The Xiaomi Mi 8 comes with a notch at
the front on top of its 6.21-inch FHD+ 18.7:9 Samsung AMOLED display with an
88.5% screen-to-body ratio and a brightness of 600nit. The rest of the body is
made out of glass with a dual rear camera setup in the upper left corner,
meanwhile the fingerprint scanner is placed in the middle.
What’s really different from previous Xiaomi phones
(aside from the notch) is the dedicated button we find on the left of the
phone. Xiaomi explained that said button will be used to launch MIUI AI’s
assistant, which will hopefully work outside of China as well, or at least give
us the option to remap it to Google’s Assistant.
Not too many surprises as far as hardware goes. The
Xiaomi Mi 8 is powered by the flagship Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 along with 6GB /
8GB of RAM and 64GB, 128GB or 256GB of internal storage.
The hardware combo is so high-end that it managed to
score over 300.000 on the Antutu benchmark software, making it the best scoring
Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 phone on the market.
The smartphones comes with NFC for payments on the
go as well as a new dual-frequency GPS module. This leading technology should
be far more accurate than the GPS receivers we find today, with an accuracy of
around 30 centimeters.
The Xiaomi Mi 8 packs a 12MP+12MP rear camera setup
with 1.4um pixel size, 4-axis OIS, dual pixel autofocus and AI scene detection.
Meanwhile on the front we find a 20MP shooter with 1.8um massive pixels, F/2.0
aperture, AI portrait mode and AI beautify. Along with the 20MP front camera,
we also find the rumored infrared lighting emitter and an infrared lens for
Face Unlock to work.
Xiaomi’s 8th anniversary phone managed to score 105
points in the DxOMark “photo” benchmark and got a 99 general score (same as the
Samsung S9 Plus), which means the smartphone is expected to snap some quite
amazing pictures.
The Xiaomi Mi 8 will be priced starting at 2699
Yuan, which is about US$ 420, for the 6GB+64GB version, an incredible price tag
for what it offers.
