Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite

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Reviews for the Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite

Foreign Reviews

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Model: The Mi 8 Lite is a 6.26-inch mid-range phone. At a reasonable price it packs capable hardware including a Snapdragon 660 and an Adreno 512 GPU.

Design and Connectivity

The 6.26-inch phone measures at 156.4 x 75.8 x 7.5 mm and weighs 169 grams. It has a glass front, a 2.5D-curved back glass and a chrome-colored aluminum side frame. It comes in three color options - Midnight Black, Sunset Gold, and Aurora Blue. The front glass is not curved and www.gsmarena.com finds you might feel its protruding edge along the sides though it doesn't cause any discomfort. They report a screen-to-body ratio of 82.5 %, lack of IPxx certification against water and dust (not to be expected at the phone’s price point) and that the glass back is not only prone to scratches and cracks, but also easy to smudge. www.techadvisor.co.uk finds that the Mi 8 Lite is a 6.26-inch-screen phone in the body of a 5.5-inch model, fitting comfortably in the hand.

The Mi 8 Lite runs Android 8.1 Oreo with Xiaomi's MIUI 9.6. www.techadvisor.co.uk thinks that MIUI is quite a departure from standard Android, removing the app tray, reorganizing and redesigning the drop-down notification bar, and reordering the Settings menu.

The Lite has horizontally-stacked camera sensors and a smaller notch than the Mi 8 SE. The narrow notch on the front side houses the earpiece, the front-facing camera, the usual sensors, and a subtle LED notification light.

The left side houses the SIM/microSD card tray, while volume rocker and power button are on the right side. A SIM/microSD ejection tool (included) is needed to open the card tray. The USB-C connector is on the top side. Unfortunately, the Mi 8 does not have an audio jack, but Xiaomi has included a USB-C to 3.5mm adapter. www.gsmarena.com says the buttons are delightfully clicky and feel quite firm without any noticeable wobble. The phone comes with a rear-mounted fingerprint reader, which is ideally positioned and works flawlessly according to www.gsmarena.com. www.trustedreviews.com says the fingerprint reader is fast.

For connectivity the phone supports GSM, 3G and LTE, Bluetooth 5.0 and Wi-Fi a, b, g, n and ac, but lacks support for NFC, which is necessary for making mobile payments. In our review, we compared the Mi 8 Lite to the Garmin Edge 500 navigator and found that the phone can only be used as an occasional navigator.

Display

The 6.26-inch IPS display features a 19:9 aspect ratio, a resolution of 1,080 x 2,280 pixels, and a pixel density of 403 ppi. The display is protected by Gorilla Glass 5. www.gsmarena.com complains about poor uniformity of the backlight around the notch and the top bezel. They report a maximum brightness of 468 cd/m², a black value of 0.322 cd/m² and a contrast ratio of 1,453. Furthermore, this online-magazine recommends switching over to the "Standard" mode (average DeltaE of 0.9, maximum DeltaE of 2) in the display calibration menu as it renders colors way more accurately than "Automatic" mode (average DeltaE of 5, maximum DeltaE of 10.1). However, they observed that the maximum brightness will go down to 415 cd/m2 in "Standard" mode and find that the sunlight legibility is satisfactory in default mode. www.trustedreviews.com says, “Colours are vibrant, contrast only perceptibly worse than the best LCDs at an angle in a dim room, and maximum brightness is high enough to make the display readable on a sunny day.”. In www.techadvisor.co.uk’s opinion, the display produces realistic colors, good contrast and strong viewing angles.

Hardware and Performance

The Mi 8 Lite uses a slightly older Snapdragon 660 chipset, which came out in 2017. The 14 nm processor features an octa-core CPU with four 2.2 GHz Kryo 260 cores and four 1.8 GHz Kryo 260 cores. www.gsmarena.com did not notice any thermal throttling or overheating even after a few consecutive benchmark tests and say that the performance was as expected from a Snapdragon 660-powered smartphone in view of their benchmark results (GeekBench 4.1 (multi-core): 5894; GeekBench 4.1 (single-core): 1628, AnTuTu 7: 143257; Basemark OS 2.0: 2338; GFX 3.0 Manhattan (1080p offscreen): 22; GFX 3.0 Manhattan (onscreen): 20; GFX 3.1 Car scene (1080p offscreen): 9, GFX 3.1 Car scene (onscreen): 8, Basemark X: 21269). www.trustedreviews.com thinks, “This is one of the best phones available in its class for gaming.”. www.vienna.at reports that the processor gets warm quickly under high load, but the phone never became uncomfortably hot since the processor throttles to constant 80 % after about 2,5 minutes under full load.

As for RAM and storage, there are two variants, which are 4GB + 64GB, 6GB + 128GB. Storage can be expanded with a microSD card by up to 128 GB. In our storage benchmarks, the Mi 8 Lite with 128 GB performs as well as the rest of the competition.

