFXBench’s battery life test is a similar story, with performance staying mostly around the same level, while temperatures continued to climb. The results were surprisingly consistent as the test went on, with the results all staying in a range of 395.1 frames per run, +/- 1.1 frames. That’s a mere 0.3% variance up or down, resulting in substantial range compression (and a spiky looking graph). For comparison, the Pixel XL sees a drop of around 10% from its first run to its lowest score.

With how tiny the performance drops are for the Ulefone Metal and how extremely high the temperatures get (in both our CPU and GPU throttling tests, as well as in endurance tests like PCMark’s and GFXBench’s battery life tests), it almost looks as if the Ulefone Metal simply doesn’t have any substantial thermal management code (performing at the highest level it can, regardless as to how hot it gets), which would be scary if true.

Memory & Storage

Having 3GB of RAM is absolutely fantastic for an entry-level phone, and should be more than enough to ensure that you won’t run out of RAM in all but the most RAM intensive situations. This is helped further by the fairly lean OS that the phone runs by default. With nothing open, the Ulefone Metal was reporting just 850MB used, and over 2 GB available.

The storage is about on par with what would be expected for the price (tested on Androbench, threads set to 1 and sequential buffer size set at 256 kB). While 16GB with an SD card is enough to get by on (although I tend to prefer 32GB and higher), and while the performance is definitely on the slower side, it is acceptable for the price.

Real World Performance

The OS generally performs fairly smoothly, but there are a couple weird hangs in certain places. When you go to unlock the device, after swiping up it will freeze for a half second before bringing up the page to enter your pattern/pin/password.

Some of the bugs are just strange. In the default launcher, when you long press an app icon to move it, usually it will stay on the page it is currently on, but occasionally it will jump to the primary home screen (even if that screen is full).

Setting up the cellular data connection for the first time is a bit of a pain. The phone defaults to data being turned off (which is a good idea to some extent), but after inserting a SIM card it asks you if you wish to enable data for that SIM card. If you hit yes it turns on data for the SIM card in Settings->SIM cards, but it leaves the one in Settings->Data usage->Carrier Name set to off, and you have to manually go in and change it.

For example, a swipe that would get me all the way from the top of the HTC 10’s settings menu to the bottom, will only move the Ulefone Metal’s settings menu a couple lines.

Signal strength appears to be fairly weak. The phone supports Band 7 LTE (for which there are multiple towers near my house), but I had to walk almost right next to the tower before I could get connection. WCDMA is a bit stronger, but according to the spec sheet I shouldn’t have WCDMA connection in the first place. The phone officially only supports WCDMA bands 1 and 8, but in Canada, networks only use bands 2, 4, and 5. After some exploring with MediaTek’s Engineer Mode, we discovered that the phone supports WCDMA band 5, despite claiming that it doesn’t, and was using that to connect to the network.

We reached out to Ulefone to inquire about this issue, and after a bit of investigation on their part, they said that the Ulefone Metal “does support UMTS Band 5, but the software hasn’t been optimized well, so we don’t announce it officially.” This was a bit worrying to us for a couple reasons. If the WCDMA band 5 support is truly too poorly optimized to even be announced, then it likely should have been disabled through software until a point in time at which it is ready for use (as, if the claim is true, leaving it enabled could potentially cause a host of other issues).

More importantly though, it caused some worry for us that the Ulefone Metal was potentially not licensed to use WCDMA band 5. So, since the Ulefone Metal’s packaging marks it as being tested by both the FCC and CE, we decided to take a look at the FCC filing information to confirm that it had been tested and approved for use of WCDMA band 5. Unfortunately, we could not find any, so we reached out to Ulefone again to see if they could direct us to the filing information (which they are required to keep on hand for CE). As it turned out, Ulefone did not get FCC certification for the Ulefone Metal, and the FCC logo was printed in error. Thankfully Ulefone was able to provide us with the CE technical file, which unfortunately does not list it as being certified for use on WCDMA band 5. Upon learning that the Ulefone Metal is likely unlicensed to use WCDMA band 5, I switched the phone into airplane mode, and have not re-enabled the cellular radio since.

Camera

The camera hardware is interesting in some ways. The Sony Exmor R IMX149 sensor is mentioned almost nowhere online (with just 30,000 Google results), except in reference to a couple of small brands, with it not even appearing among Sony’s product listings. We reached out to a couple of these smaller companies, and from what we gather, it appears that the IMX149 was a custom sensor developed for a “larger OEM” which was used in a prior device, and the remaining stock is now being cleared out as it is no longer needed for that device. We reached out to Sony as well to try to learn more about the IMX149, but they were not available for comment about the sensor’s history (for obvious reasons).

The Sony Exmor R IMX149 is a 6.18 mm x 5.85 mm BSI CMOS sensor with a 5.7 mm (1/3.2 Type) diagonal and 1.4 μm pixels with a total resolution of 3288 x 2512, allowing for an effective resolution of 3280 x 2464. This is about the same size and resolution as the IMX145 that appeared in a couple of the phones in Apple’s iPhone line, and the popular IMX179 that is used as the front facing camera for the Google Pixel, Pixel XL, and Nexus 6P, and the rear facing camera for the Nexus 5. That being said, there is a lot more to sensor quality than just the size and resolution.

Unfortunately, the fast pace at which cameras have been improving combined with some software oddities and what looks like a very poor lens, means that the camera simply doesn’t stack up.

First up is Ulefone’s decision to allow the cameras to capture at 13 MP and 5 MP instead of their native 8 MP and 2 MP. While there is some interesting discussion to be had about alternate ways of interpreting image data from Bayer filter sensors, the differences between pixels and sensels, and super-resolution photography, Ulefone does not appear to have leveraged any of them. In the images below are resized crops of 13 MP and 8 MP photos taken consecutively, and most of them either appear to be either so similar as to be virtually indistinguishable, or are even slightly in favour of the 8 MP version. This would indicate that they may just be running an upscaling filter after capturing the images at the camera’s native resolution.

Seeing these results, we reached out to Ulefone again, and they confirmed that there was no secret sauce here. It’s just a “standard scaling algorithm”.

Interesting hardware choices and questionable scaling decisions aside, there still remains the question of whether the Ulefone Metal has a good camera, and the answer is no.

In our first daylight scene, the Ulefone Metal’s camera weaknesses shine through quite heavily. In the non-HDR images, it somehow manages to almost completely blow out the sky, while simultaneously underexposing the rest of the image. The HDR images for the Ulefone are a bit better, reducing the amount of clipping and brightening up some of the dark areas, but it also crushed the blacks a bit (for reasons unknown). The Ulefone Metal performs so poorly in this sample, that even the HDR image is arguably outperformed by the non-HDR images taken from my $10 Moto E.

For reference, here is what the histogram for the same picture taken with an HTC 10 looks like. The very leftmost and rightmost bars in each image represent the amount of clipping.

Unfortunately this trend was not limited to the first picture set. The Ulefone Metal underperformed in every test of the rear facing camera that we tried, including numerous sets beyond what we included in this article.

The worst part of the camera appears to be the lens, and that really shines through in pictures that require substantial dynamic range to be captured properly. The night shots with streetlights in them came out as such a blurry mess that I started to doubt whether I had actually cleaned the lens properly. So, I gave the lens an extra thorough wipedown and went out to test it a second time, and got the same results. It’s a wonder how a lens this bad made it through QA.

The images from the Moto E are particularly telling in this instance. The Moto E performs terribly, and that is to be expected with its 5 MP 1/5″ sensor, however the higher quality lenses on the Moto E results in it seeing substantially less blurring of the street light. It really leaves us wondering how the Ulefone Metal could have performed with better glass.

The HDR images are a bit more interesting in some ways. The Ulefone Metal definitely sees some improvements in foreground brightness, but the red tint only gets worse, and the limitations of the poor quality glass show through just as strongly. While the Sony Xperia Z3 and the ZTE ZMax Pro pick up substantially more background details in the HDR images, the background continues to be a giant black blur for the Ulefone Metal.

Last, and certainly least for photography on the Ulefone Metal, is the flash. The flash is extremely weak, to the point where I almost cannot imagine a situation in which it would be useful. In the flash test below, I took pictures of a tiny hill in relative darkness with a couple different phones. In this test, most of the phones lit up most of the hill, with the HTC 10 even lighting up the whole thing (including the small trees on top).

The Ulefone Metal’s flash failed to do that. In fact, it barely was able to light up my own feet when I pointed it directly downward. It was so bad that the HTC 10 without flash performed about as well as the Metal with flash.

Now, admittedly, I rarely use flash when taking photos, instead trying to find better lighting and finding ways to use longer exposures whenever possible, but sometimes you simply cannot avoid it. For the times where you simply can’t avoid using flash, the Ulefone Metal’s flash is weak enough that you might as well not have one.

With the actual photos are out of the way, let’s touch on the features. Ulefone advertises a manual photo mode for the Metal that actually looks pretty nice, but I couldn’t find anything that even resembled it. The closest I found was a manual ISO setting hidden away in a menu.

Video defaults to an H.264 video and AAC audio in a .3gp container at 640×480 @ 30 Hz for some reason. It can be switched to 1920×1080 @ 30 Hz, but the setting doesn’t tell you that it is changing the resolution. It just lists four “Video Quality” settings to choose from, “Low”, “Medium”, “High”, and “Fine”. Recording from the lockscreen always defaults to the “Medium” setting of 640 x 480 @ 30 Hz, even if you have it set otherwise in the phone itself. That means every time you want to record video without unlocking the phone, you have decide between either manually resetting the resolution, killing the entire speed advantage of not unlocking, or making do with 640×480 video.

The camera has a slow motion video mode, which are all the rage right now. But instead of increasing the frame rate and then playing it back at a reduced speed (so you still get ~30 frames per second of video), it drops the frame rate from 30 Hz to 20 Hz, so that if you play it back at one quarter speed, you get just 5 frames per second, and it is quite noticeable. It also limits the resolution to 640 x 480 and disables EIS and Noise Reduction, but at that point, I don’t think anyone cares anymore. You’re much better off just filming at normal speed and manually slowing it down yourself.

The camera is one of the worst smartphone cameras I have used to date, and I have a feeling the image sensor is not to blame. Poor quality glass, an unintuitive UI, and questionable software decisions come together to make for a very poor photography experience.

The front facing camera is atrocious. The non-HDR images taken with the Ulefone Metal have so much clipping that it looks like I applied a filter, and the HDR images aren’t much better. Looking at the histograms from this scene is a bit ridiculous to be honest.

Display

A 720p 5” LCD display is certainly nothing to write home about, but it does very well in certain areas for a phone in this price point. The display gets surprisingly bright for an entry level phone, outshining my Moto E 2015, and the white point calibration feels pretty decent (if a bit blue at times). Unfortunately that brightness does mean that the display doesn’t get quite dark enough at night at minimum brightness though, with it easily lighting up dark rooms, and it still isn’t quite bright enough for easy reading in daylight either.

Despite those positives, the fact that it is a $109 phone does shine through in certain ways. Most noticeably, colour shift starts appearing fairly heavily at even a 45 degree angle, and there is some backlight bleed (although it is fairly uniform on our test device).

Battery Life

It pains me to say this, as battery life is one of the features that I care the most about, but the Ulefone Metal has fairly bad battery life. With the hardware it has it shouldn’t, but it does.

Ulefone advertises that the Metal’s 3,050 mAh Li-Po battery with its 5” HD screen as equivalent to a 5.5” FHD phone with a 4,500 mAh battery (it would theoretically be closer to a 3,400 mAh battery in that situation, but I digress) and that it is capable of “1.5-day normal use or 1-day heavy use”, but it simply doesn’t live up to that. If anything, in my testing it gets just over that of standby most of the time, let alone “heavy use”. Even a light benchmark like PCMark killed it in 4 hours on minimum brightness on certain runs (on a freshly wiped device). For comparison, the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 with its 5.5” FHD display and 4,000 mAh battery got almost 16 hours in the same test.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly what is causing the issue. A portion of the problem may be the WiFi battery drain bug that the Ulefone Metal has, however it is likely just misreporting the WiFi drain, rather than actually draining extra power, as my unit consistently claims ~20% WiFi drain, even while in airplane mode. When left on for two days, it reported about 10,000 mAh of battery drain between WiFi and Phone Idle alone, but still had 43% of its 3,050 mAh battery left.

Even in airplane mode on minimum brightness (where the WiFi power usage should have no effect), the phone could only eke out 7 hours and 20 minutes of PCMark.

Ulefone is now aware of the misreported battery drain issue and are working on fixing it, but it is looking like that won’t address the issues with battery life.

Audio

I put this phone’s speaker up against every phone I had nearby trying to find a device that I liked less, and I could barely find one. I’m a little bit shocked to be honest, I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen audio quality this bad. Even the Moto E that I picked up for $10 last year handily outperforms the Ulefone Metal. So did the HTC 10 (obviously), the Samsung Galaxy S7, the Moto X Play, the ZTE ZMax Pro, the LG G2, and the Sony Xperia Z3.

I tested it against a Samsung Galaxy S2, hoping that it would beat it, but it didn’t. The Ulefone Metal is louder, but the S2 still has much clearer audio. It’s a toss-up at best.

So I broke out my HTC Legend (not helping the whole situation with Froyo on the dashboard) to test against it, and while I finally found a phone that the Ulefone Metal beats in speaker quality, it wasn’t by much. The HTC Legend (a midrange phone from almost 7 years ago) was louder than the Ulefone Metal by a significant margin, thanks in part to its front-facing speaker, but it was really tinny and had almost no bass (and I have reason to suspect that the speaker on my HTC Legend might be damaged…).

Just being back-mounted alone is a bit of a strike against a speaker, but worse than that, the speaker had muddy bass and tinny highs. It definitely is possible to have acceptable audio with a rear facing speaker (as the ZTE ZMax Pro proves), but the Ulefone Metal simply isn’t up to the task.

Headphone audio was fine, it had no problem driving my Sennheiser HD 598s, but I can’t think of a single modern phone that really does have issues with that. Audio quality was a bit of a step down from some of the other phones I tested with, especially in terms of clarity, but it wasn’t really something I would have noticed if I wasn’t looking for it. It’s got a bit of a weird curve to it though. Some mid-range sounds that would normally be barely noticeable in the background sit right out in front with the Metal, as if they were the focus of the song. And that curve really butchers some songs. Nine Inch Nails’ With Teeth in particular loses a large chunk of its complexity with the Ulefone Metal. If you enable their EQ, it just gets worse. The “Normal” mode pushes the bass, and adds extra distortion in the process, and the more aggressive EQ settings aren’t any better.

The microphone does an OK job. It seems to trend a bit quiet and does a poor job of cutting out noise from wind, but it does a good enough job to get by for the price. The one part where it really does fall flat is the fact that it only has a single microphone, which is mounted on the bottom. While this is fine for phone calls in areas with little background noise, it makes it extremely hard for the phone to perform any noise cancellation, makes it harder to hear the subject when recording a video, and can have a dramatic effect on call audio. For comparison, the Moto E and ZTE ZMax Pro that I keep bringing up both have multiple microphones.

If you use the built in voice recorder, it records in AAC at ~128 kbps, again in a .3gpp container, which is fine (although it would have been nice to see some higher quality choices). Oddly enough, despite only having one microphone, the Ulefone Metal still records “Stereo” audio. The two audio tracks are identical, provide no real benefit, and only serve to increase file size, but there are two of them.

Developer Relations

We are very pleased to see that Ulefone released the kernel sources for the Ulefone Metal, and they did it in an acceptable amount of time to boot. While the MediaTek chipset and lack of pre-existing popularity among developers will likely hold back the development of ROMs, it is a good starting point that will help interest in Ulefone’s devices grow in the development community over time. If Ulefone keeps up the good work with the Metal’s software, their next phone will be more likely to see a strong developer following (and we may even see a nice little community develop for the Metal over time).

