Here is my complete review for phone before you purchase:
The good:
Awesome display with display calibration. The sunlight readability works as advertised.
Well built with anti-slip matte back and very light weight.
3.’Flagship-killer’ rear camera with fast focus, awesome HDR mode and great details and colors. Decent front cam, gets the job done but don’t expect much.
- Good battery life. Lasts a typical work day with about 10-20% battery left. Obviously depends on usage pattern. For better battery life, keep the phone in balanced performance mode and 40-50% brightness set on Auto
The bad:
Performance is middling at best and doesn’t deserve a’flagship’ rating. App launches are slow, sometimes won’t happen at all. Signs of an unoptimised OS running on decent hardware. Expect a Day 0 software update of 800 mb+ which is a must-have else the phone overheats and performance stays sluggish. There is an update in the works which should fix most of the issues though.
Battery life could have been better. A problem possibly because of Lollipop 5.0.2. An update to 5.1 is needed to remove memory leak and battery life problems which should happen soon enough.
The balanced mode takes the life out of this phone. Multitasking is a pain, app launches slow down further and you can notice the stutter in animations.
Continuous camera usage can overheat the phone to the point that the camera app starts to lag a lot and the focus struggles. You will have to let the phone cool down to go back to smooth performance.
Severe CPU throttling when phone heats. Don’t know if its the OS or the Snapdragon 615 problem. We will know after the Software update for sure.
16 GB non-expandable storage with about 11 GB of user available memory. If you keep a lot of media or love to take pictures, you might wanna wait for the 32/64gb one
The OS uses a lot of RAM. 1.5Gb out of 2 is usually taken by MIUI. This is not a deal breaker but definitely a drain on performance and battery life. Lots of other bugs which need a fix.