Xiaomi Mi 8 SE Review

Xiaomi Mi8 is a really popular phone, but if you want to spare some money you should look at the Xiaomi 8 SE, cheaper phone means fewer options so is this a good phone again or are you giving up too many features? This is our Xiaomi 8 SE review.

Xiaomi 8 SE has a gorilla glass five back and a metal frame with a matte texture surprisingly despite the glass fingerprints aren't too noticeable, even though it's the gold variant the phone's color is actually more pinkish in color than its name suggests still it's not garish and it's a great looking device.

The fingerprint reader is lightning fast and easy to reach there's a face unlock option too, the Mi 8 SE can be very comfortable to use one-handed but it depends on how you hold the phone.

The glass back is very slippery but the sides allow for a good grip, still you might want to use a case in the box. Sadly there's no notification LED of me 8sc feels sturdy but there's no IP rated protection.

On the front of the phone is a rather wide notch that you can thankfully hide with black strips on both sides, it doesn't cut into content but that's only because you can't expand videos to fit full screen if they're not the right ratio, still if you can get over that the screen is a beauty.

The nearly 5.9 inch Super AMOLED display has excellent contrast and is certified for each year 10 video, it also gets plenty bright and sunlight legibility is not an issue, colour reproduction is really accurate in the standard contrast mode, but the adaptive contrast mode is fine too especially if you're a fan of more vibrant punchy colors.

The Mi 8 SE has a single bottom firing speaker that gets really loud, unfortunately it also gets pretty distorted especially with higher pitched sounds.

There's also no headphone jacks so you need to use a dongle unsurprisingly there's no FM radio on board either. Sound through headphones is less distorted than on the speakers but its loudness is way below average, surprisingly even with the missing headphone jack there's no NFC on this phone.

The phone comes with either 64 or 128 gigabytes of storage but it has no expandable card slot.

The phone packs of 3120 milliamp hour battery it got a good 86 hour endurance reading in her battery life tests, of course even when the battery fell to zero it wasn't much of a problem because the phone supports quick charge 3.0.

The Mi 8 SE is the first phone with the Snapdragon 710 chipset and it occupies an issue its own, in terms of performance this chips sits squarely between the flagship snapdragon 835 and the mid-range snapdragon 660, any multi-core tests it ranks higher than most devices with the snapdragon 660 while being more powerful over, the phone handled heavy games with ease and the four gigabytes of RAM was more than enough for heavy multitasking.

The Mi 8 SEspots Android Oreo 8.1 with Mi UI on top, it's not exactly a minimal UI but you don't feel slowed down. It comes with a ton of pre-loaded tools which can be useful for example unlike the regular Mi 8 there is an IR blaster on the top of the phone and you'll find the Mi remote among the included apps.

The phone also includes a security app that both protects and optimizes your device, one of my favorite features is gesture navigation which saves you some screen space and allows you to ditch the navigation bar, third-party launchers can give you an app drawer you will lose the notes and shrink its shelf on the side. If you don't want to change the look of the phone that much there's also a theme store that brings me to the biggest issue with the software.

Some parts of the phone might still be in Chinese and you might have to download the Play Store itself, if you're buying this phone for someone who is technologically challenged you should really set it up for them before giving it to them.

For now we don't know when the global Roms will be released so there's going to be some things that are still in Chinese.

The Xiaomi Mi 8 SE gets a 12 megapixel main shooter and a 5 megapixel secondary camera for better depth sensing, it's a step down from the Mi 8 and lacks OIS, though in daylight photos are acceptable and far from potato quality still they're far from perfect too, there's a little too much noise for my liking and photos are a little soft, colors are a bit oversaturated too, dynamic range is limited but HDR helps with that surprisingly the AI mode made photos look better 90% of the time, so I suggest you just leave it on.

Low light photos are alright but once again they're garnished with a noticeable amount of noise, you'll also need a steady hand or a tripod to get more keepers after dark because the shutter speed can get low and camera shake can be a real issue.

Portraits are decent but occasionally we had inconsistent face detection, so once again it's good to take more than one shot, 4k video is great it offers excellent detail and plenty of dynamic range though colors are still a bit too oversaturated for our liking, the phone tech linky supports a is for poor K but the footage doesn't show much difference if any, this might be a bug but for now it's better to use full HD for better stabilized footage and if you're worried about detail loss from the resolution drop well while it's not as good as 4k, 1080p gets you plenty of detail and good dynamic range.

The selfie camera is a 20 megapixel snapper with an F 2.0 aperture selfies are high-quality and have good colors in detail, selfie video maxes out at 1080p and quality is pretty good.

Xiaomi is really pushing the limits of the word mid-ranger with the Xiaomi Mi 8 SE this phone has good performance, good battery life and it's made well.

The camera isn't quite as good as a Mi 8, but it still performs respectively in fact its biggest flaw might be that it lacks certain features that are present on other mid-rangers like a headphone jack and FM radio and an expandable card slot, these are things that are more likely to be missed by those who are on a budget and don't want to spend extra money on things like new bluetooth headphones. Still if you can forgive these faults this is one of the best phones that you'll find in this price range and we definitely recommend it.