That developer friendliness is already starting to pay dividends. Just a couple days ago, XDA members fire855, DerTeufel1980, and superdragonpt launched a 7.1.1 AOSP ROM for the Ulefone Metal as part of their Team M.A.D. (Mediatek Android Developers) project, which has gotten quite a bit of positive attention for the Ulefone Metal. We haven’t had a chance yet to test their build ourselves, but we are quite excited to see how it progresses.

As for Ulefone, it appears that they are providing some updates, and even included a decently laid out changelog, which is fantastic to see. Unfortunately, the changelog wasn’t listed in the OTA itself (which only had “Minor Bug Fixes” listed), and certain key changes weren’t mentioned (like the icon changes mentioned in the UI section of this review).

We will have to see how this progresses, but if Ulefone can build upon this stepping stone, they may be able to find a niche and build a loyal development community for their products.

Final Thoughts

The Ulefone Metal looks and feels like a nice phone, but its rough edges and the tough competition at that price point prevent me from recommending it. It has many of the right pieces, but it simply hasn’t put them all together yet.

While the Metal is lacking, it does show great potential for the future. The build feels solid, the spec sheet ticks almost all of the boxes for the price point, and Ulefone seems to be putting a legitimate effort into their developer relations. There are just a couple (major) nagging issues that need to be fixed.

If Ulefone can 1. figure out what is causing their battery drain issues, 2. continue to polish the rough edges of their software (especially the camera software), and 3. make regular incremental upgrades, then one of their future phones could be a solid choice.

In the meantime though, it is incredibly hard to recommend the Ulefone Metal over a device like the ZTE ZMax Pro, the Xiaomi Redmi 4, or a refurb flagship from previous years like the unlocked refurb/used LG G3 devices that can be found for around $110 USD on Ebay and Swappa currently. At the device’s MSRP of $169, the competition gets even tougher with phones like the Nextbit Robin and the BLU Life One X2 joining the fun.

India is a crucial part of Xiaomi’s international market. Here, their flagships have not had much success. On the other hand, the company continues to see its popularity rise with well-priced and high-value budget and low-end offerings.

The Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 650 SoC was Xiaomi’s best selling phone in India and the country’s best-selling (online) phone with 3.6 Million units sold in just 10 months. For a budget device in a developing country with a saturated and competitive market, that is a lot of volume. With the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4, Xiaomi is aiming even higher with its sales figures, hoping to double the numbers by selling at least 7 Million handsets in the country alone.

But is the Redmi Note 4 enough of an upgrade to achieve that number? How much value does it provide, and how does it stand against the competition?

In this review, we’ll take an in-depth dive into the Redmi Note 4. Rather than listing specs and talking about how the experience felt, this feature attempts to provide a thorough look with contents relevant to our reader base. At XDA, our reviews are not meant to tell a user whether a phone is worth buying or not — instead, we try to lend you the phone through our words and help you come to the decision by yourself. Before getting started, let’s get the specification sheet out of the way:

Index

• Design
• Software
• Performance
• Camera
• Display
• Audio
• Battery Life
• Development & Future Proofing
• Miscellaneous Observations
• Final Thoughts & Conclusion

Design

The Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 features an aluminum body in a design that depict it as smaller variant of the Xiaomi Mi Max rather than a direct successor to the Redmi Note 3. While the Redmi Note 3 had more pronounced curves on the side edges, the Redmi Note 4 gets a boxy-appearance thanks to the flat mid frame. Only subtle curves appear on the side edges of the back.

A first look at the device would make it appear that the build is a unibody construction. However, and just like the Redmi Note 3 and several other Xiaomi phones, the metal does not extend over the entire back. The top and bottom caps of the back are made of plastic, which facilitates signal transmission. There is a shiny trim that separates the plastic and metal areas, and this strip adds a bit of a character to the back of the phone. The MI logo is present towards the bottom, as well as a few declaration markings.

The camera setup on the back appears identical to the Redmi Note 3, but the camera sensor and fingerprint scanner sit well below the back surface, keeping them protected from scratches. The shiny color trim is also present on the edges of the camera lens and the fingerprint sensor. The back no longer houses the speaker and the slightly awkward protrusion to keep the speaker lifted up. Instead, the speaker now finds its place at the bottom side frame of the device. Xiaomi took care this time to get a symmetrical layout with identically drilled holes on either side of the micro-USB port, but only the right side bears the speaker. The left side houses a microphone, but the rest of the holes are merely cosmetic.

The right side of the device bears the volume rocker and the power button. The buttons are well built with no wiggle in either direction, but they have a slightly muted click response — nothing too bad though. The left side of the device has room for the hybrid SIM tray.

The top of the device has the 3.5mm headphone jack, the IR Blaster and the secondary microphone.

The front of the device has a 5.5 inch IPS LCD display with 2.5D curved glass edges occupying most of the front. The sense of symmetry continues with the speaker on the center and two identical holes flanking either side — the left holds the proximity and light sensor and the right bears the front camera.

Our review unit is the Gold back and White front color variant, where the LED notification light is neatly hidden under the colored front and is visible only when lit up. The traditional Xiaomi capacitive buttons — Recents, Home and Back — are present on the bottom.

As far as handling of the device goes, the phone is comfortable to handle for anyone used to handling standard size 5.5” phones. The device’s physical dimensions compared to its predecessor are just 1mm longer but remain static on the width. The Redmi Note 4 is barely thinner with a 0.2mm difference, but it appears thinner than the Redmi Note 3 because of its flat sides. The 2.5D curved glass edges give the front a bit of a taper on the edges, but the transition from glass to the metallic chassis does feel sharp.

A black bezel border does exist visibly on the white color model, but it seems Xiaomi is taking efforts to cut down the color difference. The (total) bezels (72.7%) on the device are virtually the same as on the Redmi Note 3 (72.4%), but due to the shape of the device, I had more of my palm resting on the display while gripping the phone. Xiaomi’s palm rejection on stock MIUI did not feel up to the mark, and I had frequent annoying mistouches on the sides. I had to often adjust my grip while holding the phone as my palm would cause the UI (and especially scrollbars) to go crazy and jump all over the place.

The trim lines on the back add a nice premium touch in a very subtle way.

Xiaomi does play it safe on the budget line in terms of design, not experimenting much beyond the tried and tested. The design language on the Redmi Note 3 quickly spread through the budget lineup in India with various other OEMs also bringing out similar looking products, intentionally or unintentionally. So a bit of a switch up by letting the device take cues from the Mi Max lets it have a year of differentiation in an otherwise saturated price range. The trim lines on the back do add a nice premium touch in a very subtle way.

Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 and the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4

Overall, I was content with how the Redmi Note 4 rests in the hand. Outside of occasional adjustments to counter the erratic palm rejections, I had no issues with holding and using the device with one hand. The metallic device remains cool to the touch throughout its usage and also does fairly well on not slipping around on level surfaces. The build quality is good, and the device speaks for itself.

The device certainly looks better than its price tag. Before the Redmi Note 4 became common knowledge, people around me would frequently quote numbers up to twice the price of the device when asked to guess the retail price. The white-gold color variant does look very pretty, and the overall build quality does lead people to believe that this is a premium, mid-range device.

The phone also comes in two other colors: Dark Grey with Black front and Matte Black with Black front. In my limited hands-on with the Matte Black color during the launch event in India, I did find that fingerprints were rather visible on the back of the device, though that is nothing a quick wipe won’t fix.

Software

Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow on MIUI 8.1.15.0 Stable (MCFMIDI)

Marshmallow on the Redmi Note 4 is nothing like Marshmallow on any device that runs Stock Android, completely thanks to Xiaomi’s extensive MIUI “skin” (ROM) which is laid on top of the core of Android. The modifications in MIUI run deep enough to the point that calling this is a “skin” would be an utter injustice to the years of efforts and the myriad of changes that Xiaomi has put in, cosmetically and otherwise, even if it doesn’t amount to a perfect experience.

The changes done by Xiaomi exist all throughout the Android OS: from the lock screen to the notification bar to the launcher and even down to “stock” apps like the calculator and dialer. While MIUI still goes on top of the base Android framework, an update to this framework will be lost on the end user (even if Google does an obvious cosmetic change), while major updates to MIUI itself will be apparent even if the base Android platform remains untouched.

We have extensively detailed the various changes present in earlier versions of MIUI, i.e. MIUI 7 on the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3. The Redmi Note 4 comes with MIUI 8 out of the box.

While the Redmi Note 3 ran Android 5.1.1 Lollipop out-of-the-box (Android 6.0 came as an update down the line), the Redmi Note 4 runs Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow with a promise for an update to Android Nougat soon. For the most part as has been our experience, the base Android version remains largely irrelevant as long as MIUI exists.

MUI 8 does build up on MIUI 7 rather than being a complete and revolutionary redesign of it, but MIUI itself is a complete redesign of Android as is seen on AOSP.

Suggested Read: Going Over to the Dark Side — Comprehensive MIUI Review & Details

Notification Panel and Lockscreen Changes

One of the most striking changes that one can easily notice is how the Notification Shade is implemented on MIUI. This is one of the change areas on MIUI 8 from MIUI 7, and also differs from AOSP. The default pulldown on the notification bar brings out the notification pane as well as an expandable set of quick settings toggles. These are placed below a weather widget which changes background color depending on the time of the day (although there is no option to get rid of the widget though). For the expandable quick toggles, a set of four toggles are revealed in compact form, which then expands to a total of 11 toggles and one settings button for the toggles themselves. You can reorder toggles, but the maximum and minimum number that can be displayed remain fixed as above. One choice available to users is to switch to a double panel layout which decouples the toggles to its own pane, accessed through a side swipe on the notification pane.

1 & 2: Combined Layout
3 & 4: Separate Layout

My personal opinion on the notification panel is mixed. On one hand, I do like extensive toggles for easy access to settings. On the other hand, I do not like how rigid the whole implementation is. MIUI 8 also does weird changes to expanded notifications. Notifications can still be expanded, but only and strictly with a double finger swipe on the notification, irrespective of how many notifications you have received or the app initiating the notification. This means that all apps will default to small notifications all the time — even your music player of choice! A single finger swipe initiated on the notification will not expand the notification but will expand the quick settings tile. This change is rather jarring and is something I simply could not get used to, affecting my one-handed usage of the device.

On the topic of broken notifications, the Lockscreen also features notifications which cannot be expanded or cleared. At All. There is no quick way to find out the contents of your notification or swiping them away except by getting past the lockscreen. This behaviour exists independent of lockscreen notification settings that control the display of information and content. Thankfully, the fingerprint scanner on the back of the device is quick to respond and works very well, so passing through the lockscreen takes a second if you have the phone in your hand.

Launcher: App Drawer and Homescreen

The Launcher on MIUI 8 is largely the same as it was on MIUI 7. There is no app drawer in place, so all of your apps are directly placed on the homescreen. There are plenty of animations around, so we invite you to our MIUI 7 review to view gifs of a few of those animations. One can easily install and use a different launcher, so there are plenty of alternatives if you do not like the launcher.

Recents Panel

The Recents Panel on MIUI 8 is a slight improvement from that of MIUI 7. The icons are expanded into larger cards by default, and you can switch back to smaller icons too. If multiple activities are launched in an app, say like Settings, these cards appear stacked on top of each other and can be expanded upon separately. The panel scrolls sideways and not as smoothly as AOSP’s recent’s implementation does, so it does hamper how quickly you can jump around to different apps.

Share Actions

Another change that is significantly different is how share actions are presented. Here is a quick GIF demonstrating the share activity available on actions like screenshot (as well as a look at the screenshot animation).

Even with all of the complaints so far, there is a lot more which MIUI 8 does and it does them right. For example, the caller app builds in video calling functionality (assuming both ends have supported devices) as well as call recorder and caller ID. Call recorders are very popularly used in India, especially in urban areas, so baking in this functionality resonates well with the target audience.

Notable additions to MIUI 8 also include Dual Apps and Second Space. Dual Apps allows you to create separate copies of individual apps that will co-exist with each other. This is insanely useful in scenarios where the app in question does not support account switching in an easy manner. For example, you can have two WhatsApp accounts, one for each SIM, co-existing simultaneously on the same device. If you want, you can also use Second Space to create a new phone setup entirely — complete with its own settings, apps and app data, and then switch between these two.

Then there is added functionality like Long Screenshots, Notification Control, Lite Mode, Child Mode, Guest Mode, One-Handed Mode, App Lock, Scheduled Power ON/OFF, Scheduled Battery Profiles, Scheduled Notification Profiles, App Firewall, Data Usage Monitor with individual graphs for both SIMs as well as WiFi, Autostart Manager, and still much more. We extensively covered some of these aspects in our previous review, and most of the functionality with its bundled advantages and disadvantages continue on from MIUI 7 to MIUI 8.

MIUI works out for an average user who has no particular affinity towards AOSP

There is so much more to MIUI than what we can cover in one article. MIUI continues to be one of the most feature-loaded ROMs to ship as a stock ROM on a range of devices. The best part about MIUI is that phones designed to run on MIUI actually run it very well, and the overall ROM works out for an average user who has no particular affinity towards AOSP.

There are a few more problem areas. One is how MIUI handles RAM and multitasking. The ROM aggressively tackles multitasking on the system level, doing great injustice to the plentiful amount of RAM in the hardware package. I wholeheartedly recommend disabling “Memory Optimizations” and “MIUI Optimizations”, which drastically improves app switching capabilities and lets app linger on in the background in their natural state and activity cycles for longer.

The list of dubious additions continues with the inclusion of the Security app from MIUI 7, also carried over to MIUI 8. Do we really need a “virus scanner” application on Android with virus definitions from Tencent, Avast and AVL? Do we actually need a cleaner application with scan definitions from Clean Master and Tencent? Preloading these applications is common on Chinese ROMs but having these additions on Global ROMs with Play Services running alongside is questionable. Worse, none of these application packages can be entirely disabled without root.

Yeah, no.

There are also concerns about MIUI pushing advertisements to their users. I would like to clarify that I did not receive a single ad from MIUI/Xiaomi during my usage on the Redmi Note 4 (as well as on previous Xiaomi devices). But preliminary investigations on this end indicate that a means to push ads exists in the ROM. In Settings > Additional Settings > Privacy > Ad Services, there exists a toggle for disabling Personalized Ads. I also frequently found an application named “MSA” with package name “com.miui.systemAdSolution” running in the background. There is no means to completely disable this application. Worst, the application very often updates itself silently in the background. Other users have complained of the phone receiving “invisible ads” (ads that wake up the phone but are immediately self-dismissed to avoid detection), but checking through Notification logs on my device gave no such indication. The chances of receiving an ad increases if you use the stock MIUI browser, but even after such usage, I am yet to encounter one.

Note: The Ad framework is separate from the Analytics framework. Both exist, both cannot be entirely removed. We can kind of see why Analytics exist, but cannot see why Ads do for an OEM that sells hardware and software as a one-time purchase.

If you absolutely need to have a custom skin on top of Android, MIUI shows how one can accomplish it. It’s not perfect by any means, but the various additions sprinkled throughout the UI give it an edge over minimalistic skins. Even small and seemingly insignificant changes can affect how YOU use YOUR phone.

For example – MIUI appending the originating applications package name in screenshot immensely helps me in reviewing the device and sorting through 500+ screenshots. Having currency conversion built into the calculator also helps me when I am writing about phones launched in different parts of the world. My relative who purchased their own Redmi Note 4 enjoys the Call Recorder functionality and how it can start recording for selected contacts only; as well as how he can use two WhatsApp accounts on the same phone.

All of these functionalities are possible by using various apps or modifications, but having these baked in works better for the average user who does not have the patience to hunt or the realization that his workflow is improved by their existence.

