Xiaomi Mi 8 Pro Review

Xiaomi is a massive name in its native China, but it isn’t yet a global household name like Huawei. The Xiaomi Mi 8 Pro is a good demonstration of why that’s the case.

This has got nothing to do with this new flagship smartphone’s quality. It’s actually really rather good. No, it’s down to the fact that this is the first Xiaomi phone to receive an official push in the UK.

The company has appeared reluctant to do more than dip its toe into international waters for several years now. But it could make a considerable splash with the Xiaomi Mi 8 Pro. This is a well-spec'd, boldly designed smartphone at an appealing price.

Transparent ambition

• Transparent back shows off fake components
• In-screen fingerprint scanner is a bit slow

With its notched display and vertically-stacked dual-camera set-up, the Xiaomi Mi 8 Pro is clearly another phone in thrall to the iPhone X. But it only takes a cursory glance at the rear of the phone to see that it’s offering something a little bit different on the design front.

You can seemingly see right through the Gorilla Glass rear cover to the Mi 8 Pro’s various chips. And very photogenic they are too, with several of the components given a little inspirational line of text - “be the coolest company in the hearts of our users”, for example, or “always believe something wonderful is about to happen”.

If it all looks suspiciously neat and photogenic, that’s because these components are fakes. The real engine room is stashed away deep within the bowels of the phone. Which, when you think about it, is quite reassuring.

We have mixed feelings about this approach. On the one hand, Xiaomi is trying something different with the design of the Mi 8 Pro, and in a very safe and settled smartphone market that bravery is to be commended. Our inner 12-year-old also found a certain geeky charm to the design.

But it’s also just a little bit tacky. There’s a brazen allure to a phone flaunting its hidden parts for everyone to see, but finding out that those parts have been artificially embellished cheapens the effect somewhat.

Xiaomi hasn’t limited its showing off to the rear of the Mi 8 Pro, either. It’s easy to miss with that distracting see-through back, but there’s no fingerprint scanner on the rear of the phone. Nor is there one on the front.

Design and display

• Flashy transparent effect, but fairly generic design otherwise
• Balanced, unflashy 6.21-inch AMOLED display

While the Xiaomi Mi 8 Pro sets out to catch the eye by flashing its bits at us, there’s nothing outrageous about its general shape or dimensions.

This is a solid mash-up of iPhone X and generic Android elements, with a vertical dual-camera lozenge and notched edge-to-edge display culled from the former and a curved back and gently rounded aluminium edges that suggest something like the Samsung Galaxy S9 or OnePlus 6T.

Squint a little, and the Mi 8 Pro’s footprint could be any number of phones from the past few years.

It’s a pleasant phone in the hand, with a 177g weight proving hefty but not cumbersome. It’s quite skinny at 7.6mm, too, and combined with minimal bezels it shouldn’t stretch a standard trouser pocket too much.

Xiaomi has joined Huawei and Google in adding a welcome splash of colour to the side buttons, with a red power key helping it to stand out from the darker hues elsewhere. 

It’s a shame the button doesn’t have the texture of something like the Huawei Mate 20's power button, though, with a smooth finish that makes it feel almost identical to the adjacent volume rocker.

We’ve discussed the inclusion of an in-display fingerprint scanner, but we should probably run through a few noteworthy omissions. There’s no 3.5mm headphone port here, because it’s 2018. Time to go wireless if you haven’t already.

While we wouldn’t label that omission as a glaring oversight - more of a calculated decision - the lack of meaningful water resistance is tougher to let slide. We’re not seeing any form of official IP rating for the phone, which means you’ll expose it to water at your peril.

We don’t exactly expect such a feature within this price category, but it’s something we feel should be present. Such an IP rating is noticeably absent from the OnePlus 6T, but the Huawei Mate 20 sports an IP53 rating.

It took us a little while to warm to the Xiaomi Mi 8 Pro’s 6.21-inch display, but we got there in the end. Having come directly from the aforementioned Huawei Mate 20, it felt a little dim and flat to begin with.

But the display has its own charms. Unlike Huawei’s similarly priced effort, the screen tech here is AMOLED. So while it doesn’t get super-bright like its rival (few screens do), it does have a nice range of colours and deep blacks, with full HDR10 support.

Those colours aren’t excessively punchy or vibrant, either, as AMOLED screens can often be. Everything looks natural and balanced. It’s plenty sharp enough, too, with a 1080 x 2248 or Full HD+ resolution.

That’s not the QHD resolution of some top-end smartphone displays, but we’ve found that the law of diminishing returns seems to apply when moving up to that resolution standard.

What’s way more important is that there’s none of the pixel fuzziness that can accompany lesser AMOLED displays. This is a clean, balanced display that soothes rather than assaults the eyes. It’s a far more subtle take on AMOLED than you might be accustomed to, but that’s largely for the better.

