The Mi 6 manages to stand out with its design. While it doesn’t stray too far from past Xiaomi phones, we still applaud the company for trying to be unique.
The Mi 6 variant in this review is also the ceramic edition, which makes it quite a bit heavier than the standard glass model.
Also, the ceramic model comes with the highest configuration of specifications
The ceramic shines beautifully and is complemented by small gold accents – 18K gold accents, to be exact.
Yes, Xiaomi seems to spare no expense when it comes to the materials of this phone, but it almost makes you wonder how the retail price could be so low.
Nevertheless, it feels incredibly premium and hefty, but can slip around in the hand a little too much.
However, there is a case included that helps a bit with the handling.
Despite being a flagship device, the Mi 6 does fall behind the pack a bit with its 1080p display. This LCD isn’t bad in any regard, though Quad HD is very much a standard this year in high-end devices. However, Xiaomi has done a great job at making the LCD panel extremely bright in daylight, and also impressively dark when the slider is cranked to zero. This level of darkness is something we’d normally expect from AMOLED displays,
but somehow Xiaomi was able to make it work with the Mi 6’s LCD panel.
Xiaomi is shipping the Mi 6 with its own custom version of Android, MIUI 8, atop Android 7.1.1 Nougat. And if you’re at all familiar with Xiaomi devices, you probably already know that MIUI doesn’t come with an app drawer, which means you’ll need to rely on folders to help organize your home screens.
This is par for the course for many other Chinese ROMs,
but users in the West might have a hard time getting used to it.
If you have been following the trend of this review,
you may notice that the Xiaomi Mi 6 seems to take a lot of the best features from previous devices and puts them into one complete package.
That’s definitely true for the camera,
which is a dual lens system that provides a 2x optical zoom aside the original wider angle.
Zoom can be quite important to shutterbugs and Xiaomi has done well to provide one for picture taking in particular. Zoom capabilities are unfortunately not available for video recording,
which is a rather significant downside.
The Mi 6 does a decent job of this as it softens out the edges,
but it does sometimes cut the line a bit incorrectly.
This is only really noticeable when zooming in; taken on their own,
the portrait photos turned out to be the most enjoyable part of the camera experience.
Especially in good lighting, photos of friends and colleagues yielded new-profile-picture-level shots.
Lower light situations make these and pretty much any other photo suffer especially in the finer details of the pictures,
making this a less than ideal indoor or nighttime camera.