To wrap up the software section, I would like to say that I enjoy MIUI as a whole, but do have issues with a few segments that leave me with a mixed opinion. We eagerly wait the coming of stable MIUI on Android 7.0 Nougat to see what improvements the update would bring.

Performance & Battery Life

The following section is a full copy of our previous article on the Redmi Note 4’s battery life and performance, which you can find here for sharing or isolated reading.

Just like its predecessor, the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 comes in two SoC variants: one with a MediaTek Helio X20 and the other featuring a Qualcomm Snapdragon 625. Alongside these chipsets, you can find different combinations of RAM + Storage options as listed below:

Our review unit is from the Indian market, and thus it comes with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 SoC, along with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage.

Performance

The Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 (Snapdragon 650) that we reviewed left us mightily impressed by the sheer performance of the SoC in both processing speed and power efficiency, in both benchmarks and the real world. The addition of 2x Cortex-A72 cores in a separate performance cluster supplemented the 4x Cortex-A53 cores in the efficiency cluster, allowing the device to ace various benchmarks with ease. The Redmi Note 3 put up an absolutely untouchable wall of performance against its competition within the affordable segment, a fact that largely contributed to it being Xiaomi’s most successful product in the Indian market.

However, on the surface, the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 (Snapdragon 625) lands up behind the Redmi Note 3 (Snapdragon 650) based on pure specifications. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 bears 8x Cortex-A53 cores on a 14nm fabrication process. It’s claimed that the cluster setup is supposed to be divided into a performance (4x cores) and efficiency (4x cores) combination (as intended), but in the real world we routinely saw that all 8 cores were capable of reaching the 2.0GHz peak clock speed and staying there, so we are inclined to believe that the clusters are implemented rather homogeneously.

The removal of the Cortex-A72 cores should be best felt in performance-intensive scenarios as opposed to daily usage cases where the Cortex-A53 cores should be sufficient, although some quick burst operations will likely take a hit in performance as well. The lack of A72 cores will also impact benchmark scores. The area that would be an improvement is battery life, as the SD625 SoC also stands to benefit from the 14nm fabrication process as against the SD650’s 28nm process. While that advantage also translate to better performance under similar conditions, it’s largely offset by the difference in core setups.

So how exactly does the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 fare?

CPU & System

The Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 settles in the low and mid end with regards to benchmark performance. It trails behind in several benchmarks against its predecessor, which is inline with our initial assessment of the spec sheet. While the RN3 was a powerful mid-ranger at its best performance, the RN4 is an efficient mid-range device at best.

Starting off with GeekBench, a benchmark that helps narrowly assess the CPU performance, we find that the Redmi Note 4 lags behind the Redmi Note 3 by a good margin. The RN4 scored 841/2927 at its highest, while the RN3 could manage 1492/3482 at its best during our last review. Individual numbers by themselves have little meaning, but as a comparison across the two generation of devices, it is indicative of the decline in sheer computing capacity between the 2016 product and the 2017 product.

Other tests which measure performance through abstract algorithms, like BaseMark OS II and AnTuTu, share similar results. Total score on BaseMark OS II was lower when compared to the scores on the Redmi Note 3 and Mi Max (Snapdragon 650, 3GB RAM), albeit anomalous behavior was noticed with system scoring higher and memory scoring half in comparison. AnTuTu score was lower on the Redmi Note 4 as well. The margins of difference may not be very large, but they consistently exist.

The surprise that we did find was in PCMark tests where the Redmi Note 4 scores higher than both the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 and the Xiaomi Mi Max. In fact, the score on Work 1.0 test on PCMark has the Redmi Note 4 score closer to the OnePlus 3 with its Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 SoC and 6GB of LPDDR4 RAM scores (6692 vs 6748 respectively). This behavior is surprising as PCMark’s tests are not entirely abstract tests, but take a holistic approach to benchmarking by putting the device through common use case scenarios in a less-discrete testing environment that still uses system resources.

The results of PCMark echo across the general performance of the device. I was personally disappointed upon learning that the Redmi Note 4 was a downgrade on paper over its predecessor. But the practical performance of the phone left me pleasantly surprised.

MIUI 8 is chock full of animations, which can give a feeling of fluidity to the OS experience but ends up feeling less snappy and not quite as instantaneous. Actions feel deliberate and slow, so the first few hours with the phone felt as if the device was consciously and intentionally slowing down actions, giving an air of incompetence to the underlying SoC power. The slow reaction times were very apparent as I had jumped from a very snappy and reactive OnePlus 3 down to the Redmi Note 4.

Going through menus in the post-setup, there were a few settings which I played around with to get an experience that didn’t feel as lethargic. In developer settings, I sped up the animations from the default 1x to 0.5x for Window animations, Transition animations and Animator durations, just to see if the device started stuttering. I also turned off Memory Optimization and MIUI Optimization, both of which are settings which are opaque in their workings and were found to be detrimental to the true hardware potential in my past Xiaomi experiences. I also turned off “System Animations” in the Battery Settings, though I am unsure of which animations these refer to as animations still continued to exist in all the expected places.

Once the animations were sped up and the “optimizations” turned off, the daily usage experience on the Redmi Note 4 became comparable to that of the Redmi Note 3 and other products in the price range. It is not a flagship-like experience, as apps still take a noticeable second to open up (made apparent when you completely turn off all animations in the Developer Settings). But for an average user going about his daily business, there will be no noticeable difference between the Redmi Note 4 and the theoretically-better Redmi Note 3.

The Redmi Note 4 makes its predecessor proud with excellent thermal performance

Great performance carries onto thermal throttling. The predecessor Redmi Note 3 was an absolute thermal pleasure to use, as heat dissipation was excellent and throttling because of heat buildup was not noticeable. The Redmi Note 4 makes its predecessors proud as it accomplishes the same results. In our throttling tests with consecutive benchmark runs, the Redmi Note 4 showed only a slight decline in benchmark scores while temperatures rose. Temperature stagnated and hovered around 36°C, and performance only showed nominal variations. Do note, due to the higher ambient temperature of my city thanks to its tropical climate, this particular throttling test starts at 30°C base temperature — just a point to remember when comparing throttling performance across our other device reviews which start off around 28°C.

Another thing to point out, the minimum frequency on the Snapdragon 625 is 652MHz and not any lower for some reason. The phone still performs well in the battery department, as we will note later on in this article.

GPU & Gaming

The GPU is an area where the Redmi Note 4 shows a greater downgrade from the Redmi Note 3.

The RN4 utilizes the Adreno 506, while the RN3 utilizes the Adreno 510. While the Adreno 506 is based on the 14nm fabrication process and has a higher clock speed, it has less number of ALU’s (96 vs 128) and manages to score lesser GFLOPS (130 vs 180). Most games on the Redmi Note 4 start off on the lowest graphic setting as their recommended setting, but you can ramp them up on popular titles and still retain playability.

Benchmarking scores for the GPU place it well below the Redmi Note 3. The Redmi Note 4 scores about ⅔ the framerate on similar tests.

GPU throttling, on the other hand, is absolutely negligible. Granted, the GPU is not the best performer, but our throttling analysis indicates that it is a rather consistent performer. GFXBench’s Manhattan 3.1 Endurance tests had the device scoring a rather consistent 377 frames across 30 consecutive benchmark runs. The variations in the score are of the order of ±0.1 frame across the tests, so while the scores are not impressive by themselves, the consistency is.

GPU Throttling

When it comes to games, most titles perform just as well on the Redmi Note 4 as they do on the Redmi Note 3. Games do start at low quality, but you can push them up to max details without any issue as popular titles tend to artificially cap the framerate to 30 on most devices. Asphalt 8 and Warhammer 40k Freeblade had no issues churning out their 30FPS ceiling in gameplay at highest settings. On the other hand, Dead Trigger 2 does perform closer to 45FPS as compared to the 55FPS average achieved on the Redmi Note 3 at highest settings.

The takeaway from the CPU and GPU performance sections is that the Redmi Note 4 is indeed a practical downgrade from the Redmi Note 3. But this statement is rather myopic in its outlook, as performance in practical scenarios is nearly equal and differences unnoticeable. Outside the scope of benchmarks, the Redmi Note 4 does not come across as the inferior device, and normal usersdoing everyday tasks will not be able to differentiate between the Redmi Note 3 and the Redmi Note 4. I’d even go as far as saying that advanced users will also be unable to differentiate between the Snapdragon 650 and the Snapdragon 625 in performance unless they go out of their way to find deltas by testing both side by side.

After my usage of the device, I am more at peace with Xiaomi’s decision to go for a an SoC that does not have a performance cluster setup as they have ended up with an impressive package nonetheless. App and OS performance is quick, popular freemium titles usually max out at fps, and the device performs admirably under prolonged usage scenarios with minimal throttling and a comfortable maximum temperature ceiling.

RAM Management and Storage

One of the weakest links in the Redmi Note 3 package was its limited RAM and liveable storage. The base variant came with a RAM and storage combination of 2GB + 16GB, while the higher variant bumped these up to 3GB + 32GB. We reviewed the 2GB variant of the Redmi Note 3 and noted the disappointing multitasking capabilities of the device. MIUI’s heavy handedness in handling background applications as well as its own bloat ended up giving us a very poor performer. Our Mi Max review, which was done on the 3GB RAM variant with the Snapdragon 650 SoC, noted the improvement an additional GB of RAM brought to the experience.

With the Redmi Note 4, Xiaomi attempts to fix this one broken aspect. To cater to a wider budget scenario, the device comes in three RAM + Storage combinations in India: 2GB+32GB, 3GB+32GB and 4GB+64GB. Our review unit is the top variant, and our experience affirms that more RAM is actually good on devices that run MIUI and is well worth the additional cost.

More RAM is actually good on devices that run MIUI and is well worth the additional cost

To actually make use of all that RAM though, one does need to turn off Xiaomi’s MIUI “optimizations”. These settings try and close down background applications and processes mercilessly, aiming for more “battery life”. So even though you may have more than 2GB of free RAM, you would find your last accessed background application would be closed away and reset upon a screen off, or your last game which you were playing before an unexpected call came through is no longer in memory and needs to reload from scratch.

The 4GB LPDDR3 RAM variant of the device, without MIUI’s optimization interference, can hold more than 12 apps in memory. This is enough for the needs of most people. There is no weird or anomalous behaviour when you have plenty of apps open. You can even switch from games like Warhammer 40K Freeblade and Asphalt 8 and back with no issues. As far as holding apps in memory goes, the experience is comparable to modern day flagships.

The 64GB of eMMC storage (user accessible: 56GB) formatted to EXT4 filesystem allows the Redmi Note 4 to compare with the Redmi Note 3 and the Mi Max on Read and Write speeds for the most part. The only improvements seen are in Sequential Write speeds, where the device comes closer to flagship like performance. High sequential write speeds would come in beneficial when writing large files like videos into the internal storage, so there is limited scope in seeing these improvements unless you plan to be a heavy data creator on your budget device.

In addition to the internal storage, the Redmi Note 4 also provides storage expandability through a microsd card slot (via the Hybrid Dual SIM tray). Seeing as there is no 16GB storage option even on the base variant, most users would be satisfied with the 32GB and 64GB options by themselves. But having the option is always nice, and we appreciate the choice.

App Opening speeds on the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 are okay. Seeing that this is a budget device after all, we do not have high expectations. For the most part, the device delivers opening speeds (cold start) comparable to other low end and budget devices, and as naturally expected, tastes dust when compared to flagships. Even compared to the Mi Max, the RN4 opens up apps (cold start) slower by a margin of ~1 second across an averaged run of Play Store, Gmail, Hangouts and Chrome. The difference may seem minuscule, but it adds up through the day if you keep the default MIUI “optimizations” enabled. If you don’t, then the hot start timing of apps comes down significantly.

Overall, on the performance end, the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 is another solid performer from Xiaomi’s stables. It is a theoretical downgrade in certain areas, but does not let any of that affect its real world performance. It is important to keep in mind that Xiaomi’s target demographic with this phone is the budget audience, people who go for devices like the Lenovo Moto G4. The previous Redmi Note 3 was an absolute monster in the price range and set the bar a little too high for even Xiaomi to one up. So even though the Redmi Note 4 shoots for the stars and misses, it still ends up pretty high.

Battery Life and Charging

The upgrades to the Redmi Note 4 over the Redmi Note 3 come in the battery life department, and that is an accomplishment by itself. The Redmi Note 3 was one of the best phones I have experienced for battery life, dwarfed only by the likes of the Mi Max while coming out on top of the OnePlus 3. So to go beyond that is no small feat.

For forward and backward comparisons, we tested out the Redmi Note 4 on both of PCMark’s Battery Life test versions. On Work 2.0, the device gives out a monstrous 16h 41m of battery life at lowest brightness, while continuing on with an impressive 8h 15m of life at maximum brightness. On Work 1.0, which is what we used in our reviews of the OnePlus 3, Mi Max and the Redmi Note 3, the Redmi Note 4 comes out the highest with a life of 19h 15m and 9h 31m at minimum and maximum brightness respectively.

The Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 has the best battery life of any device that I have used so far

Much of the credit here, especially during battery benchmarking, goes to the large 4000/4100 mAh (min/typ) non-removable battery and the Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 SoC and its Cortex-A53 cores on the 14nm FinFET fabrication process. Qualcomm claimed a reduction of up to 35% in power consumption compared to the previous generation (which would be the Snapdragon 61x series in this case). Xiaomi claims an increase of 25% in battery life over the Redmi Note 3. We do not agree with the numbers, but it certainly is a marked improvement over something that was best-in-class by itself.

It is so difficult to kill this device that for sake of charging time testing, we ended up spending 1h 42min just trying to get the phone down from 20% to 0%!

As far as Screen On times are concerned, most days end with around 6 and half hours of screen on time with around 25% battery still to go. My usage classifies under heavy usage in these scenarios, thanks to constant LTE connection (courtesy of Reliance Jio) and Dual-SIM usage. These 6 hours would be a mixed bag of Chrome browsing, Whatsapp, Telegram, Slack, Reddit Sync, YouTube and a combined of around 1 and half hours of Ingress and Vainglory gaming. The Redmi Note 4 is pure beast mode when it comes to battery, and with an acceptable level of performance, there simply is no tradeoff in achieving these insane numbers.

On medium to light usage with much more device standby and wifi switchover, the phone can easily eke out two days of usage. Average users will be absolutely content with the battery life on this device, irrespective of their usage intensity.

The best part of this insane battery performance is that the phone manages to do all of that while still retaining a standard size form factor, without needing a bulky battery and body. As we will expand upon in our full review, the Redmi Note 4 offers pleasant ergonomics and allows for comfortable handling too.

As insane as the battery life is, the charging rate of the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 is the exact opposite. The phone comes with a 5V/2A charger in the box. Xiaomi makes no mention of any fast charging capabilities on the device even though the Snapdragon 625 supports Qualcomm Quick Charge 3.0.

Charging with the provided box charger consistently takes approximately 3 hours to charge a dead Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 to 100%. Charging rate significantly tapers off towards the higher percentages.

An hour’s worth of charge is good enough for the battery to go from 0 to 50%. External temperatures while charging remain a cool 36-38 °C while the phone is idling/asleep, although the charger brick itself manages to go higher than 50°C while charging (not an issue since no one needs to constantly handle the charger, but just something worth mentioning). We had hoped Xiaomi would incorporate improvements in this area seeing that the Mi Max and the Redmi Note 3 had similar charging performance, but alas, that is not the case.

Camera

Rear: 13MP BSI CMOS Sensor, f/2.0, PDAF, 1080p@30fps/720p@120fps
Front: 5MP CMOS Sensor, f/2.0, Fixed Focus

The Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 comes with a 13MP primary camera with f/2.0 aperture and PDAF. Just like the Redmi Note 3, the Redmi Note 4 performs okay in the camera department. The improvements come about in color reproduction, where the camera is able to capture a wider range of colors and with better accuracy.

