I am a person who never in my life would of ever thought that a chinese phone was gonna be such good quality, I was always 100% a samsung user, I never really cared about other phone brands at all. I guess I was just suckered into paying samsung nearly a grand every year when a new device released, I had to start looking for other budget devices and I was even going to settle on a crappy samsung J7.
I was just lookin around on youtube on what the best budget phones were and i seen a guy who said the redmi note 5 was the best budget phone ever in 2018, I was of course skeptical as fuck because I never even heard of such a weird company like xiaomi. I just said fuck it and went to amazon and bought it. Ill be honest I had really low expectations, I was on the belief that the more you pay the better quality you get. Thats true in some regards but holy shit this phone feels like a $500+ Premium device, How can it really just be $200?? Can someone explain this? It has the same top tier quality that id expect to see on a flagship samsung device and yet i feel like i stole it at $200. It feels weird. I feel like ive been lied too by paying so much for samsung phones all this time. the previous phone that I had was a galaxy s6 edge plus and that thing was aging bad, had really bad screen burn and the battery life was abysmal.
I really dont even know if this is real life anymore, I feel like im in some alternate universe where top end flagship phones are affordable… So are all xiaomi phones this good of quality and is there anything better then the note 5 right now that is affordable like this phone? because if so I am on board to be a full time xiaomi customer if this is the superb quality that i can expect. Like seriously I am so blown away that im nearly speechless.
I am debating between A2 Lite and Redmi Note 5. How is the camera on the A2 Lite? I don’t play games on my phone, so I think the SD625 should be ok, right? Too bad the A2 doesn’t have good battery, otherwise i will go for the A2. I am actually ok with no headphone jack.
Well hard to tell since its 10000mah + the power losses in the conversion. But if you think about it, your phones battery degrades because you use it every single day, so it goes through a lot of cycles and the average is what, 3000mah?
This bad boy is 10k mah, so you cant possibly use all of it and cycle it every single day. I mean you can but who does?
Id say it hasnt degraded a bit! But I maintain it and never leave it fully charged or discharged to sit
Wow, 4 years.
How good is that powerbank now?
I mean the % of battery capacity after 4 years.
Thanks didn’t know that (it’s still almost the same phone)
This exactly. There are people on this sub who post about how good the mi A2 battery is but… it’s all WiFi, and it isn’t good enough for a BRAND NEW phone. Watch the battery age. Brand new, it should be way above a day’s use if you intend to krrp it for long.
>a ban on all rap music
Really? not too bad an idea!
Yeh same the note 6 was holding me back but fuck it the note 5 is better
When the Mi A1 released it was the next Moto G. I wish Xiaomi would have made the same with the mi A2. Yeah it’s a good phone, but it’s a lot harder to recommend than the mi a1
What do you do with all the old phones? Sell them at a loss or are they just all piling up in a corner somewhere?
huh? Drudge is one of the oldest news aggregate site online. Bitchute isnt left or right, juste a torrent style of youtube. Put whatever you want on it.
do I really have to wait a whole month to install gcam?
mine just arrived a few hours ago, blown away by the build quality.
Kinda pissed off about the whole 720h wait to unlock period tho
Well, from my wast and long experience with notch, that is 7 days or so – I don’t even notice it. Before I bought Pocophone I was kinda worried that it might be annoying, but it’s not, not at all.
Regarding people, only about 14%. (Sorry)
As with the other replies here, I think it’s a pointless fashion statement, beyond that I get kinda peeved when anything is in front of a display that I’m looking at, so the notch looks like there’s always something covering the screen..
Glad you like it.
Edit: Just noticed, those two sites are so far to the [USA political right](https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/drudge-report/), they don’t make any sense to me as a European.
Literally dint notice a difference in browser. I use Chrome and mostly for drudge and some news or bitchute. Everything else I use apps like YouTube etc. I definitely like it better then iPhone SE, which I got the week it came out.
Dirac speaker and headphone optimisation is really nice technology, more manufacturers should implemented it.
