I always thought that MIUI is the heaviest skin for Android, and because it has chinese background it was always drawing me back from trying any chinese brand, but mainly Xiaomi. I was a long time Samsung user, from S3 to S9 (and some other flagships from Oneplus/HTC inbetween), so i was mainly used on the Samsung ecosystem and newly introduced OneUI was great refresh, but…
Samsung wasn’t most competitive in battery life, my screen times varied from 2-4h of SOT, and it lasted me somehow almost the whole day, but as soon as i got home and started ti be a poweruser, i had to be right by the charger.
Long story short, i went to the store and without any recomendations blindly bought the Mi9 (EEA, 6/64), sold my S9 almost for the price of the brand new Mi9, and as soon as i set it up and disabled bloatware i started to think “Why the hell you didn’t switch before?!”
First and foremost, MIUI is the most fluid Android skin out there, and i can tell that because i rotated almost all widely known brands, and that were mostly flagships. The skin isn’t as heavy as i thought because it’s mainly minimal and straightforward, you can see a lot of Apple copypastas but i don’t care about that. I don’t get a single hiccup, lag, or something like that, it is fluid as butter, when compared to iPhone XS Max, very similar if not better in some situations.
Second, battery life. Holy s***! I average on about 8h of SOT and the record was 10h30m, and that varied from 2-3 days of usage without a single charge. This is a day and night difference and it was very hard to change the charging schedule, because i couldn’t imagine going to bed without my phone on the charger.
And third are the cameras. Well, Xiaomi, step up the game with the official camera app, because GCam makes wonders and puts the S9 to shame. I was shocked how good it is because Xiaomi wasn’t really the best competitor in camera segment before, but that changed drastically. The only thing that is bothering me a bit is the overall sharpness of the wide angle cam and quite bad sound quality, but i can go over that.
To sum up, i am happy to be on the MiTrain and to see that the community is very active and supportive.
P.S. don’t hate on my english, i’m not native 🙂
**TL:DR – By far the best decision budget/perfomance wise**
Cheers.
>tied to region select in system settings.
You are correct. Living in SEA, switched region to UK and I’m good.
>I already tried full screen display, but the issue that i can’t get used to is that the keyboard doesn’t have the same space from the bottom anymore
Took me quite a while to get used to it, but i still force myself to use it. Because in my mind I’ll think “so…. You buy a phone with no capacitive button and bezel, just to put virtual buttons?”
just use Tasker and you can automate every scenario you’d like
You can use the floating Keyboard option & increase it’s size & place it where you need
I got a budget phone after being on iPhone and i couldn’t be happier I cant wait to get a 5g phone next year from Xiaomi
Xiaomi and miui are so much better, Samsung is shit
sound like you might need to flash another ROM if you don’t return it. go for Xiaomi eu if you miui or like lineage os as you said but you need to wait for the bootloader to unlock
It’s almost something i’d like, but not the best implementation.
That push proboem which you mentioned is really annoying unfortunately.
I’ll try and see if i can compile the apk with changed padding. That could be the only way i think because i like gboard.
In the settings you can enable “go back to previous app”. I think it’s pretty fast, miui has one of the best gestures. I tried aosp roms but I just couldn’t used to different gestures or navigation bar
I flashed lineageOS on my phone once. Ew, didn’t like it. But I’m too lazy to immediately change it. 3 months later i had enough and switch to xiaomi.eu. Using MIUI again is so satisfying
Left Reddit due to the recent changes and moved to Lemmy and the Fediverse…So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish!
I saw ads in folders but after promoting apps turning off i don’t see much. Just at security app.
I can’t imagine how long you typed this then 😅. I had same issue. I had xiaomi redmi note 4x before and i was using some swift kboard which was really smooth but this gboard i find it hard to type fast.
Can you give me some reasons why you changed launcher? I don’t find anything bad in current miui one.
Interested, I used to get reasonable SOT on my S6 before the switch. Note3 did gave me more SOT than S6, but that was because of a much larger and battery efficient CPU.
For me, yes. My definition of better are just the smoother animations and overall feel, ability to use the blurred app drawer background and dock, everything else is pretty much the same. And also Google now search works on the homescreen without any modules.
I don’t know actually, it’s like that from the very beggining. I disabled most of the Mi bloat and all logging apps. I average on about an hour per 10%.
[Current](https://i.imgur.com/HizRIyD.png)
Edit: i also disabled chinese network band so i use only true WCDMA, and i turn on GPS only when i need it, and i am almost always on WiFi.