As long as the light is in your favor, shots on the Redmi Note 4 come out better than the Redmi Note 3. We have not had a chance to check out camera performance on other mid-rangers in the Indian market who actually boasts of camera performance as their strong point, like the older Moto G4 Plus and newer Moto G5 Plus as well as other phones from camera oriented lineups like Oppo’s F-series and several of Vivo’s phones. So it is difficult to make an absolute statement on how the camera performs in its price range.

With comparison to the Redmi Note 3, the camera is an improvement. Firstly, there is the improved color reproduction and slightly improved dynamic range overall. Colors captured are closer representatives of the subject and if the lighting is good, you can get a decent level of detail as well as accuracy. HDR on the Redmi Note 3 was often atrocious with how it would over-brighten lit areas, but HDR on Redmi Note 4 does a better and more consistent and predictable job. But as a down side, I do feel it is slower than the RN3 though, as HDR pics often had me waiting for around 2-3 seconds for the image to complete processing (and a premature movement would blur out and destroy the image).

Low light performance is again a sore point. Improvements are barely noticeable, if at all. The budget as well as focus on other areas of smartphone performance does not give us room for higher expectations in the camera department, so we would consider the camera performance in line with our grounded expectations.

The selfie camera on the front is a 5MP shooter. Again, you can get a good click if lighting is natural and plentiful, while low light selfies are better off not boasted about. You can play with a few beauty mode settings, with a Smart mode with “levels” of modification, as well as a Pro mode which give you a slider to fine tune the software modifications to the subject’s face. Placing a finger on the fingerprint scanner does click a picture (works for both rear and front camera), so positioning the phone and clicking a selfie one-handed is more comfortable than compared to a thumb-initiated click on the screen.

The general trend continues on with video as well. As is typical for the budget, the phone can capture 1080p at 30 fps, but there is no provision for OIS or EIS. Color and dynamic range is better on the RN4. But the Continued Autofocus leaves a lot to be desired if you have movements on the camera or your subject. You can switch to Tap to focus too, but focusing in video takes a few moments.

The camera UX remains vastly similar to the one found on MIUI 7 on the Redmi Note 3. You can access a bunch of image filters and shooting modes, and can choose from a few beauty mode settings when on the front camera. The Redmi Note 4 does feature Manual Mode, but the very limited set of controls (namely White Balance and ISO level) does not give you the fine tuning control that the name would have you believe.

Overall, while there are improvements to the camera in this generation of Redmi Note, it still isn’t something you can boast about. For the budget segment that the phone aims for, and the over-compensation it does in other areas like battery life leaves us little room to complain extensively on the aspect of camera.

Display

5.5” 1080p IPS LCD (401ppi)

The Redmi Note 4 comes with a standard 5.5” IPS LCD display with FHD 1080×1920 resolution. There is nothing to complain about in terms of size or resolution, as both are adequate and conform to the standards over the recent years for phones generally.

The display on the Redmi Note 4 is good for its price point. It gets very bright on maximum settings, enough to mitigate any readability issues under direct sunlight. It also gets very dim in its minimum settings, to the point that the dimmest setting was too low for me even in pitch black surroundings. In these, the Redmi Note 4 performed as well as the Redmi Note 3 if not better. We do not have the review unit of the Redmi Note 3 with us, so it is difficult to make comparisons on this end without the existence of numerical and objective data.

Color accuracy on the Redmi Note 4 is a bit off as the display tends to prioritize saturation and makes reds pop. This works out well for many users, but can be a concern for you if you want truer representation of colors. There are a few settings for the display that can be used to adjust the temperature and contrast, which came in handy as I found the default setting a tad bit warm for my taste.

Audio

The Redmi Note 4 is a noticeable upgrade from its predecessor as far as audio is concerned. All of the improvements come from the repositioning of the speakers from the back of the device to now fire from the bottom of the mid frame. The loudspeaker is present on only one side of the symmetrically-drilled holes. You can keep the phone in any orientation of its screen and still retain high volume and clarity, making tasks like watching videos much more enjoyable. You can still muffle the device if you cover up the holes, but it is now more difficult to do so unintentionally.

The experience from the 3.5mm headphone jack and the earpiece have been at par with various other smartphones that I have used. Clarity and volume levels posed no issues for audio for their intended uses. You can use this phone for extended calls very comfortably through both earphones as well as earpiece.

Development and Future Proofing

When I started reviewing the Redmi Note 3 last year, I had my doubts on how the device would fare in this section. A lot of the issues stemmed from MIUI’s then-recent convoluted unlock procedure, the one which induces more headaches than the problems it solves.

Three Xiaomi phones later, the headache still persists but the overall development situation (for the Snapdragon variants at least) is surprisingly good.

The unlocking procedure as provided by the OEM is still a problem area, wherein requests take a long while to get approved. Once approved, you have to battle your way through several errors in the official unlocking tool. If your luck is shining and the stars align, you unlock your phone in your first attempt. If it does not, and it does not for a lot of people if the forums are any proof, then you need to repeat part of the process in a combination of manners, button presses, and steps. Frankly, official unlock is an area that is unnecessarily complicated even for people who follow instructions to the T.

With the Redmi Note 3, there were ways one could unofficially unlock the device. These methods appeared complicated against the simple instructions of the official unlock process, but in reality were far easier to follow through as they ironically had greater chances of success. Eventually, as the device aged and had more community members and devs to contribute and experiment, one could install ROMs and do several modifications without needing to unlock the bootloader of the device at all.

In fact, the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 grew on to become among one of the most popular device forums over here at XDA-Developers, coming behind the current king OnePlus 3/3T and ahead of even the Nexus 6P and the Google Pixel. There is a wide plethora of custom work from the community available for the Redmi Note 3, including but not limited to guides, FAQs, ROMs (including official nightlies for LineageOS 14.1), tools, kernels, recoveries and more. There’s some more stuff over at the MIUI forums for the device too, just in case you did not think this was impressive.

The Redmi Note 3 set the bar very high for a Xiaomi phone in terms of development and third party software modifications. Does the Redmi Note 4 live up to that?

The short answer is, it will in due time.

The Redmi Note 4 looks to be on its way to achieve a lot of what made the Redmi Note 3 a popular choice in the forums. Bootloader unlocking is still all hit and miss (and this part may not see any improvement), but once you get past unlocking your device, you can load up an official build of TWRP on the device. Want to get rid of MIUI? There’s Lineage OS to flash. Want to try out Nougat on MIUI? There’s a developer beta ROM released by Xiaomi themselves previewing Android Nougat on MIUI 8 on the Redmi Note 4. Want to get rid of MIUI and try out Nougat? There’s Lineage OS 14.1 for you to try out.

The options may seem limited, but keep in mind that the device is barely two months old. Flash sales have been selling out their stocks within 10 seconds (for all the 5 sales that I tried for), so the device is consistently gaining popularity, and the nature of MIUI is likely to invite many enthusiasts to become part of the community. Xiaomi also recently announced they have sold over 1 Million of this device within 45 days, so its popularity is already significant.

As far as official update goes, Xiaomi has promised that the Android 7 Nougat update on MIUI 8 is in the works for global stable release. As mentioned, there are developer previews to try out if you are impatient. Xiaomi is slow to update their phones, absolutely because of MIUI and the deep modifications it does which require porting every base update. This delay scenario also extends onto updates wherein base versions are not updated. For instance, MIUI 8.2 (on Marshmallow) was to begin rollout “progressively” from 20th Feb onwards, but as of 14th March, the update is nowhere in sight for the Redmi Note 4. So while the update will come, be prepared to wait because it might take a while.

While Android 7.0 Nougat will arrive on the Redmi Note 4, be prepared to wait as it might take a while.

Will the Redmi Note 4 receive Android O whenever it is released? This question is a bit too far in the future, but it helps assess the scope of the device which we can through the example of its predecessor. Xiaomi has remained mum so far on whether the Redmi Note 3 will receive Nougat. As noted in our software review, the base Android version matters little, so users are unlikely to experience any changes that Android O brings unless MIUI itself brings them in. Xiaomi has promised MIUI 8.2 (Marshmallow) for the Redmi Note 3 though, and it continues to provide that to other older but supported devices across its lineup. We would expect the MIUI update support for the Redmi Note 3 to continue on for a while, but Android version update support has a bleaker future. So expect the same for the Redmi Note 4.

As for kernel sources, Xiaomi takes a while to release them, but they do so eventually. The Redmi Note 3 has had its complete kernel source uploaded to Xiaomi’s Github, but these have not been updated recently so they are out-of-date though. The Redmi Note 4 does not have its sources out, but it will likely have them out in the future. It is also likely that Xiaomi chooses to release kernel sources directly after the MIUI 8.2 or Nougat update, so there is waiting involved in the future.

Miscellaneous Observations

IR Blaster

The Redmi Note 4 comes with an IR Blaster. This is a nice touch of added hardware that makes things easier. I enjoy the convenience of controlling a few of my other electronic appliances from my phone. However, this feature and the Mi Remote app themselves remain inconspicuous and subsequently unused by a large number of people who owned the predecessor.

FM Radio

The Redmi Note 4 also comes with an FM Radio app. This is not Internet-based, and seeing the popularity of FM Radio in semi-urban and rural areas, this will also be appreciated by a few people. I certainly do appreciate the existence of the functionality even though I do not use it actively, as I often miss the same on my daily driver (OnePlus 3) when I am out of network and bored of the music on local storage.

Lack of NFC

However, what the Redmi Note 4 does not have is NFC functionality. The use cases in urban India (the Redmi Note 4’s prime market) still do not invite extensive use of NFC, as mobile wallet solutions do not rely on NFC here. Android Pay is non-existent in the country as well. While the ordinary user will not miss NFC on this device, we would have preferred the existence of the feature and a choice in using it, rather than a complete impossibility for the future.

Difficulty to Purchase – Online Flash Sales

The biggest drawback to the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 is its sales model that makes the phone very difficult to procure. The online only sales are held on a regular basis on Flipkart.com and mi.com. However, as has been my own experience purchasing one for someone else, both the sites sell out of stock in mere moments. Even if you manage to load both the sites at noon sharp (which is when most sales are), and manage to click the one button that needs to be clicked, you get placed into a queue with a thousand other people. In most instances, the queue goes on for 15+ minutes after which you get a failure message.

This frustration of purchasing and the online-only sales model makes the device unfavorable in scenarios when you want an urgent replacement and do not wish to wait months for the phone to be purchasable. Impatient customers will more likely drift towards other inferior options if it means they can purchase the phone and use it when they want to, and not months later.

The Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 also becomes subject to popularity and demand in unofficial sales channels. From my own experience buying the device for an impatient user and failing to do so in five flash sales, we ended up walking into a nearby mobile store and “placing an order” for the phone at a good margin above its selling price. While the highest variant costs ₹12,999, we ended up booking a phone unofficially for ₹15,000 (plus additional debit card transaction charges). The phone was picked up from the shop the very next day in original and sealed packaging. The shopkeeper also mentioned that they sell about one of this phone every day, which is very surprising because of their high overcharging and them being an unofficial sales channel.

Xiaomi is trying to remedy the situation (all OEMs want greater sales after all). The OEM recently revealed that they have sold more than 1 Million units of the device in 45 days, since their first sale on January 23rd, 2017. Keeping in mind that the Redmi Note 3 sold ~3.6 Million units overall, the Redmi Note 4 is already about a quarter of its predecessor’s popularity. Stocks of the device are coming in, but there is simply too much (initial) demand! If Xiaomi does not address this with more stocks available in a timely fashion, it will lose out customers to other competitors simply out of the frustration involved in purchasing.

Conclusion

The Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 is a commendable device when you view it in an isolated vacuum where its own predecessor does not exist. For a budget and entry-level price tag, you get a very good set of specifications that surprisingly punches higher and better than its face value. Pure numbers on the specification sheet do not completely do justice to the Redmi Note 4 and its holistic smartphone experience.

The biggest talking point on the Redmi Note 4 is the Snapdragon 625, without a doubt. This is the area where the predecessor was actually better. But, this was because the Snapdragon 650 in the Redmi Note 3 was that good, and not because the Snapdragon 625 is bad (it is not). Switching out the beastly Snapdragon 650 for the efficient Snapdragon 625 is a very calculated decision from Xiaomi, as it only marginally hits the device in performance but enhances the battery life. For the average user, this trade-off involves losing out on performance improvements they do not notice, for some more useable time on the smartphone that they will notice.

Additionally, the improvement in capacity for storage and RAM brings more areas where the final consumer will notice the positive difference. Having 32GB as base storage options and 64GB on the highest variant, as well as a choice between 2/3/4GB RAM gives users more choice on how they much they wish to spend on their purchase.

For about the same price set as the Redmi Note 3 before it, the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 starts off with more storage, more RAM options, better build quality, superior battery life and relevance in software support. There is not a whole lot other than these that has changed, but with the prices barely fluctuating between the two generations, you still get a very strong value package.

The Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 costs ₹9,999 ($152; 2GB+32GB), ₹10,999 ($167; 3GB+32GB) and ₹12,999 ($198; 4GB+64GB) for its respective options. For comparison, the Redmi Note 3 went on sale for ₹9,999 ($152; 2GB+16GB) and ₹11,999 ($182; 3GB+32GB). The Redmi Note 3 would have been the strongest competition to the Redmi Note 4, but Xiaomi has stopped sales of the device (the RN3 has been out of stock ever since the RN4 came out) which is a very smart move in my opinion as that would have hurt their own new product.

But, because the Redmi Note 4 has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 625, it also has a lot more competition from other OEMs who have pushed out devices on the same chipset and displaying similar prowess.

For example, the Lenovo P2 is pretty much the Redmi Note 4 but with a bigger 5,100 mAh battery and fast charging support for ₹16,999 ($260; 3GB+32GB) and ₹17,999 ($275; 4GB+32GB). The Moto G5 Plus also sports the SD-625 and Android 7.0 now but on a smaller 5.2″ display, smaller 3,000 mAh battery at a price of ₹14,999 ($228; 3GB+16GB) and ₹16,999 ($260; 4GB+32GB). If you want a step up in SoC but can live with a comparatively smaller brand, the Coolpad Cool 1 comes with a Snapdragon 652 and a dual-rear camera setup for ₹13,999 ($212; 4GB+32GB); but you will have to assume the spec sheet speaks for the performance of the device.

The Moto Z Play is another competitor with USB Type-C, MotoMod support, cleaner UI but a smaller 3,510mAh battery but way more expensive at ₹24,999 ($380; 3GB+32GB).

Barring the Coolpad Cool 1, the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 will trump over the competition out of sheer price bargain. Xiaomi’s aggressive pricing strategy will attract customers, but that also assumes they have enough stock to satisfy the demands.

We still wish that there were improvements on the Redmi Note 4 in a few areas. Namely, support for quicker charging will help alleviate the charging woes and complement the insane battery life. MIUI itself can do with a few improvements in notification handling and lockscreen as well as be less aggressive with apps in memory. While they are at it, addressing the security and adware concerns would be a definite plus too. But outside of these, there is nothing that really stands out as an absolute negative for a $150-$200 device. Remember, this is not a flagship, so judging it with the same parameters would be foolish.

All in all, we are really satisfied with how the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 performed as a whole for a budget device in India in 2017. My recommendation goes out to the higher RAM variant which I feel is well worth the additional cost and I would strongly suggest skipping over the 2GB variant based on past experiences. If you are a regular user, the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 will be all that you would need, and more, in a starter smartphone. If you need alternatives, unfortunately for this year, there are a few around depending on how much you loosen your pockets.

The Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 can be purchased in India from Mi.com and Flipkart.