Edit: added some prices.
Just interested, what does the Redmi Note 5 (~$200) score on [Speedometer 2.0](https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.0/)? (37-42?) Speedometer tests javascript heavy website loading. The SE/6S apparently scores about [83](https://twitter.com/codinghorror/status/912047023871860737) to [90](https://twitter.com/deboer_82/status/912054971344080896). I understand you buy it for the bigger screen, but just wondering if it isn’t a downgrade in the browsing department. But that might not be important for you.
The Poco F1 (~$345) is about as fast as the SE/6S in this regard, btw. The iPhone 8/X ($600) have about [twice](https://twitter.com/wyldphyre/status/912133625109344256) the performance as the SE/6S. If that is worth it, is up to you 😛
And the lithography machines by ASML in The Netherlands. Almost in Germany, I know..
I certainly don’t consider myself as a Xiaomi fanboy but looking at it, it does seem so.
The thing is that they make quality, stylish and reliable products with a huge discount as compared to what I can get here in Europe. I dont have much time to research and get into the nitty-gritty so I just revert to Xiaomi because I trust their reliability. For example my friend bought a random powerbank off of ebay which doesnt even have half of the stated capacity, while my Xiaomi one has been through hell and back with me. Fell numerous times, worked reliably for 4 years so far and it also charges the phone pretty damn fast.
Nice adv.
And for freaks like me there is the Max 3
Well except for the machines and the parts that the Chinese use to make stuff. Those come from Germany
omg bless your heart, i didn’t know this existed til now
The intel shortage might be the problem.
After always having plastic phones I got honor 9 lite at work. I don’t like glass, it’s so slippery, always dirty and so much heavier then my previous phones.
My only concern with Xiaomi is that their true flagship just don’t feel that “flagship”.
Say you wanted the best Xiaomi on the market. You could be willing to spend any amount, but truth is their best phone will probably be avaiable for 400€ and when compared seema a bit pointless.
As of now I would say that that +200€ to get a Mi8 compared to a Mi A2 doesn’t seem thatbl right.
Welcome brother. I switched a year ago to Mi A1 and I’m gonna stay Xiaomi as long as my finances stay low as they are.
My last phones were: Xperia X (400€), LG G2 (270€), Asus Zenfone 2 (280€) and preowned iPhone 5 from my brother. All of them after a fee months started slowing, broke after 1~ year and I realized I paid them too much.
Now rocking with this MiA1, after 1 year it has even improved with GCAM. All of this for 150€.
My friends (at least used to) refer to this phone as “Some fancy Huawei” because Xiaomi is still not that popular in Italy. Now seeing what it has to offer and at what price, I’m dragging them down the rabbit hole.
If you don’t leave it on for a couple of hours, i believe there’s no worries.
Somehow it feels different with google tracking and taking tons of data than xiaomi!
Probably not used to it.
And till the unlocking wait – use the debloat tool available on this thread’s wiki. Thank you so much to the guy who made it. I personally went nuts with the amount of crap that comes with Miui. Though it was expected for the great devices they make and sell it cheap. :p
lmao wait until you discover how to enable gcam api and use it with HDR+
Yeah i agree. It’s pointless to have a notch on the top yet larger bezel on the bottom. Cram all that shit on the bottom , I’m fine with turning my phone around when taking selfies.
I was thinking the same thing! An A2 as a backup phone to my main A2. With the price you can’t go wrong. And there’s LineageOS to play around with as well!
Ha! I went from LG G3 to Pocophone …. you can imagine my surprise!
Wow, you bunch are like some apple worshipers but that also have awareness of the money you spend! 😉
I just bought a Pocophone and already i’m having my eye on Mi laptop. Why don’t they sell it outside China?
Dude, notch is nothing horrible. If you look at it this way – you have 6mm of phone that has status bar and camera and sensors in it , with notch, or you have 12mm of space, six for bezel and six for status bar which stays half empty and not looked at most of the time, without notch. So you just have physically larger phone with some unused space.
