Anyone got a Xiaomi phone yet ?

[g8ina]

These things seem to be cheap n cheerful and work well according to most reviews, anyone using one here yet ?

Im in the market for a new phone, £100-£150 max ish.

[g8ina]

This one tempts me :
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/390994214970

Gimme reasons why I should NOT buy it ?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Warranty.

Have you looked at the Lenovo K5??

[g8ina]

Tis also on my hit list along with the Moto G4

[Smudger]

My mum just got the G4 Play, she likes it a lot, but she did come from a Samsung Galaxy Y, so a brick with a piece of wire on it would have seemed better. It's £120 on Amazon/Motorola at the moment. Nothing flashy, and it doesn't come with some of the gesture controls, but it seems a decent phone.

[g8ina]

Aye, my existing is an old Sony Xperia Arc, so similar... My phone has like 600MB of RAM !! Cant run nuffink.

[AETAaAS]

I've had a Redmi Note 3 Pro and am now on a Redmi Note 4. I can easily recommend the Redmi Note 3 Pro if you have a £150 budget, as there are a number of eBay around that price without having to buy from overseas (a big plus in my book, and means you won't have to be waiting weeks).

The thing to note is to aim for a Note 3 Pro Prime. The Pro variant ups you from the Mediatek Helio X10 to a Snapdragon 650 (which is much better supported on XDA if you want to go changing ROMs later on if you are wary of dodgy retailers putting god knows what on your phone) and the Prime variant takes you to 3GB of RAM from two, and doubles internal storage to 32GB. MIUI is smooth and has a number of nice additions. I like their camera interface and notification centre but preferences vary obviously and if you are savvy enough to know what you want, I'm sure there's a launcher, app or tool to do what you want.

Don't be afraid to officially request unlocking your bootloader from Xiaomi, they respond quickly and it is useful to have in case you want to go rooting or flashing ROMs. I've gotten the unlock software with an unlocked account but haven't really found a reason to use it. Xiaomi unlike say, Samsung (my last phone being a Note 3) haven't lumbered the phone with bloatware. That is providing you get the Global ROM, the Chinese one has apps more suited to their market. Even if you get a Chinese ROM, it's easy enough to flash over to a Global ROM, with plenty of guides on the official forums as well.

Both my Note 3 and 4 happily ran 4G on Three, but the thing you will notice the most about these phones is the battery life. I can easily get through a day with 50% battery to spare; that is with playing games, browsing the web, videos and nearly 3 hours of screen on time. The cameras are in the upper-average bracket. The take competent low light shots and are perfectly happy taking daylight shots. Some people bemoan the lack of 4k recording but I question how much benefit there is on small sensors like this. IIRC, the Note 3 already had the instant shutter providing you have settled on a focus, which is nice.

edit: Oh yeah, the double sim/micro SD tray. If you don't moonlight as a drug dealer, you can have a microSD in the second card slot which can be handy if you want to go photo crazy or bring your media collection with you. I used to be on a peculiar O2 plan before I was on Three, so it was cheaper for me to have a second Three SIM on their PAYG 321 than do too much with the O2 SIM. There are creative uses of two sims which you may find out on your own.

edit 2: There's no NFC so pairing or using some payment methods aren't available, but depending on your security philosophy, that may not be a bad thing. I personally miss it but not very much.

[g8ina]

Another day of reading stuff, talking to some guys in AVF too. FINALLY decided on my original choice of the Moto G4 16GB/2GB. Argos refurd ebay for £120

Quite happy with that !

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Another day of reading stuff, talking to some guys in AVF too. FINALLY decided on my original choice of the Moto G4 16GB/2GB. Argos refurd ebay for £120

Quite happy with that !

I have the earlier G3 16GB/2GB and it has a surprisingly decent camera for a phone and the G4 is better. Its also very tough - I just bought a cheapo rubber case and the phone has survived many falls onto the floor.