In 2016 readers wanted to know how AMD’s FX processors performed when it came to Linux and Android building – and thanks to the folks at AMD we were happy to find out and share the results with you. The lessons we learned from that article helped us learn how to better configure our systems and realize build times far better – our FX-8350 build times dropped by over 50% thanks to your tips! But even then we reached a wall. AMD’s performance, while better than expected, felt like it had room to improve in comparison to its competition in Intel.

For some time we had been told by AMD that something new was on the horizon: a processor that offered performance improvements of 40% or more versus the current lineup. Now with the Ryzen lineup making its way out to the public we’re also getting our hands on these processors. Do they perform as well as AMD has been claiming they would? It’s time to find out.

Index

• Unboxing
• Gigabyte AM4 and Linux
• Photos
• Test Setup and Methodolgy
• Benchmarks
• Build/Graphics Benchmarks
• AMD PSP and Open Source/CoreBoot
• Final Thoughts

Background

Advanced Micro Devices has been one of the few competitors to Intel in the x86 realm in no small part due to patent licensing. I still recall times in the late 90s of having AMD, Intel and even a few classmates with Cyrix CPUs. Unfortunately by the early 2000s Cyrix as a brand had disappeared from the scene. The rivalry between AMD and Intel lent itself to healthy competition and innovation throughout the first years of the new millennium. AMD disrupted the market by introducing the x86-64 architecture to mainstream CPUs in 2004. It was something that would take several more years to mature and kept the competition strong. Both also innovated beyond the frequency barriers by multi-core architectures in the same time frame.

As Intel dialed in their performance with multi-core simultaneous multi-threading (branded Hyper-Threading) AMD began to struggle to keep up with its rival. In 2011 the Bulldozer architecture was supposed to help close this gap and bring AMD to a more competitive stance against Intel. And while Bulldozer and its relative Piledriver did offer improvements, it failed to get AMD to where they wanted to go. This began the long process of a “bottom up” redesign of their processors, their implementation of simultaneous multi-threading which became the Zen architecture and Ryzen CPU lineup. Given that they didn’t offer many updates to their AM3+ lineup for several years, Ryzen offered great risk with the chance of great reward.

Over the past year they’ve been slowly detailing the technical details, which Anandtech has been very helpful in explaining this beyond AMD’s own technical slides and presentations. Just as the Polaris architecture proved competitive abilities in the graphics technology scene against NVIDIA the goal was simple with Ryzen: Make sure they accomplish what they sent out to do with Bulldozer and become a real contender against Intel once again. Many analysts and partners had even gone as far as taking a bearish stance in advance with Ryzen. After the experiences with Excavator and Piledriver they expected it to do about as well as its predecessor. Now it’s time to let the guesses fall to the wayside and the benchmarks continue the rest of the tale.

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Everything AMD sent to put Ryzen to the Test

Unboxing

If it looks like this is a lot of stuff, it is. AMD actually sent this all in multiple batches. The reasoning behind that was to offer the samples for testing in time for the availability of Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 5 into the marketplace. Most of those reviews though are performed in a Windows environment. But if we want to test building Android from source we’re still looking at Linux, and so this is where the focus of our review will be. It has also been an interesting journey that taught a very valuable lesson in the end.

Gigabyte AM4 Motherboards and Linux

This unfortunately caused issues with both of the pictured Gigabyte motherboards. Both refused to boot into any version of Ubuntu without using the noacpi flag. Since that takes away many of the enhancements of Ryzen – including simultaneous multi-threading – we started digging for answers. Through a collaboration of other reviewers, Phoronix founder Michael Larabel and a few XDA readers who had run out and purchased Ryzen on day one, we were able to confirm that this is an issue specific to Gigabyte. MSI boards and ASUS boards that have been released do not appear to have these issues. So after reaching back out to AMD we received the MSI X370 XPower Gaming Titanium and ended up using this to test everything as it arrived.

Since we didn’t get to test the Gigabyte boards out in Linux we did put them to brief use in Windows. If you’re not worried about Linux, seemed to offer the highest stable overclocks of the three boards, achieving 3.9 GHz with the Geil RAM reaching its full clock speed of 3200 MHz – and staying cool thanks to the Wraith Spire cooler, one of the two new LED fan cooled solutions released by AMD with Ryzen. Gigabyte’s X370 board also offered Sound Blaster MB5 support for a better surround experience. Both also featured some great LED lighting features with additional headers to connect peripherals to match the lighting pattern of the motherboard.

Our thanks go to the collaborative efforts of many who helped troubleshoot the issue in a quick manner. AMD also deserves some thanks for its quick response once the issue was confirmed. If anything this reinforces the fact that more reviews of PC hardware are sorely needed on day one for Linux users. We also plan to review and inform users should the situation improve with Gigabyte and Linux.

Update 4/25 12:30 am CDT: Redditors have been quick to post that the issue is already in Ubuntu’s Launchpad as a bug. The issue appears to be due to CONFIG_PINCTRL_AMD enabled and while an official solution is in the works, a workaround kernel (stated working by user feedback) was built and posted in the thread. Ubuntu and OpenSuSE are confirmed to have this issue, other distributions that do not enable this in their kernel may work without issue. Our thanks for the folks in the Linux community working hard to address these issues. We’ll continue to monitor and update as more information is available.

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Photos

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Testing Specifications

While the test bench survived a treacherous journey halfway across the world, the AMD Radeon HD6450 was not the graphics card we wanted to test with. So out came the Radeon and in went the best graphics card in the available arsenal – a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080. The reason for this was simple: While AMD knows that it has quite a fanbase for its own graphics cards, it also knows that many others will go with NVIDIA.

Since the lowest Ryzen processor is a 4 core, 8 thread CPU I also performed a benchmark using my personal PC. I have listed the specifications and testing methodologies below.

FX-8350 Testing Platform

• ASUS M5A97 r2.0 Motherboard
• Crucial 16GB DDR3-1600 RAM (4 x 4GB)
• AMD FX-8350 with Wraith cooler (provided by AMD)
• Corsair CX-750M 80 Plus Gold Power Supply
• 2 VisionTek SATA III 120 GB SSDs (provided by VisionTek)
• MSI NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Founder’s Edition
• Lian Li PITSTOP PC-T60

AMD Ryzen (AM4) Testing Platform

• MSI X370 XPOWER GAMING TITANIUM (provided by AMD)
• Corsair 16GB Vengeance DDR4-3000 (2 x 8GB) (provided by AMD)
• Ryzen 7 1800X/1700X/1700 or Ryzen 5 1600X/1500X (provided by AMD)
• Noctua NH-U12S SE-AM4 Press Kit Edition with NF-F12 2000 rpm Fan (provided by AMD)
• Corsair CX-750M 80 Plus Gold Power Supply
• OCZ 512GB RD400 m.2 NVMe drive
• MSI NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Founder’s Edition
• Lian Li PITSTOP PC-T60

Intel Core i7-6700K Testing Platform

• ASUS Z170I PRO GAMING
• Intel Core i7-6700K
• Corsair 16GB Vengeance DDR4-3200 (2 x 8GB)
• SilverStone RL-TD03-SLIM Water Cooler
• SilverStone SX600-G SFX Power Supply
• SilverStone FTZ01B Mini-ITX case
• Samsung SM951 512GB AHCI m.2 SSD
• Sapphire RX 480 Nitro+ 8GB 

Note: Items not mentioned as provided by a third party were purchased on own. In addition, additional drives were physically installed in each platform but were not used for testing purposes.

Software

• Ubuntu 17.04 with all current updates.
  • Ryzen Note: Ryzen was tested with an updated 4.10 kernel and 4.11 kernel as it has code implementation for Ryzen’s simultaneous multi-threading. Users of AMD and NVIDIA GPUs will want to steer clear of the 4.11 kernel for now as both proprietary packages currently do not have code merged to easily install and run the proprietary packages.
• Phoronix Test Suite v7.0
• Unigine Heaven v4.0
• Unigine Valley v1.0

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Testing Methodology

In order to try and minimize the number of test variables, all RAM was kept at 2133 MHz for the testing. The exception to this was the FX-8350 and AM3+ platform as its maximum was 1600 MHz. CPU speeds were overclocked for the 1800X, 1700X to 3.9 GHz and 1600X to 4.025 GHz to come as close as possible (or, in the case of 1600X, an extra 25 MHz to test viability) to both the FX-8350 and i7-6700K stock speeds of 4.0 GHz. The 1700 and 1500X were attempted to overclock to these speeds but would not remain stable. As a result they were tested at their highest stable speeds: 3.7 GHz for the Ryzen 7 1700 and 3.8 GHz for the Ryzen 5 1500X. For Intel a brief test of the i-6700K at 4.0 GHz and an easily achieved overclock of 4.2 GHz based on build times yielded slightly better numbers for Intel but not enough to change the findings of this review (one build was faster, another was not.) I decided to run the Phoronix Test Suite at 4.2 based on these findings. All overclock adjustments mentioned are by clock multiplier only.

Android build times are an average of 3 builds of Lineage OS branch cm-14.1 for the Nexus 6P (angler). All builds were done using ccache and make 3.82 based on previous findings. It should be noted that we also did some tests with make 4.1 and did not notice the performance issues with the current build process that we did during our FX processor testing. As the times of our sample tests matched those of 3.82 they were not included in the test.

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Benchmarks

Benchmark Notes: Phoronix Test Suite’s CPU suite offers a plethora of tests and not all will be included in this review. The full test results from the Phoronix Test Suite are available on Openbenchmarking.org site. I am adding a link here for the comparison of all results.

FFTW v3.3.4

FFTW is a single-threaded benchmark of fast Fourier transform. Much like we have seen in the Windows benchmarks, Ryzen’s single-threaded performance seems to be similar across all variants with frequency being the main difference. It’s a significant improvement over the previous generation FX-8350 – over double the performance – but still struggles even against the Skylake i7.

During the press briefing AMD admits that Ryzen “wins some and loses some” and here we can see why. While in Windows many of the tests stayed within 15% of Intel, AMD’s Ryzen processor seems to be over 20% less performing than the Skylake i7-6700K.

GMP Benchmark v0.2

GMP’s benchmark is a composite of arithmetic operations and while multi-threaded the CPU frequency makes a large difference here. Again, we see that even the Ryzen 5 1500X is a stark difference versus the FX-8350. Surprisingly our two highest were the highest clocked CPUs during our benchmark tests, showing that core and thread counts do not seem to make much of a difference over raw speed in this test.

SciMark 2 (Java) v1.1.1 Composite

The SciMark 2 benchmark utilizes Java for arithmetic operations and then provides scoring based on a composition of the various operations.  AMD’s Ryzen CPUs shine brightly here. Even the 1500X, at a slower speed than its Intel equivalent, outperforms it by roughly 12 percent.

Bork File Encrypter v1.4

Bork tests encrypting files in Java, measuring how long it takes to encrypt a sample file. Here we see that AMD’s Ryzen does improve against its own previous architecture, but that Intel clearly wins this round.

CacheBench

Cachebench is a tool to help measure performance of the underlying cache for a given architecture. It’s noteworthy because at face value it seems the additional L1 cache helps give AMD an edge here, even with the older FX-8350. But this alone doesn’t tell the entire story; we see in other benchmarks that doesn’t always translate into real-world wins across the board.

John The Ripper

For readers who wanted to know about cryptography performance, John The Ripper has some good news for you. The multi-threaded nature of this benchmark allows it to tap well into the additional cores and threads for maximum performance. Ryzen’s additional cores certainly make it look attractive here – and even more so when considering cost as an additional factor versus Intel.

GraphicsMagick v1.3.19 Sharpen

GraphicsMagick is one of the more robust open source image tools in the market; it’s one I have actually even found use for as an IBM i RPG programmer. The sharpen results here do seem to be skewed slightly against the Intel CPU and I have to believe that this is in part due to the GPU difference. I’m including it here because it’s noteworthy to compare the results of the 1600X, 1700, 1700X and 1800X together. The pricing for these 4 processors is different and shows that in some cases the additional horsepower may not offer too much more in the way of benefit.

C-Ray v1.1

C-Ray is another example of this same theme: The jump from 8 threads to 12 makes a dramatic improvement and well justifies the 1600X in its position. But those returns diminish between the 6-core Ryzen 5 1600X and its Ryzen 7 counterparts.

7-Zip v9.20.1

The 7-Zip test is for compressing a file but more clearly defines the difference between the four, six and eight core variants of Ryzen. What is a bit disappointing is to see the 1500X performance less than its predecessor the FX-8350. Thankfully this can be explained by the 200 MHz clock difference between them. The PBZip benchmark follows a similar trend.

GZip 1.1.0

Not all compression routines do better with Ryzen. Take for example GZip, which saw the Intel i7-6700K outperform them all. A similar result was found with the LZMA benchmark. In both cases the differences between all Ryzen models are marginal. When we realize that these are both typically single-threaded operations we can then make sense of this as it matches the trend of single-threaded performance in other benchmarks.

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Benchmarks: Build Performance

This last page of benchmarks focuses on builds – including Android builds on some (but not all) cases. We also provide 2 graphics benchmarks to help get an idea of how Ryzen will affect overall graphics performance.

Build Test: ImageMagick

While the i7-6700K does better than all of Ryzen the margin easily falls within the 200 to 500 MHz clock speed differences. Here the 1500X compile time decreases by 25% from the FX-8350, but we see diminishing returns as we cross into the 6 and 8 core thresholds.

Build Test: Linux Kernel 4.9

When we get to the Linux Kernel the above case no longer applies and the additional cores here get a chance to flex their muscles. We also see a more clear definition in regards to performance between the four, six and eight core models. CPU clock speed also makes a difference in this build test.

Build Time: LineageOS cm-14.1 ccache

As we have noticed in the benchmarks the Ryzen 7 processors all seem to behave similarly when working on the same clock speed. So with that we put the best of each to the test for our LineageOS build. The FX-8350 build time has increased with the cm-14.1 branch and is typical of each newer version of Android. We see a tremendous improvement in this with the 1500X, but as we cross into the 6 core threshold the CPU bottleneck is removed. Times improve with the 8 core but the returns quickly diminish and could probably be better invested in I/O performance, just like we observed with the RAID5 array and Xeon counterpart to our i7-6700K.

Graphical Benchmark: Unigine Heaven 4.0

Unigine’s graphics benchmarks are a well-known benchmark often used in reviews. We want to limit the variables in the build configuration in order to get a better idea of how much Ryzen improves over the FX-8350. Then by changing only the CPU we can get an idea if the cores offer an additional boost. And in the case of Heaven we see a significant improvement from FX-8350 to the 1500X, then a slight bump as we add additional cores and threads to the mix.

Graphical Benchmark: Unigine Valley 1.0

Valley is a newer benchmark and again we see an improvement from the FX-8350 to the Ryzen 5 1500X. But once we cross this threshold it seems to be no longer about additional cores and threads but again about raw speed. Our 1800X sees an improvement over the 1500X with an additional 100 MHz but is beaten by the 1600X running at 4.025 GHz.

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Ryzen and Coreboot

Shortly after the release of Ryzen AMD took to Reddit in an AMA to answer questions about its new product. During that discussion came up the request from several Linux and open source users requesting that AMD release its Platform Security Processor (PSP) code to the open source community. The reason for this is to enable support of options such as Coreboot and Libreboot, among others. Even Edward Snowden chimed in on the matter via Twitter:

Good moment for @AMD to open-source their PSP & firmware. In the next cycles, many will discuss replacing @intel. https://t.co/SI8FwDneCI

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) March 2, 2017

AMD’s Product Manager James Prior replied during the AMA that they are investigating this and provided a further update earlier this month regarding the status of the investigation. We have previously offered support for AMD as they released GPUOpen to the community and hope they will take another big step forward by supporting this request. We will follow this and provide additional updates as they are available.