On the other hand, I have no problem with Mi Mix 2 solution of putting camera on lower bezel.
They’re just trying to catch up to US and NSA …. but I think consequences are a bit different to a citizen.
The Verge article tells only half the truth as usual, there are multiple ways to disable , and not even see ads to begin with.
You should ask them for royalties.
It’s nice to know you have two or more backups.
Works great, especially on Miui 10
https://beebom.com/how-disable-ads-miui-apps/ here you can learn how to disable the ads.
Unfortunately for ya, Mi A1 isn’t even better than RN5 (40% less powerful), otherwise, the good news may be that the stock android could be better than what I could’ve tried with custom ROMs, anyways, welcome back to MIUI, I really advice you to try pocophone launcher, it’s beautiful and I personally like it more than any other launchers as it seems to work perfectly with MIUI (unlike some bugs I could found with Pixel Launcher/Lawnchair)
Yesterday I got an update (MIUI 10) and the gestures goes flawless.
I’ve tried Mi A1 for 4 months and definitely got back to MIUI. Maybe technically the A1 is better than Note 5 Plus, but I prefer to have the gestures (and a lot of features) and Nova Launcher in my phone.
I still believe that AMOLED panel is worth extra 50-100$. Night mode ftw
Had my portable charger, portable speaker, water tester, screwdriver set, yi 4k+, the original yi action cam and yi dash cam before I received my Poco yesterday.
I was already neck deep in the rabbit hole haha
tbh j series and on series phones from samsung are quite crap.
Tbh I prefer MIUI over any stock like ROM, for Dirac and for gestures (I didn’t see gestures as good than these one, except iPhone X) I’ve tried over 10 custom ROMs (even Pie, LOS…) And I found out that MIUI based ROM (xiaomi.eu) is way better than anything else as it has better battery life, features and also, surprisingly enough, more stability, unfortunately, the only drawback I could found is less performance (around 10%)…
99.9% things in this world is made in china 🙈
Right?! I’m loving the plastic on my poco. it feels great and I never have to worry that it will slide down the table or sofa like the slippery glass backs can.
This. Instead of blowing money on marketing, they cut down the prices and let consumers rave about it themselves.
Xiaomi has gained a lot of happy customers because of my recommendations.
3 months in atm but it still feels like new, battery is also a beast. I don’t really take pics so I don’t mind the meh camera.
Yeah, this is my only gripe with them at the moment, I’m upgrading from a nearly 3yo note 3 pro, but so many of the line-up have the horrible notch. So that limited my choice down a bit.. that said, I’ve got a mi max 3 to pick up today that in keen to try! (Wanted a bigger phone otherwise the note 5 would have been my pick)
My ASUS phones from ZenFone 2 to 4 all didn’t last long. And battery life wasn’t awesome. Hope the Max Pro M1 is better! Stock android too which is so much better than ZenUI
Still rocking it with my Redmi note 4 after year and a half.
Battery, man, can’t believe it
I’m using Redmi note 3 for the past three years and it’s working fine even after this long. I’m using Android pie (custom ROM). I don’t know why people are wasting so much money in flagship phones, when you can get almost the same experience in such cheap price.
>I really dont even know if this is real life anymore, I feel like im in some alternate universe where top end flagship phones are affordable… So are all xiaomi phones this good of quality and is there anything better then the note 5 right now that is affordable like this phone?
One thing to note for former Samsung users is that Xiaomi phones do not support exfat/ntfs on sdcards only fat32.
I love Xiaomi phones, but I chose the zenfone max pro m1 over the RN5 because it was just cheaper xD
Oh I feel you. I love Xiaomi so much now after I switch over from a long term use of Samsung and ASUS (yes I was dumb) Android phones. Wished I didn’t spend so much on overpriced brands before.
The build is solid for the price of a RN5, the performance and battery life is just amazing. Have been using the phone for about 3 months only but already sold on the brand.