Battery life

• 3,000mAh battery provides ordinary stamina
• Comfortably lasts a day of moderate use
• No wireless charging

We were ever so slightly apprehensive about the Xiaomi Mi 8 Pro’s 3,000mAh battery ahead of our review. While it’s not exactly tiny, nor can it be considered particularly generous.

That’s evident when you look at the batteries of its most obvious rivals. The OnePlus 6T packs a 3,700mAh unit, while the Huawei Mate 20 has a chunky 4,000mAh number.

We wouldn’t judge the Mi 8 Pro battery on its size alone, but it did mean we were watching extra close for any power-sapping anomalies. In general operation, we didn’t really have anything to worry about. The phone lasted a full day of moderate usage with a little to spare.

However, there was never any threat of the Xiaomi Mi 8 Pro stretching to two full days of usage, as we’ve managed to achieve on a few occasions with the Huawei Mate 20.

Advanced tasks confirm the impression that the Mi 8 Pro is distinctly ordinary in the stamina department. Our standard video test, which involves playing a 90-minute looping video with the screen brightness cranked right up yielded a fairly ordinary result.

An average power loss of 14% following this task is far from catastrophic, but it falls comfortably short of the OnePlus 6T on 10%.

We also experienced one particular anomaly whereby the phone lost 25% of its charge when left on airplane mode overnight. This only happened once during our week-long test period, so it’s clearly not a deeply ingrained fault, but we felt we should report it nonetheless.

There’s a Battery Saver mode here, as we’ve come to expect from modern Android phones. This monitors background processes and turns off sync functions. We appreciated the intuitive facility for scheduling a time for this mode to run, so you can identify quiet times in your daily schedule and use them to buy yourself a little extra battery life.

You’ll have to do without wireless charging, though, despite that glass back.

Camera

• Dual 12MP cameras deliver strong, but not top quality
• 20MP front camera

The Xiaomi Mi 8 Pro adopts the kind of dual-camera setup that’s fast become par for the course in a modern flagship-level phone.

The Google Pixel 3 goes with just the one, while the Huawei Mate 20 Proincludes three - both to great effect, it should be said. But these are outliers. Two is the magic number when it comes to modern smartphone cameras.

We had few complaints with the dual-camera setup of the Xiaomi Mi 8 Pro. The shots we obtained were generally crisp and consistent, and we were able to grab them quickly.

The phone’s two 12MP cameras grant a certain amount of consistency in terms of pixel count, though the 2x telephoto camera’s f/2.4 aperture and smaller 1.0µm pixels lead to grainier shots in low light. The main camera gives you f/1.8 and 1.4µm pixels by contrast.

Indoors and low-light shots tend to be relatively bright and reasonably detailed, but they’re also quite prone to movement blur. Evidently Xiaomi is leaning on the phone’s four-axis optical image stabilisation (OIS) here and increasing the exposure times.

As long as you work within its limitations, though, and try and keep your subjects still, you’ll find yourself able to get pleasing or at least usable results in fairly challenging lighting conditions.

Xiaomi’s camera UI is intuitive and pleasant to use, with a helpful level of automation that will enable casual users to get consistent results in a range of scenarios.

HDR is automatically and effectively applied by default, and you also get an automatic AI mode for advanced and reliable scene selection. It’s annoying that Xiaomi has decided to apply an unnecessarily boastful AI camera stamp to images by default, though.

This can be turned off in the settings menu, but as you’ll see from the following test shots, that doesn’t help with the shots you’ve already taken.

We were quite happy with the quality of the Xiaomi Mi 8 Pro’s 20MP front-facing camera. As always you’ll want to feed it with plenty of light, but the quality and tone of the shots is on point.

You’ll need to contend with the selfie cam’s ghoulish ‘beauty’ function, which is turned on by default, but this can be lessened or turned off without much issue.

Interface and reliability

• Android 8.1 with MIUI 10.0
• Cluttered but very customisable

We haven’t encountered Xiaomi’s products too often here in the UK. There’s a chance that the ones you have seen, such as the Xiaomi Mi A2, were running stock Android.

That’s not the typical Xiaomi way, though. The company uses its own custom MIUI interface, and that’s precisely what the Xiaomi Mi 8 Pro comes bundled with.

MIUI 10.0 is layered upon the now-outdated Android 8.1. As ever with such heavily tinkered-with UIs, it’s a bit of a mixed bag.

To this particular writer’s eyes, MIUI is too busy and too fussy. It delves into every nook and cranny of the clean and crisp Android OS and makes it, well, a good deal less clean and crisp.

From the navigation keys that are on the wrong way round, to the app switching menu that presents open apps in a jumbled scrolling list format and the shortcut screen that elbows out Google feed’s position to the left of the home screens, it will have digital neat freaks and Google traditionalists alike tutting.

