Where to buy? Gearbest or Banggood
The Mi 9 SE came out along with the Mi 9, a top-of-the-line phone, and it’s positioned one category below, being a premium midranger. This means it’s less powerful but with the same sophisticated build. But it feels like Xiaomi kept the coolest stuff on the SE: three cameras on the back and the fingerprint reader built into the Super AMOLED screen.
Basically, it’s a midranger because of the processor. But in my use, this was not a problem at all. Underneath the hood we have a Snapdragon 712, a new chip, which prodived me an absolutely satisfying performance, and I think it will be that way for 90% of people. Opening apps is fast, crashes are really rare, unless we’re talking about Instagram, which hangs on any Android phone. Even after 15+ days, the performance was still great. I can say with some confidence that even advanced users will be satisfied with the speed of Mi 9 SE, which should only confess that is not a flagship in specific tasks like video editing and rendering.
Performance in games was also satisfactory. I installed PUBG and it ran with high graphics, a setting recognized automatically by the application. This doesn’t happen on devices with Snapdragon 600 series chips, for instance.
One aspect of which I was not a fan is the sound. It’s mono, it comes out only from underneath, and it has only acceptable height. Also, for anyone who wants protection against water or memory expansion through microSD card, there is none of both. Infrared sensor is present.
The fingerprint reader, which is embedded on the screen, is a fun feature. It works in a delimited area of the display, and that area is always visible on the lock screen, or it is highlighted when the screen is off and you touch or lift the phone.
What I need to say is that the reader is clearly slower than a traditional one. And I’m not talking about lab tests: on a daily basis, when you are not thinking about it and you take the phone out of your pocket, sometimes the reader takes up to 2 seconds to unlock. When your hand is dirty or sweaty, it happens even more. So it works, it’s fun, but it’s slower than current standards. Oh, and when I installed a glass protection film on the screen, the reader kept running smoothly. The maximum you may need to do is to re-register your fingerprints after applying the glass.
The cell phone itself is pretty, it has a nice Super AMOLED screen with beautiful colors… And a glass back. Because of that, I highly recommend the use of a protection case, because in its original state it can be very slippery. There’s a simple one out of the box, it will do the job.
About the cameras, well, it’s cool to have a device with a regular lens and also a zoom and a wide one. They allow absolutely different framings that common phones do not. It’s not something you’re going to use all the time, but it’s interesting to realize that you can take a picture of something close with no need to walk away, and also capturing something that is a little far away without having to get so close. The three cameras are a nice feature indeed.
You can’t match their quality with that of more expensive devices, such as a Galaxy S10 or even a Mi 9, because there will be a loss in image processing, which is reflected in dynamic range, shadows and so.
But many times you can confuse SE’s results with those of flagships. Day to day photos of are beautiful, with good coloring, and this happens even at night. The 48 megapixels of the main lens mainly serve to bring together 4 pixels in 1 with more light, creating a final photo of 12 megapixels with improved light, and this seems to work well.
One thing that pleased me too was that in Instagram Stories, this phone goes well. It is far from an iPhone level, but it has a satisfactory smoothness and specially the sound, it’s captured with good quality. It’s a nice Xiaomi phone for Instagram stories, and those are a minority. Unfortunately, when you record videos in too loud environments, like music concerts, the captured audio will be blown, and that’s worth a mention.
So far, the negative points are quite unimportant for me, I make that clear, but the one that made me more concerned was battery life. It’s not a tragedy, but in my usage, in order to get more than 12 hours of full autonomy, I had 5 hours of screen-on time at most, hardly anything above that. So it really is not a phone that stands out for good autonomy, although the results, if they are to be analyzed coldly, can’t be considered bad. It was rare to be let down by the Mi 9 SE in the middle of a working day.
On the software department, MIUI, Xiaomi’s custom interface over Android, remains great, with useful features. I use app cloning and app password protection a lot, and the performance of version 10 was great with Mi 9 SE. I only noticed one bug in both Whatsapp and Telegram: sometimes when I received audio from them and I would listen on the speaker, the cell phone would turn off screen and suppress audio as if I was listening with the phone against my ear. It happened a good number of times in my unit, but anyway, certainly it can be fixed through software update.
My final impression of this device is good. It is what we can truly call a premium mid-range, and delivers an experience quite similar to the more expensive phones. Performance is good and also the cameras. It’s a beautiful devic, and the flaws are all within a level that can be relieved. Certainly it was one of the most interesting cell phones in this category that I have tested in recent times.
PROS:
– Great design
– Good performance
– On-screen fingerprint reader is fun
– Cameras do a good job
CONS:
– Microphone will blow audio in loud environments
– Battery is average at most
– Minor audio bug in message apps to be fixed