Battery Life

The phone comes with a 3,350 mAh built-in battery and supports Quick Charge 3.0. However, the included brick and USB-A to USB-C cable only support 5V/2A charging speeds (10 W). Hence, you might want to get a QC 3.0-compliant charger for faster charging. www.gsmarena.com calls the 3G talk (29.59 h) and standby times respectable and reports web browsing and video playback times of 10:24h and 10.15 h, respectively. They summarizes that the Mi 8 Lite sacrifices power efficiency for performance and performs worse than most of its competitors in battery life, but only a few of them feature a powerful chipset like the Snapdragon 660. According to www.trustedreviews.com the device will survive a full day of solid mid-to-heavy use. www.techadvisor.co.uk ran the Geekbench 4 battery test and the Mi 8 Lite recorded 6 hours 22 minutes.

Cameras

Mi 8 Lite features a primary 12 MP camera with f/1.9 aperture, 1.4 µm pixel size, dual pixel phase detection autofocus and 5 MP sensor for depth sensing only. The camera lacks optical image stabilization. Additional settings like HDR, AI camera mode, beautify effect for the portrait shots filters are available. A pro mode allows more control over the camera. www.gsmarena.com finds HDR's Auto mode did not use HDR in most scenes it should, AI covers the very basic and is not as capable as in flagships, and the camera struggles to produce good shots under low-light. www.trustedreviews.com confirms that the Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite isn’t a low-light master with any configuration of modes, but think that it is better than some in this class. In contrast, www.techadvisor.co.uk thinks that the camera’s large 1.4um pixels were able to do a decent job lighting the scene without turning to the flash in low-light.

Videos can be recorded in up to 4K at 30 fps. www.trustedreviews.com find that 4K stabilization isn’t very effective, but 1080p stabilization is, dramatically reducing hand judder.

The 24 MP front camera uses fixed focus. According to www.gsmarena.com some of your selfies may not come up as sharp as they should be.

www.trustedreviews.com summarizes, “Considering everything from shooting speed to selfie quality, video capture options and the image quality you can get using the right modes, the Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite is one of the very best sub-£250 phone cameras you can get.” vulcanpost.com thinks that as a point and shoot camera, the Mi 8 Lite actually produced images they would consider very good for what you pay for.

Sound

According to www.gsmarena.com, the bottom-firing single speaker gets pretty loud. They say that the phone delivers very loud output with perfect accuracy with an active external amplifier. With headphones they experienced a slightly above average degradation with a noticeable spike in stereo crosstalk, some intermodulation distortion and some frequency response shakiness.

According to our review the Mi 8 Lite provides a very good call quality.

Summary

The Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite delivers good system performance and big storage capacity, but its battery life is only average, and it lacks a 3,5 mm headphone jack. In view of its price point, the cameras are good.

In www.trustedreviews.com’s opinion, the Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite has unusually good hardware considering its price.

Competitors include the Mi 8 SE and the Mi A2, Samsung’s Galaxy A7 (2018), the Motorola One, the Nokia 7 Plus, the Honor Play, the Honor 8X, and HTC’s U12 Life.

Sources

• https://mobile.mi.com/uk/mi-8-lite/#specs
• https://www.gsmarena.com/xiaomi_mi_8_lite-review-1859.php
• https://www.trustedreviews.com/reviews/xiaomi-mi-8-lite
• https://www.techadvisor.co.uk/review/android-smartphones/xiaomi-mi8-lite-3686190/
• https://www.vienna.at/xiaomi-mi-8-lite-test-und-fazit-zum-selfie-handy/6011783
• https://www.giztop.com/blog/Xiaomi-Mi-8-Lite-Review/
• https://vulcanpost.com/651649/xiaomi-mi-8-lite-review-malaysia/
• https://www.china-gadgets.de/xiaomi-mi-8-lite-smartphone-test/
• https://www.notebookcheck.net/Xiaomi-Mi-8-Lite-Smartphone-Review.400796.0.html

Press Review by Martina Osztovits

Qualcomm Adreno 512: Integrated graphics card based on the Adreno 500 architecture, like the Adreno 520 in the Snapdragon 820. According to Qualcomm up to 30% faster than the previous generation (Adreno 510?). Supports DirectX12, OpenCL 2.0, OpenGL ES 3.1 + AE. Only some 3D games with very low demands are playable with these cards. » Further information can be found in our Comparison of Mobile Graphics Cards and the corresponding Benchmark List.
660: Fast mid-range ARM SoC with 8 CPU Kryo 260 cores (four fast 2.2 GHz cores in a cluster and two power saving 1.8 GHz cores) and a rather slow Adreno 512 GPU. Manufactured in a 14 nm process.» Further information can be found in our Comparison of Mobile Processsors.
6.26":

Only a few smartphones have larger screens.
Large display-sizes allow higher resolutions. So, details like letters are bigger. On the other hand, the power consumption is lower with small screen diagonals and the devices are smaller, more lightweight and cheaper.

» To find out how fine a display is, see our DPI List.
0.169 kg:

Only few smartphones are more lightweight than this.

Xiaomi:

Xiaomi Tech was founded as a Chinese smartphone producer in 2010 and soon reached high market shares in its home market. Although Xiaomi is not one of the Top 5 smartphone manufacturers worldwide in 2016, it is nevertheless one of the big global players in this market segment.

Since 2015 there are many reviews. The ratings have been above average since 2016.

79.76%: This rating is not convincing. The laptop is evaluated below average, this is not really a recommendation for purchase.
» Further information can be found in our Notebook Purchase Guide.

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