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Final Thoughts

There’s a few ways to think about Ryzen and how it fits into the new ecosystem. The first, which many have discussed, is how it fares against Intel in a core/thread matchup. There is a definite improvement from the FX-8350 to the Ryzen 5 1500X. If looking at performance alone we don’t see it always keeping up with the Intel Core i7-6700K. But AMD’s strategy has never been about raw performance alone. Instead, AMD’s business strategy has largely been to offer the best value at the price point at which it offers its products. They have continually followed this overall strategy in both its processor and graphics technology. This becomes even more important at the moment when considering the overall costs of the PC.

When wanting to overclock an Intel motherboard currently the choice is generally limited to the Z series of their lineup, though some have found ways around this barrier. AMD has taken an alternate approach, offering 3 motherboard chip sets that enable overclocking and then enabling multiplier overclocking on every AM4 processor. This offers tremendous selection at lower price points. The challenge that I found with offering all of the processors is that once XFR is no longer a factor, the processor models all behave similarly.

From there it gets down to how well you can overclock that particular processor. You may hear of this from time to time as the “silicon lottery” because not every processor will overclock as well as others. For example, I was able to either increase the multiplier or run the RAM at its XMP profile speed on all 3 motherboards. Recent BIOS updates have helped improve the matter, but it doesn’t resolve it. Take for example the Ryzen 7 1700. Higher clock speeds would boot, such as 3.9 GHz, but would end up failing for reasons other than overheating.

The choices are very clear when we look at stock speeds. AMD now offers an alternative to Intel’s extreme consumer lineup at half the cost of its competitor. As we move into overclocking the same goals can be achieved with even a Ryzen 7 1700, so long as the processor will allow. The cost savings of 66% less than Intel’s i7-5960X or i7-6900X are enough to even buy a very high end graphics card or additional SSD storage. The same case can be made for the Ryzen 1600. It is priced very competitively against the Core i5 and it offer an experience beyond many consumer uses of the Core i7. Consumers who are looking at getting the most value out of Ryzen should not immediately dismiss these “non-X” options. That cannot be emphasized enough if they intend to overclock their PCs.

There are cases though, at the moment, where Intel can still justify its price point. One of those cases comes in PCI Express lanes, which Broadwell-E and the upcoming Skylake-E offer additional PCI-E lanes beyond what AMD does. This means in some high-end usage there isn’t an alternative – yet. AMD is expected to announce an X390 motherboard and Naples, the enterprise lineup for Ryzen. I fully expect here to see a challenge against X99 and not only the additional PCI Express lanes but also memory capacity.

AMD’s own challenges in this market meant taking a very big gamble on its return to form by sacrificing many short-term sales. Sometimes this pays off even bigger – the Chicago Cubs and Cleveland Cavaliers are testaments to that in the sports world. If AMD’s goal was to achieve this competitive stance, I believe they have achieved their goals. But this isn’t the end of the story; change and innovation need to continue. Intel has hinted at such a change by retiring the Core branding in 2019. Could this hurt AMD’s promise to stay on the AM4 platform until 2020? Only time will tell. In the meantime pass the popcorn; a competitive AMD is back to their old form and that means an exciting competition for your hard earned dollars. Who wins in this case? We, the consumers, do. And it’s about darned time.

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IMPORTANT: We want to know: did you enjoy this review? Would you like to see more of this coverage on XDA? Or maybe you don’t think this is relevant on our site? Sound off on this and other parts of reviews in the comments below, Facebook, Twitter or Google+! We look forward to your feedback!

 The article has been updated from its original content as follows:

• 4/25/2017 12:30 am CDT – Adding updated information regarding the Gigabyte/Ubuntu issue and workaround.

Quite recently, the lead developer of substratum released version 801 of the application. The update not only adds proper support for Samsung users (that too, rootless!) but it also manages to include a version bump for substratum’s template to version 10.

Rootless integration for Samsung SeX/TW users has been added to the application as a paid add-on. At the moment, though, devices running Android version 7.X-based ROMs (either custom or stock Samsung Experience/TouchWiz) are the only ones supported. This particular project under team substratum has been named “sungstratum.”
In order to reduce the number of overlays in the list of overlays displayed once a user taps into a theme’s section, the team has shuffled the Android System, SystemUI and Settings overlays off. In order to have them back in the list, one must head to the app’s settings to discover a freshly-baked option awaiting them.

The team went ahead and created a chat room on popular messenger Telegram for users using substratum on Samsung devices. The moment you face an issue related to the app’s functioning, that’s where you should be.

Another major update entails the inclusion of support for DP3 OMS into Android’s version O which means rebooting after applying themes won’t be needed henceforth. Users will still require root.

Moving onto the version bump for the template, team substratum introduced version 10 of their template containing encryption. The developers over at substratum also happened to land a collaborative (and official) partnership with the developers over at slimROMs. Hence, version 10 allows adding support for the slimROMs Theme Engine as well.

Users aiming to use themes on slimROMs’ Theme Engine should know that team substratum hasn’t (yet) been able to provide full support for slimROMs’ theme engine. Hence, head over to the G+ community for slimROMs for support.

Template 10 also introduces Encrypted Assets. Team substratum quotes Encrypted Assets to be

the beginning of a new theming standard where we encrypt all our assets on-the-fly during compilation.

All files built using template version 10 will be encrypted within the APK as opposed to overriding original files in the “/assets” directory. This implementation frees all themers from worries originating from potential data loss. Diving a bit deep into the encryption standard used, all files will bear the “.enc” format under a 128bit AES algorithm.

Due to the fact that assets are encrypted with randomly generated keys every single time, losing the original source of one’s theme could lock the themer out of decompilation and asset-copying benefits. It is recommended to have a copy of the original theme hosted elsewhere as well. Encrypted Assets bars recompilation as well.

The team has now migrated to Kotlin with the introduction of final APIs for Android O and has deprecated their Java branch. A complete wipe of the older template in favour of the new Kotlin-based system has been highly recommended.

This also means that if you were running a third-party modified template with dialog/dashboard apps built in, this will BREAK it.

A new “flag” has been introduced into the template in order to check support for the Samsung framework.

What do you think about substratum’s ongoing progress? Let us know in the comments!

The Indian smartphone market is comprised of hundreds of players, spread across a large spectrum of budgets. But in a country where the per capita income (income per person in a year) was just ~$1,450 last fiscal year, aiming for the low end of the market with its vast untapped potential becomes crucial for brand recognition.

Xiaomi’s Redmi series of smartphones aims to bring the Xiaomi brand to the masses. The Redmi series of smartphones are entry-level devices aimed at first time buyers or those with limited needs and budgets. With the newly launched Redmi 4, there are no fancy flagship specs, nor the fancy flagship performance that we can obsess over. What we get instead is a small yet practical device that can fulfill all the needs of a basic user, and then some, without pinching his small pocket.

Index

• Design
• Software
• Performance
• Battery Life and Charging
• Camera
• Display
• Audio
• Development & Future Proofing
• Miscellaneous Observations
• Final Thoughts & Conclusion

Design

The Redmi 4 will be a familiar face for anyone following Xiaomi’s newest devices. The Redmi 4 borrows design cues from the Redmi Note 4 without any risky experiments. For its price, the Redmi 4 looks better than expected out of an entry level device.

The faux-unibody construction is comprised of a metallic main back plate flanked by plastic caps on the top and bottom, just like several other Redmi and Redmi Note smartphones. The plastic caps are separated by an indented trim line which gives some more character to the device. The back curves in on the side edges, complementing the size of the phone and its feel in hand. However, the back plate on the Matte Black gets ‘dirty’ easily (with oily residue from fingers) and for some reason, it did not clean with simple wet wipes. The fingerprint sensor on the back is also placed higher, but considering the size of the device, the new positioning makes sense as that is closer to the areas where your fingers will come to rest.

The front of the device features the 5” HD display with 2.5D curved glass, the three capacitive buttons on the bottom, the earpiece and front camera on the top as well as other sensors. Hidden away when off is the notification LED which is found below the capacitive key. Our review unit is the Matte Black color variant, which looks very sleek in its stealthy black appearance. Note that there are no backlights under the capacitive keys.

The bottom of the device features the micro-USB port in the centre and identically drilled speaker holes on either side, although only the right houses the speaker behind itself. The right side of the device features the power button and the volume rocker. The left side is clean apart from the SIM tray. The top of the device features the 3.5mm headphone jack (yay!), an IR blaster and a secondary microphone.

Overall, the phone looks very good for an entry level device. This is a device with a 5” display, so holding and handling the phone was a piece of cake for me, especially after my experience of handling phones as big as the 6.44” Mi Max. First time smartphone users should also have no problem handling the device as the small size of the Redmi 4 is very comfortable for daily usage, one-handed operations and pocketability. The device competes with the likes of Indian OEMs like Karbonn, Micromax, Lenovo and Moto E series; and feel-in-hand definitely ranks up high. Despite its humble price tag, the phone does not come off as cheap and plasticky, and that is something that mainstream consumers would appreciate.

Software

Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow on MIUI 8.2.4.0 MAMMIEA, Android Security Patch: 01-03-2017

The Redmi 4 comes with Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow as its base, and with Xiaomi’s MIUI 8 UX on top.

The MIUI experience tends to be consistent across devices on the same MIUI version. As such, there are only a few differences in the software experience on the Redmi 4 as compared to experience on the Redmi Note 4, both of which run MIUI 8 on Android 6.0.1. We would like to make a reference to the Redmi Note 4 Review for a comprehensive run down on Xiaomi’s skin as otherwise this review would be riddled with repetition.

There are a few changes to MIUI, mainly to account for the jump from MIUI 8.1 to MIUI 8.2.

For starters, notifications can now be dismissed from the lock screen. It took Xiaomi long enough to reach here, but they have finally implemented this feature. Now you can swipe away notifications right from the lockscreen, without needing to unlock that before. Yes, you couldn’t do that before.

Other annoyances remain: notifications on the notification pane still default to small notifications all the time and can be expanded only with a double finger swipe down. This greatly impacts one handed use of an otherwise one-hand device, and also limits the information available to you at a glance.

RAM and multitasking continue to remain problem areas, but overall performance also sees another choke point in the form of the entry level processor (we will expand on the processor in our performance section). Our review unit comes with 3GB of RAM. With all apps ‘cleared’ off memory, you still have only 1.6GB of RAM available out of 3GB for your apps. MIUI’s aggressiveness starts coming into play once the free RAM reaches closer to 1GB left, as apps in the background routinely close down and lose their last positions.

Multitasking between apps is slow by a second as the animations bog down the experience and the processor starts showing its entry level limits. The Redmi 4 provides a multitasking experience which can be termed entry-level at best, and in contrast to the Redmi Note lineup, the Redmi lineup with its entry level SoC would benefit from a toned down version of MIUI. Stock Android / options closer to AOSP are popular in the 3rd party custom ROM scene for the Redmi Note series, but with the Redmi 4, Xiaomi should look into adopting something lighter by itself to get the most out of the limited processing power.

The stand taken by us on this may seem harsh since first time smartphone buyers are unlikely to notice the small lags and delays (or maybe they do notice it but ignore it anyways, especially in this price bracket) but I could notice the delays because I came down from a flagship daily driver. The competition against the Redmi 4 does perform better when it comes to multitasking, though. Even the two year old Elephone P8000 with its MTK6753 SoC and 3GB RAM does multitasking better and quicker than the Redmi 4 with 3GB RAM. The experience is likely to be compounded and exacerbated if the customer purchases the 2GB RAM variant, as there will be another choking point in the form of limited physical RAM that will affect the future proofing of the device.

My overall experience with MIUI 8 on the Redmi 4 is just about okay. I still like the various additions that MIUI brings, but MIUI on this device also starts pushing closer to the limits of the Snapdragon 435 SoC. For the price of the device and its intended audience, the shortcomings can be forgiven, though we feverishly hope to see MIUI adapt itself better to low end hardware now that even Google has announced its intentions to do so with Android Go.

Performance

The Redmi 4 in India is known as the Redmi 4X in China, but to keep things simple, we will refer to it as the Redmi 4.

The Redmi 4 comes with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 435 SoC, and in India, it comes in three RAM and storage variants: 2GB+16GB, 3GB+32GB and 4GB+64GB. Our review unit is the middle variant with 3GB RAM and 32GB of internal storage.

The Xiaomi Redmi 4 is an entry level device, and fittingly, comes with an entry level SoC. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 435 is an incremental upgrade over the Snapdragon 430 with the major point of difference being the faster X8 LTE modem on the 435.

The Snapdragon 435 comprises of 8x Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.4GHz, and is manufactured on a 28nm process. The GPU is handled by the Adreno 505 which has support for Vulkan and OpenGL ES 3.1.

As expected, the Redmi 4 is not the smartphone one purchases for showing off benchmark prowess. The benchmarks reflect the low end scope of its SoC, obviously scoring lower than the Snapdragon 625 that we have reviewed multiple times in the past. The chipset was put in this phone for mainstream, consumer and budget oriented decisions, and this fact is reflected by the benchmarks.

The SoC offers passable single core scores, but multi core scores for an octa-core chipset are on the lower side. Even older low/mid-end SoCs from MediaTek like the MT6753 scored better multicore than the Redmi 4. However, the GPU is certainly capable, offering much better value and performance than the much older MT6753.

The primary current competition to this SoC will come from Snapdragon’s own stable in the form of the older Snapdragon 430 which continues to remain a popular choice in the budget segment, and 2017’s imminent line-up of 4XX alternatives. Nokia’s recently launched devices include the Nokia 5 and Nokia 6, and they use the Snapdragon 430. But the difference between the 430 and 435 mainly resides in the X8 LTE Modem and a slight bump up in clock speeds (1.4GHz vs 1.2GHz), so end users are unlikely to experience any drastic differences as far as CPU performance is concerned.

Regarding  thermals, the phone performs like a breeze during normal, day to day tasks. It is only under gaming and benchmarking scenarios where the phone does heat up a fair bit around the fingerprint sensor. But thankfully, the heat remains under control. Although noticeable, it does not build up to an extent to cause any discomfort and dissipates well once you switch out of the taxing activities.

There is only a slight hint of thermal throttling. Scores for GeekBench decreased marginally after a few successive runs, with the dips coinciding well with high temperature. The changes to the score were small and since this is a device which is unlikely to be purchased for its processing prowess, the small amounts of thermal throttling are excusable but were worth mentioning to maintain the objectivity of the review.

As far as GPU is concerned, the Adreno 505 does not throttle thermally, so that is good news (but it is not all that powerful to begin with).

Most higher intensity titles work well on low graphics, with higher options causing frame drops and stuttery gameplay. There is noticeable heat generation as well, but it dissipates well and does not cause any noticeable effects in gaming performance outside of the existing frame drops. Casual titles are handled much better on the device, so there is atleast some hope for the budget user.

For storage speeds, the Redmi 4 performs better than one would expect from a budget device. The results from AndroBench place the 32GB eMMC storage formatted to EXT4 close to the Redmi Note 4 with similar sequential read and write speeds. There is improvement against Random Read speeds, which is surprising to say the least.

Overall, the Redmi 4 works much better on the practical side of the smartphone experience than on benchmarks. Its target audience will find the insides of the phone sufficient enough for their limited use cases during daily usage. It is important to keep in mind that this is not a flagship and not even a mid-tier smartphone. It is a starter, budget device, so it becomes imperative to pull our expectations back in line and measure it with an appropriate yardstick. The processor is not what adds value to the Redmi 4, its pricing is. And for its price, the processor that Xiaomi chose makes for a very good choice with no clear “better” alternatives (without bumping up the price) available for the OEM to use instead.