I’ve been using miui for 3years now. Never faced any of these issues you mentioned. I don’t what’s wrong with your perticular device. Maybe you should flash miui.eu rom instead. That should fix most of the bugs. Give it a try.
holy my poor dude I just check and xiaomi eu and lineage don’t support this device. RETURN IT FAST lol, you can try to flash completely the rom : go to the miui website, download the rom for your device but the fastboot one ! with the official tool xiaomiflash.com. it will reset your device and reinstall the firmware completely.
del5eted.
I’m a Nova launcher prime user for years now. Why you switched to lawnchair? Is it better?
yeah the gesture of miui is the things that keep me with it
I think my best SOT is something over 5 hours. I don’t play games. Mostly use it for reddit, messenger some YouTube videos and that’s pretty much it. How do you get that SOT I truly don’t understand. Don’t get me wrong I’m satisfied with my battery life but holy shit that’s a huge difference.
Left Reddit due to the recent changes and moved to Lemmy and the Fediverse…So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish!
which is the usage of your device? 8h or even 10h seems impossible to mean
there is a way to float gboard in the setting somewhere so you can move it up a few mm to get that gap back
THE PICTURES YOU’LL TAKE WITH THAT PHONE WILL BLOW YOUR MIND😍
Well, you get used to type, i immediately turn off all assistants, predictions bars, gestures, almost everything. But i can type almost blindly 🙂
The reason i am using Lawnchair is purely because i can customize it the way i want. I use google search pill in the dock paired with Sesame shortcuts, i have many gestures and fairly simple arrangement of icons.
I already did all of that on my first day. No adaptive battery, pin, and no battery saver for all apps. How’d your experience with ram?
I don’t know if you know but miui 11 is comming soon. I don’t know when on mi9 but on mi 9t started rolling out. It should be better than miui 10.
There are a few features that you should try:
– Full screen display.(im pretty sure you already did)
– Settings>Notification & status bar – show connection speed. (Allows you to see your connection speed of the internet – up left corner next to clock)
– Go in any folder and click on his name. Then you will see promoted apps may be turned on so turn it off and you wont see ads in the folder.
– Make sure you create an mi account. Its useful.
– Settings > Home screen & recents – show memory status on. (Allows you to see your ram memory status it may be already turned on)
-Settings > Home screen & recents – home screen layout. (Change it if you want to 5×6 and you will be able to see more apps in one screen)
– if you long press the display you will find wallpaper, widgets and setting where you can find pretty cool stuff like trasition effect.
Also if you go to settings>about phone and tap 10 times miui version you will be able to developer options which you may find very useful stuff there.
Let me know if you found something useful i hope you did. Enjoy your new phone!
I had a Galaxy S9 until 2 weeks ago. It was providing no more that 3’30hs of SOT every day. If I didn’t plug it by 3pm at work I would not reach home with a working phone. Added to that battery issues (no app was taking all the juice as I checked it several times), there was the fingerprint scanner has peeled off, so 6-7 out of 10 times I tried to unlock my phone was a miss.
When I found out that Mi9TPro was available at my country I just went and get one.
Now I have a properly working fingerprint scanner, have more storage (128 vs 64GB), have better CPU now (Snapdragon 855) and best of all is that this phone has a bigger battery (4000mA) which lasts more than 1 day with my usage pattern, providing easily 7 hours of SOT.
I’m really happy with Mi9TPro !
Correct, i can’t imagine what exactly is budget. Ok, they made some sacrifice on spekaers, and cameras, especiall the ultrawide, but hey, build quality is exactly as some higher end phones, design – well i don’t comment on that because all phones are basicall almost the same when compared to the early ’00 era (the same goes with car interior design), everything else is basically like the flagships, SD855, plenty of ram, 3 cam setup, gorilla glass 6, nfc, wireless charge, ir blaster, qc 3.0, samsung display with 103% dci-p3… What else do you need? Headphone jack maybe ok, but i don’t use them so i don’t care 🙂 Oh and, it’s dual sim, so private/work combo in a single pocket.
Yeah miui is buggy but that has never happened to me
I tried to get used to them, but as i mostly type on my phone, i have to really struggle because i have quite long fingers 😐
That keyboard gap is the only thing that is drawing me back.
IPhone X for example has that bottom line and it creates almost the same gap for the keyboard, Samsung made a gap on their keyboard, there coupd be methods, but i don’t see one on MIUI :/
Your S9 might be bugged if you only getting 2-4hr SOT with the same usage as your Mi9. Battery life should be comparable.
Switched my S6 to Note3 back then when Samsung UI is crappy before they have the current UI. Never looked back, performance was alost neligible between the flagship S6 and midrange Note3, and the new Note3 cost me 1/2 of what i managed to sell my 2nd hand S6 at.
I just straight up embrace it lol. My first few days using it i was so frustrated by the amount of typos i get. I had to shuffle my hands lower to what IMO (was) uncomfortably low position to get decent amount of typos.
