Xiaomi Mi Mix 2S

Takes on iPhone X

By Anca Gagiuc on May 26, 2018 in Technology

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, they say, but I doubt Apple is pleased with the compliment Xiaomi has been paying since it launched its first smartphone back in 2011. Since then, the little rice (Xiaomi’s translation from Mandarin) grew into a solid 12.4 percent market share in China’s smartphone market. Chances are its growth will be boosted this year, with the help of the recently launched Xiaomi Mi Mix 2S.

This Android-powered Apple-looking device is the company’s latest flagship smartphone. Design-wise, the Mi Mix 2S didn’t change from the version launched about half a year ago, and it’s understandable as it holds several design awards. The change happened under the hood, as it more often should.

Back to the design features, the device looks exactly the same as its predecessor when regarded from the front—the 6-inch, full HD plus LCD display with 18:9 ratio and 1080p resolution and trim bezels on the side and top is unchanged, as is the 5-megapixel front camera, still placed in that awkward position at the bottom right corner of the device. The fingerprint sensor is still placed on the back. Mi Mix 2S is also made of ceramic with aluminum, but the company is interested in producing a full-ceramic edition, just as it did with the previous version; the color-scheme is minimal: black with gold trim and white with silver trim.

On the back, there’s another story: the new dual-camera system replaced the single module and has been moved to the top left corner, mirroring iPhone X’s design. The camera system consists of two 12-megapixel sensors—one behind the wide-angle lens and the other behind a telephoto lens. The system features dual-pixel autofocus, four-axis optical image stabilization and Sony’s IMKX363 sensor with an F/1.8 aperture and 1.4-micron pixels as the primary camera, which helps the device a great deal in low-light. Xiaomi tried something new this time and equipped the camera with AI—in theory, pointing the 2S at a landscape or a person’s face will trigger the phone to tune the resulting photo appropriately. The massive updates to the camera system is the source of the S2’s comparison with Apple’s iPhone X.

“We are comparing to iPhone X because people say it is the best phone. We just want to show we surpassed the best in many features,” Xiaomi co-founder Lei Jun said at the device’s reveal in Shanghai.

A big change lays in the beast that’s feeding the device, too—Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845 chipset makes every task you give it to work swimmingly. The pre-production Mi Mix 2S comes with up to 8GB or RAM and 256GB of storage, the lighter versions sporting 6GB of RAM paired with 64GB or 128GB of storage. The Mi Mix 2S runs on MIUI 9 layered on top of Android Oreo 8.1 and comes with a Do Not Disturb mode and Xiaomi’s digital assistant ‘Xiaoai’. The NFC functionality is also present, to help users with data sharing.

Another notable change is the device’s ability to support Qi wireless charging for its 3,400mAh Li-Ion battery. Mi Mix 2S has a dual nano-SIM card slot (either can be set as primary) and a USB-Type C port.