Battery Life and Charging

As is made tradition by all the Xiaomi smartphones that I have tested by now, the Xiaomi Redmi 4 features insane battery life. This is made possible by the inclusion of a healthy 4,100 mAh battery, which works beautifully in conjunction with the 5” HD display and the octa-core Cortex-A53 based Snapdragon 435. This setup means that it is difficult to kill the Redmi 4 even with a day of “heavy” usage (though how “heavy” you can push is still bound by the limitations of the budget SoC).

Since the display is small and the SoC fairly limited, a normal consumer is unlikely to spend a large amount of time consuming videos or playing intensive games. In a scenario where this phone is limited to more basic tasks like casual web surfing, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook and such other non-CPU intensive tasks, it will be no surprise to see the phone last 2 days of use on a single charge.

Coming to battery benchmarks, the Redmi 4 performs admirably, scoring 15h 42m of battery life at minimum brightness. This is about 1h lower than the insane 16h 41m achieved by the Redmi Note 4 in our tests under similar conditions despite the bigger and better display, but a good chunk of the Redmi Note 4’s battery efficiency is brought about by the 14nm manufacturing process which the 28nm Snapdragon 435 is unable to compete against.

On maximum brightness, the Redmi 4 scores 8h 28m, edging past the 8h 15m recorded by the Redmi Note 4. Practical screen on time with the phone hovered around 5.5-6 hours with about 20% battery left, and I do not doubt the phone’s capability to touch the 7 hour mark.

Charging unfortunately continues to be sore points for the device. The Redmi 4 takes more than 3 hours to charge from 0% all the way to 100%. It is a good thing the device does not need to be fully charged for comfortably going through one’s regular day, because charging the phone takes way too long. Xiaomi is making changes on this regards in the new Xiaomi Mi Max 2 which features faster charging, but with the Redmi 4, you are stuck with technology reminiscent of 2015.

Camera

The Redmi 4 comes with a 13MP rear sensor with Phase Detection Autofocus and an aperture of f/2.0. This is a rather standard camera setup which can be found in other Xiaomi devices as well. And as is usually the case, the camera can perform well as long as the lighting is in your favor.

The camera performance on the Redmi 4 is similar to that on Redmi Note 4, which is surprising considering the price difference. Shots on the normal camera mode are good representation of the actual colors of the subject, while HDR tends to saturate colors to make the images look subjectively pretty but not a close representative of the subject. The other drawback to HDR is its slow processing time, as all HDR images take about 2-3 seconds of processing and you need to maintain a steady hand during processing.

As soon as the lighting is not optimal, images take a bad hit. Details, color reproduction and dynamic range all suffer. This is typical of the budget segment and one is unlikely to find a device in this budget segment that fares better in camera performance.

The selfie camera on the front is a 5MP shooter with f/2.2. If you have adequate lighting, you can get a good selfie out of it. There are a few Beauty modes available as well, to touch up the subject’s face to remove blemishes and lighten the skin tone. The camera app accepts touches on the fingerprint sensor to click a photo, making it easier to click selfies without repositioning your fingers.

The Redmi 4 can capture video at 1080p 30fps, but since this is a budget device, it would be outlandish to expect OIS or EIS on it. You need a steady hand to shoot videos, a pre-condition along with good lighting.

Our expectations with camera performance were very grounded as even the current mid rangers often leave a lot to be desired in the camera department. This is an entry-level device with a heavy value focus on its price, so we did not expect miracles out of its camera. And we did not get any miracles either.

Display

The Redmi 4 comes with a 5” IPS LCD display with HD 720×1280 resolution. The smaller display may seem off against the 5.5” displays that are now presumed as “standard”, but there is a market for smaller and more pocket-friendly devices. With the smaller display, the Redmi 4 aims to be pocket-friendly both literally and figuratively.

In what is now a recurring theme, the display on the Redmi 4 is bright and sharp, just like the devices in the Redmi Note series. Despite its price, the display does not compromise in any manner when taking its price into account. The device gets bright enough for outdoor usage, though Mumbai’s punishing summer Sun caused issues a few times (the OnePlus 3’s display also was not legible at that point, so this is not either device’s fault but an observation that had to be made). The display also gets very, very dim and I appreciate the option to go to such extremes.

Viewing angles on the Redmi 4 are OK, as one can notice the blacks deteriorate past an angle, compromising the contrast ratio on the device (you can see some of that below).

Color accuracy is a bit off as the display likes to saturate content and make reds more vibrant, but it is not too bad and most users would not notice the saturation. You can also adjust the display temperature and contrast in case you want corrections to the default setting.

For its price range, the display on the Redmi 4 does not disappoint. The smaller size may affect decisions, but all other aspects of the display are up to the mark to what is considered rather standard in this price range.

Audio

The Redmi 4 bears identical drilled holes on the bottom of the mid frame to serve as the loudspeaker, but the speaker resides behind the holes on the right side of the microUSB port. Audio quality is decent when you are not muffling the device with your hands, which is a rare case considering how easy to handle this device is.

The experience from the 3.5mm headphone jack and the earpiece have been at par with various other smartphones that I have used. Clarity and volume levels posed no issues for audio for their intended uses. You can use this phone for extended calls very comfortably through both earphones as well as the earpiece.

Development and Future Proofing

The Redmi 4 (Indian version) is a fairly new device which is difficult to obtain thanks to flash sales. Because of this, there is not a whole lot of development already existing for the device for us to consider on its own merits.

[Because Xiaomi released multiple devices with similar names, we’d just like to differentiate further. The Redmi 4 China variant with 2GB RAM and 16GB storage is codenamed prada. The Redmi 4 Prime with 3GB RAM and 32GB storage is markw, while the Redmi 4 India/ Redmi 4X China is codenamed santoni. The Redmi 4A with 2GB RAM and 16GB storage is rolex. The following sections relate to ‘santoni’.]

Unlocking the device is possible using the official unlock tool. I have been unable to confirm whether there have been any improvements to Xiaomi’s unlocking procedure as my account displayed that I had unlock permissions as soon as I logged into Mi Unlock on my desktop, without even attaching my Redmi 4 (likely a consequence of my past unlocking adventures). We do not know if one still needs to apply for unlocking and subsequently wait weeks for unlock permissions — Xiaomi’s website mentions permissions, but we already had it without any special efforts.

The closest predecessor to the Redmi 4 is the Redmi 3S (land), so we can estimate Redmi 4’s development scenario on its basis instead. The Redmi 3S did receive its kernel source code, albeit disappointingly late. The Redmi 3S does have an active development community, as one can find several third party customization options and essentials ranging from TWRP builds to LineageOS 14.1 to KaliNethunter. It is too early to say if the Redmi 4 will hold up against the development on the Redmi 3S, but we are hopeful on this regard.

As far as future proofing goes, the Redmi 4 is not the ideal candidate for someone looking for a device that ages very well and can be used beyond 2 years comfortably. Most of the argument stems from its budget nature, as devices in this price range are not built with the highest available specs in any form, thereby sorely limiting how far ahead you can use the phone. The Redmi 4 follows the norm in this case.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 435 SoC, while good for daily tasks, certainly poses a chokepoint as user needs expand. Memory and Storage options exist ranging from 2GB+16GB to 4GB+64GB, so the base variants will have issues surviving in the future (and one could even argue in the present). The phone comes with Android 6.0 Marshmallow out of the box, and Xiaomi has promised an Android Nougat update “very soon”, but it would be a stretch to ask this phone to be updated to Android O keeping in mind its asking price, and the fact that it’s releasing with Marshmallow this late in the game.

Miscellaneous Observations

The Redmi 4 features the now standard IR Blaster on the top of the device. This is a feature absent from even flagships, so other OEMs should take notice when such a budget device comes with this hardware feature. Usage and performance of the IR Blaster is similar to that of the Redmi Note 4

Difficulty to Purchase – Flash Sales, but Improved Scenario

The Redmi 4, once again in typical Xiaomi fashion, is a hard to purchase device. However, there have been improvements when compared to the Redmi Note 4.

For starters, Xiaomi now accepts pre-orders for the device. This is similar to the Flash Sales that they undertake as the pre-order timings are fixed, but the difference here is that you can book a device that hasn’t been completely produced and distributed yet (as opposed to devices which are ready for dispatch in a flash sale). This increases the window of opportunity for potential buyers and helps Xiaomi convert more such potential customers into actual customers.

Xiaomi has also opened its first offline Mi Home store in India in the city of Bangalore. This Mi Home store provides an outlet to experience and purchase the Redmi 4 (and other Xiaomi devices and electronics) offline. Xiaomi plans to open several more such offline stores in other parts of the country, as well as increase its offline retail presence in the coming months. This increases the availability of the devices to audiences which are not Internet-adept, something which is crucial for success for devices in this price segment.

Final Thoughts and Conclusion

A review of the Xiaomi Redmi 4 would be objectively incomplete without mentioning the biggest selling point of the device — its insane pricing! While overall the device may feel underwhelming and specs feel too entry level for the developed world, the phone is targeting customers who are purchasing a smartphone either for the first time, or have strict budget limitations.

The Xiaomi Redmi 4 is available in India at prices starting with ₹6,999 ($108) for the base 2GB RAM + 16GB Storage variant; ₹8,999 ($140) for 3GB + 32GB and ₹10,999 ($170) for 4GB + 64GB.

The base variant of the Redmi 4 makes the most sense to us, despite having the worst set of specs in the available variant choices. That is because the pricing of that device gives you heck of a deal, something that other OEMs have been unable to match. The jump up to more RAM and Storage feels steep, and the top-most variant just makes no sense to us despite having the ‘least’ compromises of the lot. That is because the highest end variant starts intruding upon the Redmi Note 4 pricing category. While you do get lesser RAM and storage on the Redmi Note 4 for that price, you swap out the budget Snapdragon 435 for the much better, mid-range Snapdragon 625.

The best deal is the base variant as it gets you a strong device for under $110.

In that price range, we see competitors like the newly announced Moto C Plus, which bears similar specs but swaps out the SoC for the MediaTek MT6737 and downgrades further on the camera and gets rid of the fingerprint sensor entirely. On the other hand, you do get an Android experience that is closer to stock, and a removable battery. On paper, the Moto C Plus does seem like a worse deal, so it would depend on the end user and his needs and priorities to determine which phone would be a better fit.

Other notable releases include the new YU Yureka Black, which gets you an FHD display at the same size and 4GB of RAM as upgrades, but a step down to the Snapdragon 430 SoC. The Yureka Black also starts off higher on the pricing, competing with the middle Redmi 4 variant at ₹8,999 ($140).

Surprisingly, I would also consider Nokia’s latest smartphone, the Nokia 3 as a decent competitor to the Redmi 4, despite Nokia’s ridiculously poor pricing decision. The Nokia 3 is expensive at ₹9,499 ($148) and downgrades to the MediaTek MT6737, 2GB RAM, 16GB storage, a smaller 2630 mAh battery and spec-wise step down to the camera as well. But, the Nokia 3 sports the Nokia branding and is made available exclusively through offline stores. For a first time smartphone buyer who walks into a retail shop, both of these factors would sway him towards the Nokia 3 even though the Redmi 4 is clearly the better device.

With all cards laid out on the table, the Redmi 4 is a device with its own share of compromises and one really strong selling point in the form of its price. There is little in this little device to make you truly go “wow”, but that is typical of every smartphone in the entry level. But, then one sees the pricing of the device, and all faults are forgiven. For under $110, this is as good as it gets. My recommendation goes out to the starting 2GB+16GB variant of the Xiaomi Redmi 4 as an excellent choice for a first smartphone despite its compromises, mainly due to its ₹6,999 ($108) pricing. If you can stretch your budget, skip the other two variants and opt instead for the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4.

Xiaomi’s worldwide launch has been heralded for years, and with the Xiaomi Mi Note 2 it looks like the final pieces are falling into place. As Xiaomi’s first flagship phone to offer a model with worldwide frequency band support, the Mi Note 2 offers an exciting look into what we can expect from Xiaomi as they continue to expand internationally.

In this review, we’ll take an in-depth dive into the Xiaomi Mi Note 2. Rather than listing specs and talking about how the experience felt, this feature attempts to provide a thorough look with contents relevant to our reader base. At XDA, our reviews are not meant to tell a user whether a phone is worth buying or not — instead, we try to lend you the phone through our words and help you come to the decision by yourself. Before getting started, let’s get the specification sheet out of the way:

Index

 DesignSoftware – UISoftware – UXPerformanceReal World UXCameraDisplayBattery LifeAudioDeveloper RelationsFinal Thoughts

Design

Design is always one of the hardest things to describe about a phone, and that especially holds true for devices that will often be ordered without seeing them in person. To give someone an idea about what the tactile feel of a device is from across the internet requires comparisons to other popular devices to create an understanding of what the device looks and feels like. Thankfully, in the case of the Xiaomi Mi Note 2, there is a device that feels almost identical in the hand that you can probably find in your local cell phone stores.

While the curved front and back appears to be an almost eerily close match with the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge, the feel in hand reminds me more of the slightly older Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge+ (Samsung’s 5.7” device with a curved screen from the year before).

The curved back definitely helps with gripability, however it just doesn’t feel quite as pronounced as the curve on the S7 and S7 Edge, which makes a noticeable difference. The S7’s back curves in much further, allowing it to rest in your hand more easily, in turn helping you wrap more of your hand around the phone for a tighter grip.

The volume rocker and power button are positioned on the right side of the device, and are a bit further up the device than we have come to prefer. They are just high enough to require most people to reposition their hand in order to press the volume keys if holding the device in their right hand, and to require complete repositioning to hit any buttons with your left hand. Thankfully, the device can be woken with both Double Tap To Wake (DT2W) and by pressing the home button (which houses the fingerprint sensor).

The buttons generally feel solid, with firm tactile feedback and a soft audible click. On our testing device, the home button can sometimes get stuck if you press on the left side of it, however so far unsticking it has been as simple as pressing down on the button again. This isn’t something wholly exclusive to the Xiaomi Mi Note 2, as other devices with home buttons can get “stuck” in a similar fashion. While it is not really a cause for concern, it does happen more frequently on our device than we would like to see.

The SIM card tray can be found opposite the volume rocker, and would be almost unnoticeable if not for the SIM ejector hole, as it sits flush with the frame. The top of the device houses the 3.5 mm jack (which is missing on the Xiaomi Mi 6), a microphone, and the IR blaster, while the bottom houses another microphone, the speaker, and the USB Type-C 2.0 port.

Despite having two equally-sized speaker grilles on the bottom of the phone, only one of them houses a speaker, with the other one (which houses the microphone) being the shape that it is primarily for design reasons (a very popular practice nowadays). This ends up not being an issue however, as the Xiaomi Mi Note 2 still can be quite loud at times. The noises for locking and unlocking the phone in particular are ridiculously loud in their default configuration, however the speakers do run into some issues with audio clarity when playing music, which we talk about a bit more in the audio section below.

Software – UI

We’ve written extensively about how MIUI differs from AOSP in previous reviews (such as the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 and the Xiaomi Redmi 4), from the iOS-like homescreen to the differences in the notification shade, so for this section we will be focusing heavily on device specific performance.

While the Xiaomi Mi Note 2 officially supports English (one of just five languages offered on the Chinese ROM), there are still substantial portions of the UI that have not been translated on the build we are using. The resulting UX leaves you with a tantalizing glimpse of what the phone could be (and possibly what it is under other language settings), but which simply isn’t at the level expected from flagship phones.

It doesn’t stop on the device itself however. The english language page for the Xiaomi Mi Note 2 on Xiaomi’s website has numerous spelling and grammar errors, the majority of which could be caught with a single read through by a native speaker. It really is a wonder that Xiaomi doesn’t hire someone to go over their global website at the very least, if not the device as well. They could quite literally spend a couple bucks on a freelancer website to get someone to quickly proofread their product page, and they would end up creating a substantially more user friendly and polished experience (although ideally they would want to work with someone consistently who is familiar with the technology).