Can’t wait for a Black Shark 2 or a Poco F2 to launch and I will definitely upgrade!
And flash lineageOS to prevent MIUI taking all your data
Although tbh googles already stolen far more from users
Now wait till you ditch that piece of shit called miui and try a custom ROM
I second that, the gestures on my RN5 works great
Simply flash either a debloated miui rom or a pure android-base custom Rom like aosp etc & still enjoy the hardware.
Can confirm. My dad’s S7 is lagging so hard nowadays. My Note 5 is silky smooth on MIUI 10.
I like my note 4. Just remember though, this piece of amazing technology was built in the same country that is about to enact some GDR level surveillance on it’s citizens if they haven’t already.
And it will all be done though their smartphones. Most likely Xiaomi smartphones.
Works great 👍🏼
Swear to God, I just had my Redmi 5 Plus like 3 months ago, and 1 week in to it, I swore to buy Xiaomi’s new releases every year.
After seeing the new note 6 which is just a note 5 with a notch I may just get the note 5.
Now free yourself and unlock your bootloader
Transferred from the Moto g series. Absolutely love my A1.
5 plus use sd 625, note 5 use sd 636.
Cant imagine what u gonna feel about pocophone f1 if u got that phone. 😀
same jost got the redmi 5 plus (really the same phone) and with a custom rom it’s the best budget smartphone
> I am a person who never in my life would of ever thought that a chinese phone was gonna be such good quality,
To be fair “all” smartphones are from China.
its a nice phone but i hate that you have to have a cellure network to unlock the boot loader but other than that i love it
I went from Xiaomi Mi 3 to Samsung S7 Edge. Paid three times more for S7 and oh boy, what a mistake that was. Battery is worse, home button was tearing apart after less than a year and the first time I used navigation and someone was calling me, phone and screen were so hot I couldnt even answer the call!! Fuck that, my next phone in 2019 is definitely going to be Xiaomi again, its really a no brainer considering the price and quality!
Welcome to Xiaomi club, you will not regret it!
Now go down the rabbit hole of other Xiaomi products…
I too had never heard of Xiaomi when I was asking fellow LG/Google Nexus 4 users for recommendations to replace my broken phone. I had no prejudice against Chinese companies per se, especially since I knew companies like Apple often only designed their phones in the US and then had Chinese companies manufacture them, but I didn’t know what to expect from this particular brand either. I ended up being really happy with the purchase of this phone that even has fingerprint and IR sensors.
Same here. Went from an LG V20, G6 and have used several Notes and S-series phones from Samsung. Two weeks ago, I purchased the Xiaomi A2 and was equally pleased. Top phone, 64GB RAM, Android One and a not too shabby camera. My only downside is not being able to get GCam working but soon…
I use to have a Samsung too, but now I’m really in love with my xiaomi A1 🙂
Ehi, I too have the note 5 that I use as a second phone, main phone is the s8. It’s getting hard to tell which is the main and which is the second though, cause the note 5 is impressive and with gcam it can take nice shots too.
I got my Redmi note 5 a month ago and within a week it hit me that I was a sooo stupid to pay so much money for iPhone. I switched from my IPhone SE with a small screen and 16gb, now I have 64gb internal and 128sd and huge screen haha. The only issue I have is instagram not cropping stories properly and I need to upload pictures/videos from stock camera app or else quality is shit.
All my friends at the office were skeptical now some are debating getting pocos or mi8 or Note 5 instead of apples new 1000$scheme.
For 200$ I cannot found anything bad in it.
For people’s need performance there is pocohone 300$ and who want premium estethic and camera but at expense of battery there is mi8.
Xiaomi is really good.
Me too!
Probably every other smartphone brand has the same average cost to manufacture a similar device, the big difference are the profit margins. I’m just a few months into Xiaomi as well and so far everything has been satisfying.
Im glad you’re enjoying your phone, i have the Note 5 aswell, its amazing.
Nice post. Glad you are happy with the brand!