Xiaomi Mi Max 2 Review: A Colossal avatar of Redmi Note 4!

Xiaomi is one brand that is actively trying to dominate the mid-range and budget segment in India. The company has a vast portfolio in these segments and now, it is all set to capture those users who fancy big screens with the launch of its latest Xiaomi Mi Max 2.

Priced at Rs 16,999, the smartphone takes the legacy of the Mi Max forward with a same 6.44-inch display, however, the second generation comes with quite of interesting addition and particularly a massive 5300mAh battery is one of them. Once again the debate about the screen size of a smartphone is at center stage. But will it make an ideal device to ease your craving of media consumption and make it a delightful experience? Let’s find out.

Xiaomi has taken a clue from aging Mi Max and added some nifty feature in this one. The most striking thing you will notice about the device is the 7.6mm thickness, in spite of such a large 6.44-inch display. But that doesn’t mean it is unique in every sense—one can feel some inspiration from Apple (after all other Chinese brands are inspired by Apple’s design). But mind you, you will find a bit difficult to operate on such a big screen, however, once you get used to it, things become much easier. But we still feel that one-handed operation is just not its cup of tea.

The smartphone gently curves around the edges, which makes it a bit comfortable to hold and metal design does add some sturdiness to the device. The front sports a large 6.44-inch display with some minimal bezels and a curved glass protection. At the top there is a front shooter along with an earpiece and usual array sensors, hiding in plain sight, while at the base, there are navigation controls, which are backlit in nature.

The right houses volume controls and power on/off button, while at the left, you will find hybrid SIM slot. At the top, there is a Headphone jack along with an IR blaster, while at the base there is a USB Type-C port flanked between two speaker grilles. At the back, one will find a rear camera at the top left position along with a dual-tone LED flash, while at the top centre, there is a fingerprint scanner.

Moving to the display, the Mi Max 2 comes with a 6.44-inch Full HD display with a screen Resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels. The display comes with some good viewing angles and colour reproduction is pretty good as well. The large display makes it an ideal device for all your media consumption and whether be it watching your favourite movie or video clip, it surely becomes a delightful experience. However, if you are looking for a compact device, then is just not meant for you.

During our review period, we found out that the device display is a bit reflective in nature and the brightness sometimes feels a bit less when you use it broad daylight. Further, some find the colours on the warmer side, however, the brand has given the option to change by going to the Display section in the Setting menu. That said, the display is the main highlight of the device and it surely makes a great medium to ease your media diet. Coupled this with the stereo speaker setup, which has a primary speaker at the bottom and earpiece works as a secondary speaker to give a stereo sound effect. This further adds some brownie points to the whole watching experience.

Another major highlight of the device is the massive 5300mAh battery, which the company boasts can last up to 2 days of usage. Further, the phone also comes with Quick Charge 3.0 and parallel charging support, which can charge 68 percent battery in just one hour. The parallel charging also helps to control the temperature of the device during the charging period. We were quite impressed with the performance of the battery backup in this one.

The battery is just not ready to give up and during our review period, it almost gave a backup of almost 2 days with a full charge. We used it as our primary device for a week and were quite happy with the battery backup. The daily routine included actively checking Facebook, chatting on WhatsApp, streaming some music and watching a movie during a commute. Adding quick charging support is another smart move by the company and the phone takes about 2 hours and 30 minutes to 3 hours to get fully charged.

Coming to the camera department, the Mi Max 2 sports a 12-megapixel rear camera with f/2.2 aperture, Sony IMX386 sensor, 1.25-micron pixels size and dual-tone LED flash. For the front, there is a 5-megapixel shooter for selfies and video calling. The same sensor is present in Xiaomi Mi 6 and 1.25-micron Pixel size should ideally make the low light performance better. That said, the performance of the camera is a mixed bag one. The phone is able to capture some good detailed shots during the broad daylight.

The colours are generally true to its source, however, during macro shots, we found out it struggles a bit to lock focus on the subject. The low light photos are generally clean, but in some cases, we felt that the smartphone is taking too much light, which spoils the whole picture in some scenarios. Noises and graininess are also visible in some photos during low light. Coming to the front camera, the performance is quite average in our review period.

On the hardware front, the device is powered by an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 Processor along with Adreno 506 GPU. It is backed up by a 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage, which can be further expanded up to 128GB via Micro SD card slot. It is safe to say that the smartphone is extended version of the Redmi Note 4.

The performance of the device is at par with the rest of the competition meaning that it can handle all the daily tasks you throw at it with much ease. On the gaming front, the device is able to handle casual gaming quite effectively, but it shimmers a bit when it comes graphic-intense games like Assassin Creed’s Pirates, Asphalt 8: Airborne and more. Other than this, the call connectivity is good and so is the earpiece volume. We faced on noticeable drops of networks during our testing period and there were no major overheating issues as well, which is a good sign.

Coming to the software part, the device runs on Android 7.1.1 Nougat with company’s MIUI 8 running on top of it. The smartphone comes loaded with some interesting features like a Quick Ball, which makes it easier to navigate, second space through which one can create a partition to store different files and more. One thing that Xiaomi, in our opinion, is the bootload time. It takes some noticeable amount of time when you setup the device.

However, the whole experience is quite satisfactory. Whether be it multi-tasking or swiping between the screens, it is indeed smooth. The device does take some minute time to load some heavy apps, but apart from this we rarely noticed any lag in the UI. The user interface comes with some interesting features like Dual-apps, One-hand mode, Lite mode, Quick Ball, and Second Space. Through Second Space one can actually setup two different profiles on the same device, like literally! There are some flaws as well. First is the lack of interaction in the notification panel. In Nougat, we have the option to reply directly from the notification tray to your WhatsApp messages or anything else or that matter, but sadly, MIUI 8 misses this feature.