As this is Xiaomi’s first phone with “Global LTE band” support, it thankfully has received a Global ROM as well, which ideally brings better support for other languages and support for more languages, in addition to other changes like having a different set of preinstalled apps. If Xiaomi still intends to enter the North American market, they will need to have a seamless experience in the local languages (including English, French, Spanish, and many others). Small irritations can quickly build up to create a negative experience, and untranslated popup boxes where you can’t tell what either option is are more than just a small issue.

Substantial portions of the settings menu on our device have not been translated either, including the settings for the stock lockscreen. By default, the lockscreen cycles through different sets of pictures, which are curated by Xiaomi. You can select which sets you are interested in, however as they have not been translated to English, you are left with just an abstract picture and the translation software of your choice to try to guess what each category is for.

The hyperlocalization of the device continues on into the built in browser, which ships with a couple options that you can choose between for the search engine in the omnibar, all of which are Chinese language websites. Unfortunately, it does not appear to be possible to set a custom option for the omnibar, leaving you with a lackluster search experience in other languages.

Software – Features & UX

I’ve mentioned previously how I can be quite picky about how Halo-style navigation features are implemented, and Xiaomi seems to have hit the mark. Quick ball is a proper implementation of floating controls. It opens up quickly, and lets you access what you wanted and get back to what you were doing. It is smooth, it is fluid, and it is fast.

One kind of nice feature is that the phone wakes up from being powered off to play alarms, which is both good and bad. It’s good in that you won’t miss your alarm if you do something like shutting the phone off overnight to save power, but it can potentially cause problems if you meant for it to stay off and forgot about the alarm (for example, if you meant to turn it off long term, or if you turned it off to avoid all noises while you are in a meeting, or if are in a room where you are not allowed to have your phone on). Of course, being keenly aware of this behavior goes a long way and can minimize or neutralize any issues you might otherwise encounter.

As we mentioned above in the UI section, Lockscreen pictures often have descriptions, but they are all in Chinese. There is not even an automatic translation into the language of your choice, despite Xiaomi partnering with Microsoft, who are heavily pushing Bing Translate’s abilities, and holding it up as an alternative to Google Translate. Microsoft clearly thinks that their translation capabilities are ready for prime time, having partnered with Facebook to bring automatic translation to Facebook posts, so it is interesting to see the lack of it here. It’s not clear if this was a conscious decision to leave it out due to the possibility of errors, or if it was simply a case of not realising that it was a possibility.

Lockscreen pictures are questionable at times. By default, some of the lockscreen images appear to relate to ongoing news stories, and can occasionally have some not safe for work images attached. For example, when the Victoria Secret fashion show was happening, our device cycled to some pictures which probably shouldn’t have been enabled by default. The images were fine if you’re expecting them, but being surprised by someone wearing just their underwear at the wrong time can be… frustrating, and can result in awkward explanations.

Along the same lines, many of default the lockscreen images that the phone cycles to are of Chinese models posing in magazine-style images, which stands in stark contrast to how many other similar services such as Windows Spotlight and Chromecast Backdrop are avoiding having any individual person as their main focus, and instead prioritizing beautiful landscape or urban photography and macro images.

Pictures appear to be chosen without any regard to how they will interact with the text on the lockscreen, which can unfortunately cause some readability issues at times. That being said, for the sake of fairness, only Microsoft seems to be doing that properly, and even then, primarily for Bing search, not their Windows Spotlight.

One particularly annoying thing that the phone does is that the display keeps flashing on seemingly without reason if you leave it sitting for a bit. It appears that it may flash on when the lockscreen image changes, although we are not sure at this point in time.

Many of the built-in apps require authentication in order to use, which Xiaomi has chosen to do by having the phone send an international text to their servers to verify the number. This is quite strange, as most SMS based device authentication systems instead have the system send a text to the phone, specifically to avoid problems with international texting and devices that can’t send texts (such as landlines and data-only lines). The authentication is pervasive throughout the phone, with many apps requiring it that probably shouldn’t.

One that jumps to mind is the built in Virtual SIM card app, which requires you to verify a separate SIM card via SMS in order to use it. The Virtual SIM card app is designed to allow you to buy cellular connectivity packages directly from your phone, in preparation for ESIM (which will allow phones to join the cellular network of your choice through software, instead of physically inserting a SIM card, which in turn will reduce the number of openings on the phone and allow OEMs to waterproof phones more thoroughly). Unfortunately the Virtual SIM card app is entirely in Chinese, despite the international focus of the app. It is understandable that it is meant primarily for people temporarily traveling internationally from China, but it would have been nice to see it formated in a way to be usable for international customers as well.

Xiaomi has included some nice features that help with navigation on the Xiaomi Mi Note 2, like the ability to swap the back and recents buttons to fit the order that you prefer, as well as the ability to switch to having them mapped to swipes of the fingerprint sensor. The swiping method was surprisingly useful, helping prevent accidental button presses and making both back and recents easy to reach.

The fingerprint sensor is extremely quick to authenticate and is remarkably accurate. It is easily one of the best fingerprint sensors that I have used to date. While it would be nice to see further development of fingerprint sensors in multi-factor authentication for Android (as a fingerprint is a username, not a password), the speed and accuracy make it convenient to use, which is critical for a convenience feature, and something that not all fingerprint sensor implementations have caught up with yet.

Performance

The Xiaomi Mi Note 2 is not going to be breaking records for a Snapdragon 821 device, but it doesn’t perform poorly either. It performs just as it is expected to, and that is fine to see from a device running on a popular platform like the Qualcomm Snapdragon 821.

CPU & System

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 inside of the Xiaomi Mi Note 2 behaves exactly how a Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 is supposed to behave, and that is fantastic. It has great performance across the board, which can result in fantastic results when combined with a software stack that isn’t overly bloated. The Xiaomi Mi Note 2 also saw very low variance in our testing, which helps deliver a consistent user experience.

This shows up in both Geekbench 4 and PCMark 2.0, where the Xiaomi Mi Note 2 keeps up with the rest of the pack when it comes to flagship devices. The Xiaomi Mi Note 2 does particularly well in the PCMark 2.0 Photo editing test, where it pulls well ahead of the Pixel XL, OnePlus 3, and LG V20, but falls behind the latter two in the PCMark 2.0 writing test.

Sustained performance is quite good as well. In our Geekbench 4 throttling test, the performance drop from the first run to the lowest run is less than 7% in multi core, and less than 3% in single core performance. The Xiaomi Mi Note 2 got a bit hot over the processor in the top corner, however at the midframe and by the base of the phone, temperatures drop to a reasonable level.

GPU & Gaming

Just like with the CPU, GPU performance on the Xiaomi Mi Note 2 is quite good. The phone performs right where it should with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 821’s Adreno 530 GPU, and it provides a reasonable gaming experience as a result.

In both 3DMark and GFXBench the Xiaomi Mi Note 2 stays right with the rest of the pack. While performance is quite good, it falls well behind the Google Pixel XL in terms of variance, resulting in a less consistent experience.

In our sustained performance testing, the Xiaomi Mi Note 2 gets up to its maximum heat very quickly, and throttles accordingly. In our 3DMark test, one run is enough to get within reach of the maximum temperature, resulting in a score drop of 25%, but it levels out quickly after that, leaving you with acceptable sustained performance.

Testing sustained performance with GFXBench shows similar results, with one large drop after the first run, before it mostly levels off for the rest of the test.

Memory & Storage

Having 64GB of storage standard and 128GB in the high end model is a fantastic feeling. With 56 GB of free space by default on the 64GB model, there is substantial room to take pictures, install apps, and take media with you. While SD cards are very useful, there are still some things that you can only really do with internal storage, so it is always nice to see a device with space to spare.

Speaking of SD cards, it still is a bit disappointing that Xiaomi currently seems to be avoiding using SD cards in their flagship Mi series phones, while widely implementing them in their entry level Redmi series phones. There is something about being able to just throw a 200GB SD card into the device to carry all of your pictures/music/movies/videos/etc. with you that is a bit freeing. With the recent focuses on caching videos from Netflix and Youtube, local storage is becoming increasingly important yet again.

The Xiaomi Mi Note 2 gets fantastic storage performance thanks to its UFS 2.0 flash memory. With Androbench set to 1 thread and a 256 kB sequential buffer, we see good performance in both read and write speeds, which go a long way towards creating a smooth experience.

That performance shows up in app loading times, where the Xiaomi Mi Note 2 goes toe to toe with flagship phones such as the OnePlus 3T and the HTC 10.

Real World Performance

The Xiaomi Mi Note 2 unfortunately can get quite hot, even in regular use. It doesn’t reach scorching hot levels such as the ones we saw with the Ulefone Metal, but it still is more than you would expect from a Snapdragon 821 device. This is in part due to the substantial power draw brought about by the two highest power states on the faster clocked version of the Snapdragon 821, but it ultimately is up to the clock speed scaling and thermal throttling profiles that Xiaomi has decided to use.

The processor comes with a couple tricks up its sleeve that help with UI fluidity, including maximizing clock speeds while opening any app (not to be confused with maximizing it when using specific apps), which can help prevent issues like frame drops during those relatively processing intensive moments — in simple terms, this helps ensure the processor can’t bottleneck launch times.

Using the Xiaomi Mi Note 2 is incredibly smooth. There are minimal frame drops, and every interaction with the device from switching home screens to scrolling through the menus feels fluid. While this should be how devices are expected to operate at this point, some manufacturers still run into issues optimizing their software.

That being said, there still are some small quirks with UI fluidity on the Xiaomi Mi Note 2 which can be irritating. For example, when shutting off the phone, the button that appears on screen after holding the power button requires two taps, and has a small position shift between the first and second tap that can make it easy to accidentally miss if you’re moving too quickly.

A few responsiveness issues aside, the Xiaomi Mi Note 2 generally presents a pleasing experience to interact with, with smooth animations and minimal frame drops.

Camera

The Exmor RS IMX318 image sensor is a bit of a new favourite for companies looking to advertise high resolutions, with it being used in the Asus Zenfone 3 Deluxe/Ultra and the ZTE Nubia Z11 mini S, as well as in the Xiaomi Mi Note 2. That list will likely continue to grow in the future, as Sony views the IMX318 as the direct successor to the popular IMX230 that appeared in devices like the Moto X Style/Play/Force, the Honor 7, and the Sony Xperia XA Ultra.

With a 6.858 mm (Type 1/2.6) sensor and an active resolution of 5488×4112, the IMX318 has 1μm pixels, which are absolutely tiny. While these small pixels make the high resolution possible, they also reduce the amount of light captured per pixel, and can dramatically harm low light performance.

The IMX318 uses a hybrid autofocus solution that takes advantage of both PDAF and contrast-based autofocus, which Sony brags is capable of focusing in just 0.03 seconds on an overcast day. Despite that, the Xiaomi Mi Note 2 is often slow to focus, which comes as a bit of a shock. The device appears to lean quite heavily on its contrast based autofocus, even in low light.

The Xiaomi Mi Note 2 is ridiculously slow when taking HDR photos,especially in low light. Surprisingly, it is not processing the image that takes a long time for this device (despite it being a common problem on other phones). If anything, the Xiaomi Mi Note 2 processes HDR photos extremely quickly. It is the actual act of capturing the photo itself that is slow. From when you hit the capture button until when the screen unfreezes can take a couple seconds, and if you move the phone at all during that time frame, the entire picture will come out blurry.

In daylight the Xiaomi Mi Note 2 has bright punchy colours that have a tendency to oversaturate and underexpose, resulting in a loss of detail in the shadows. The high resolution camera performs quite well in daylight, bringing out fine details that are missed by both the HTC 10 and the OnePlus 3T, like the slight indent around the letters on the Green P sign.

While the Xiaomi Mi Note 2 performs admirably in daylight, that performance starts to fall off as the sun begins to set. In twilight the rear camera still can produce a nice (if oversaturated) image, however the images start to appear a bit flat in areas, as shadow detail drops off. It is most noticeable in the evergreen trees in the background of the image below, with the branches blending together into one dark blob. Outside of those pain points however, the image is still more than acceptable.

The camera automatically activates Handheld Twilight mode (HHT) in low light situations. HHT works by raising the ISO in order to allow for a shorter exposure (to avoid issues with handshake that often come into play in low light photography). That alone would result in substantially more image noise, so Xiaomi then stacks 6 subsequent images in an almost HDR-esque fashion in order to cancel out the noise introduced by the higher ISO setting. In theory this method should work quite well to improve the image quality for stationary objects, however moving objects will be captured with more image noise than they otherwise would have, as they will be based on a single frame instead of using the full stack of 6.

While the high resolution sensor certainly helps with detail capture in daylight, the tiny pixels have relatively poor light sensitivity, and result in a lot of noise, a lack of detail, and blurry images in nighttime scenes. This is especially noticeable in the cropped image of the tree at night, where the substantial noise on the Xiaomi Mi Note 2’s image almost makes it look like you are looking at the image through water.

The Quick Shot camera is another interesting feature, although it has some bugs. It allows you to take pictures without even needing to turn on the screen, just by holding the volume down button (this seems to be a popular feature in Chinese devices). Unfortunately it appears to default to an exposure time of just 1/62 of a second and an ISO of 400 for the first photo in every series. This results in exceptionally dark photos in anything other than broad daylight, which simply is a shame. It was likely done to decrease the amount of time until the first photo is captured, but most of the time that first photo ends up just being a waste of space and time as a result.

The photos after the first one will have their exposure time and ISO set depending on the scene, resulting in much higher quality images. Even then, it still trends towards shorter exposure lengths and higher ISO than a regularly taken picture would have. As well, in a considerable number of my testing photos, the camera was out of focus, as it seems to take the Quick Shot photos right away when the camera is ready to capture (approximately 1 every 0.466 seconds), rather than waiting for the camera to be focused. Those two issues combined so that in our testing, you would often have to wait for the third or fourth Quick Shot picture before something usable was captured (and it occasionally would not be able to focus at all in poor lighting conditions).

Overall, the Xiaomi Mi Note 2 takes fantastic pictures (especially in daylight), but they simply don’t hold up to the level of other flagship phones like the HTC 10 and Samsung Galaxy S7.

The front camera is also quite interesting. It uses the Sony Exmor RS IMX268 image sensor that was recently found in the wide angle camera on the LG G5, and which Sony views as a partial successor to their Exmor R IMX219 sensor (as found in the LG V20, the Sony Xperia XA, and the Nexus 9). This is a bit of a lower end image sensor compared to the rear camera (albeit still relatively high end for a front facing camera), with contrast based autofocus, an active resolution of 3872×2192 (although the Xiaomi captures at 3840×2160), and a sensor size of 4.868 mm (Type 1/3.61) with 1.12μm pixels. Xiaomi paired this potent combination with an ƒ/2.0 lens, which in theory should provide excellent low light performance.

While the colours on the front camera of the Xiaomi Mi Note 2 are pleasing and it does a relatively good job of detail preservation when the autofocus manages to get a lock, the dynamic range is a bit limited, the colours lack warmth, and the beautify modes (which are enabled by default) can push things a bit too far towards the uncanny valley.

As with the rear camera, this competitiveness falls apart in low-light scenarios, where the Xiaomi Mi Note 2’s small pixels result in substantial amounts of noise, and poor light gathering abilities.

It is important to note that having autofocus on a front facing camera is a relatively new feature (with only a couple phones like the HTC 10 and the Sony Xperia M5 having it) which creates an often surprisingly different shooting experience. While autofocus does bring improved image clarity when compared to a fixed focus camera, it comes with two major downsides which have historically driven OEMs away from implementing it. The first is that it costs more and takes up more internal space than an equivalent fixed focus camera, which can have substantial effects on the design process.