After a few days, though, your brain will start to rewire itself to Xiaomi’s way of thinking. Some may even prefer Xiaomi’s brash menus and widgets and its flat, simplistic icons.

While we still prefer stock (and stockish) Android, we closed the week with more or less full mastery of the MIUI experience. It can’t be denied that it’s a smooth operator, either, with none of the stuttering animations that you’ll find with certain other custom UIs.

MIUI is eminently customisable, too. You can set up a number of gesture shortcuts for the likes of the camera, the torch function, split screen operation and much more. There’s also an optional Quick Ball overlay that can provide further home screen shortcuts with a swipe in from the side.

You can also opt to activate a gestural navigation system that does away with those wonky virtual navigation keys altogether.

Xiaomi’s full screen gestures system operates similarly to that of Apple’s iPhone XS. So, you swipe up from the bottom to go home, swipe and hold to bring up the app switcher, and drag in from the left to back up within apps (or from the right to go forward).

Movies, music and gaming

• No stereo speakers is a shame
• 128GB of storage is generous

The Xiaomi Mi 8 Pro handles media comfortably, though we wouldn’t say that it’s an outright powerhouse given the level of the competition.

That 6.21-inch AMOLED display shows Full HD video content off well, with accurate colours and nice deep blacks. However, the slight lack of brightness can impact the quality of the viewing experience while out and about or in strong artificial lighting.

It’s a shame about the lack of a headphone jack too, because you won’t want to rely on the Mi 8 Pro’s single speaker for too much audio. It’s not the worst in terms of sound quality, but it’s not particularly loud, and the Huawei Mate 20packs proper stereo speakers

The phone is way more competitive on the storage front, with 128GB as standard. That should be plenty for all but the most dedicated media streaming refusenik. Such ones will be well catered for with Xiaomi’s own Music and Video apps, though most will likely download their chosen service of choice.

Google Play Music and Play Movies are included as standard, too.

The gaming experience on the Xiaomi Mi 8 Pro is largely faultless, with the phone’s large, balanced display serving a whole range of games well. It helps that the phone runs on Qualcomm’s high-end Snapdragon 845 chipset, and that it’s backed by a generous 8GB of RAM.

Again, it’s a shame about the slightly weedy non-stereo sound. The single speaker’s positioning on the bottom edge of the phone also leads to frequent blockages while playing landscape games like Guns of Boom and Asphalt 9.

Specs and benchmark performance

• Snapdragon 845 and 8GB of RAM
• Fluid performance

There are absolutely no worries on the performance front, with a Snapdragon 845 powering the Xiaomi Mi 8 Pro to strong performance across the board. A capacious 8GB of RAM adds a sense of headroom to every task you tackle.

We barely encountered a hint of a suggestion that the Mi 8 Pro was struggling throughout our time with the phone. Home screen navigation is slick, while jumping into the camera from the lock screen is near enough instantaneous.

Unlocking the phone using the fingerprint sensor can take a few beats longer than we’d like, but as has been discussed, that’s more an issue with the new in-display sensor technology than the Mi 8 Pro’s performance.

Gaming performance was similarly flawless, whether blasting through the colourful streets of Asphalt 9 or running and gunning in PUBG - both on High graphics settings, it should be added. We even cranked the frame rate up to Ultra and flicked HDR mode on in PUBG, without a noticeable performance hit.

This is reflected in an average Geekbench 4 score of 2,411 for single core and 8,998 for multi-core. That’s about right for a phone with this level of hardware. The similarly spec'd OnePlus 6 and OnePlus 6T scored 9,100 and 8,461 respectively on the multi-core front.

We should note that it falls well short of the current Android performance champ, however. The Huawei Mate 20 scored a whopping 9,900 in our tests. If you’re an absolute speed or gaming hound, that might be a better place to spend your money right now.

Who's this for?

The Xiaomi Mi 8 Pro is for those who still maintain that £500 is more than enough to pay for a flagship phone - and demand the performance, design and comprehensive feature set to match.

It’s also ideally suited to those who have grown bored of the sober, me-too designs of the leading pack. The Mi 8 Pro wears its tech credentials on its sleeve, making an unorthodox fashion statement with its components.

Should you buy it?

The Xiaomi Mi 8 Pro is a safe pick if you have £500 to spend on a brand new smartphone.

With strong performance, an accurate display, and strong camera capabilities, it’s largely feature-complete. Barring a few omissions - such as a headphone jack, waterproofing, and wireless charging - this has everything you’d need of a modern flagship phone.

The Xiaomi Mi 8 Pro’s main talking point, however, is its outlandish semi-transparent design. Whether you love or hate Xiaomi’s brave approach could well define whether this is the phone for you, or whether you’d be better off with one of its esteemed rivals.