[Uriel]

I have a Xiaomi Mi2S. Was a brilliant phone for the money.

My only complaint was that it never quite played ball when using the combination of google positioning services (cell tower + Wi-Fi based triangulation) and GPS. Positioning was fine using GPS alone though but activate both and it became unusable for navigation.

I'd probably still be using it now but I dropped it, cracking the screen (using a Galaxy Alpha now). I opted to replace it myself but the proximity sensor and camera focus were never quite right afterwards. I would have absolutely no hesitation in getting another Xiaomi phone if one came up at the right time, price and specification though.

[jimborae]

To slate my cheapo chinese phone crack habit I'm currently rocking an Umi Super (or at least my son is now that I'm finished playing). It is soon to be upgraded to an Umi E Plus, they're nice phones and cant beat the £124 quid I paid for the UMI Super. The E PLus was a bit more at £160 & I'm hoping the GPS will be better than the Umi's which was flaky sometimes.

https://www.xda-developers.com/umi-plus-e-sale/

[Smudger]

The advantage of the G4 is that Moto have just started pushing Nougat to it, if that sort of thing floats your boat. You should also get the next update (Oreos?) pretty sharpish after release.

[Abrahamcoming]

I get a problem with xiaomi that I've never had with any of my previous phones. Everytime I open greenify it says auto hibernation has been stopped. That means that greenify is constantly being disabled by something else. I've tried a few different MIUI versions and they all have the problem.

[jwchips]

I get a problem with xiaomi that I've never had with any of my previous phones. Everytime I open greenify it says auto hibernation has been stopped. That means that greenify is constantly being disabled by something else. I've tried a few different MIUI versions and they all have the problem.

There are a few switches you could flip to prevent miui from touching greenify (assuming MIUI8):

* Open 'recents/recent apps' - find greenify - drag greenify down and tap the lock that appears above it to lock the app in RAM

* Security - permissions - greenify - check everything is configured correctly, autostart permissions are under a separate menu

* security - battery - App battery saver - greenify - set 'No restrictions'

* security - cleaner- add greenify to exceptions

Back on topic, I'm the happy owner of a Mi5 Pro - its a lot of phone for the ~£350 I paid. Its also covered by my mobile phone insurance bundled with my bank account. You just have to keep in mind their priorities are still firmly rooted in China and the global offerings lag behind the 'native' counterparts.

[jimborae]

So my Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 Pro turned up from China during the holidays and bearing in mind I only paid £116, once the cashback goes through, it's one hell of a phone. Very impressed. Cant stand MIUI 8 but that was easily taken care of once Nova Launcher was installed. Have applied for an unlock code so I can try other roms but unlocking & flashing to 3rd party roms looks a lot more complicated than on previous devices.

On another note my UMI Plus E order has been cancelled due to lack of stock so crossing my fingers that Ali Express sort out my refund without too much hassle. UMI are now on my blacklist as the issues that the Super has with GPS are beyond a joke and they're not doing anthing to sort out judging by what is being said in their forums.

[cheesemp]

I've had a xiaomi redmi note 2 prime* for about a year now. Here is my brief summary of the pros and cons.

Pros:
Cheap with powerful hardware - It was £100 and still beats most £200 phones (I know I keep checking)

Cons:
MIUI - Gosh I hate MIUI - its so restrictive and too much styled on iOS. Just getting google inbox to update automatically was a pain. It just disables so many permissions by default.
Mediatek processor - (Most new Xiaomi's don't have these thankfully) - so no rom support. I'm stuck with 5.0 based MIUI or hacked together old versions of Cyanogen based on android 5.1.
Hardware issues:
- Front Camera gets dusty - fixable but real pain
- Random battery issues - will suddenly run down - take out battery and replace - 20% left...

Summary: Cheap, cheerful and powerful but I'd rather have a Moto G4 right now just to have better OS support even if the CPU is a little slower...

Edit: The prime version has a faster CPU and 32gb of storage compared to the regular version.