Right now I’m good though. Still not as good as using a 16:9 phone, but better
I was thinking about getting Samsung Galaxy Note 10 next month. Should I wait for Mi Mix 4 (if it materialises) or Mi 10 in Q1 2020 instead ?
del5eted.
>is then 😅. I had same issue. I had xiaomi redmi note 4x before and i was using some swift kboard which was really smooth but this gboard i find it hard to type fast.
>
>Can you give me some reasons why you changed launcher
Mi Acc let you sync your home page, photos, settings etc when you port to new devices. Its also the account for their ecosystem if you happen to own any other Xiaomi product
Thank you for your recomendations!
I already tried full screen display, but the issue that i can’t get used to is that the keyboard doesn’t have the same space from the bottom anymore. On OneUI there is a gap that is about the height of the navbar, and i was normally typing without a single missed word, but now when i use GBoard, and the way that the safe zone of the navbar is not there anymore, i miss almoat every letter. Maybe there is a tweak for that which i’m not informed on.
Samsung also had something called OneHandOperation + which was an official Samsung extension for Goodlock, and i got kind of used to all the side swipe variations of gestures, kind of like Fluid navigation app, maybe they are something better in the upcoming MIUI 11 which i am excited for.
About connection speed, it’s awesome, i already have that turned on.
Also i saw that everyone is saying the there are ads somewhere in the system. I don’t have them, anywhere. First i was using the EEA version of MIUI which has agressive GDPR and EU policies about ads, and i knew that they cannot appear, but i switched to Global version recently and i don’t see them also, so, maybe i’m lucky or they are tied to region select in system settings.
I absolutely love Lawnchair v2, so that’s my main launcher and it replaced a long time usage of Nova 🙂
And about the Mi account, i have mixed opinions. Although it’s pretty useful, i get a very annoying bug with SIM activation. Whenever i log in with my account, the SIM activation pops up and i tried to deactivate it in many ways, block the notificarltions, disabled it in settings, nothing helps so i stopped using Mi account.
All in all, i disabled most of the Xiaomi related apps through adb, but nevertheless it’s an amazing experience. 🙂
I searched everywhere but couldn’t find anything, if you could provide a screenshot it’d be awesome!
Regarding mi account, I’m yet to make one. Can you explain me how it is useful while I’m using Google account for everything?
I am heavy on Reddit browsing and YouTube, i have Sync Pro set-up with Amoled black theme, and YouTube vanced also with amoled black, and almost every app i use is with dark mode enabled. I don’t play any games, and i chat with my phone screen turned on when i am on pc and play games for example, so that in combination bumps up the screen on time.
The problem was Exynos, on Snapdragon my buddies had about 5-6h average, but Exynos was destroying that battery and stand-by drops were awful. There were no battery sucking apps that could bug out, it was just badly optimized, i tried almost everything and that is the main reason for my switch, performance wise it was amazing, but not as smooth as Mi9.
I used to dislike MIUI because it’s overall design aesthetics looked pretty childish IMO. (But at the time, I dislike the Chinese skins in general because how they gotten the UI to look so far off from vanilla Android, it might as well be called it’s own OS. But then Samsung decided to dish out OneUI, which is pretty decent compared to their TouchWiz days, I actually like OneUI, but with how different the new OneUI is, it’ll contradict this opinion and render it moot).
Although MIUI 10 is starting to grow on me. The design elements here are actually pretty decent. And I noticed it did draw some styling cues from stock Android 9. Only thing I don’t like is it’s rather aggressive background app management that took me quite a while to figure out. But overall I like MIUI more over Oppo’s ColorOS and Vivo’s FuntouchOS, which never exactly grew on me.
Yeah i know haha, but i think that their tracking and log sending to chinese servers isn’t as big as Xiaomi ones, but that’s my opinion based on bold headlines about that.
I am currently in China and I am looking forward to buy the mi 9 Pro 5G. **But I am worried i cant use that phone in europe**, can someone give me a good answer with explanation between mi global rom and mi china rom? Also I want to buy a OnePlus 7T Pro as a present for a friend as the prices in Mainland china are so much cheaper.
Thanks for sharing, I’ve got a new Mi9TPro and I’m really happy as well.
Is it just me or is ram management terrible on MIUI? It keeps closing apps quickly while I’ve never seen ram usage go above half
no, miui has only simple gesture, near the same as iPhone for going home and recent app, but it have a really cool things for going back and Switching to the last application really fast. it’s like a swipe from the left or right of the screen to the middle, and if you go further it go to the last used app.
if you like rooting there surely a app to draw action on your screen that look dope !
I guess he meant his media sound was on but his phone was on silent.
I got the note 7 which was under £200 compared to my last £700 iPhone 7. I think I might get the mi 10 next year
Yes.