Xiaomi Mi 11 in for review

The first phone to take advantage of the Snapdragon 888's prowess is the Xiaomi Mi 11 - launched back in December for the Chinese market and just about to make its global market. It also carries a fresh new design compared to last year's Mi 10.

In addition to the chipset upgrade, the Mi 11 brings a bigger OLED display that has higher resolution (QHD+) and refresh rate (120Hz), along with HDR10+ support. The advertised peak brightness is an impressive 1500 nits. Of course, we will make sure to test that in our review.

The camera hardware is largely the same with the only change being the aperture. For some reason, the Mi 11 adopts a smaller f/1.9 aperture on its 108MP camera. The ultrawide unit is still 13MP f/2.4, while the macro camera has been upgraded to 5MP f/2.4. The selfie shooter still has a 20MP sensor.

A small decrease in battery capacity from 4,780 mAh down to 4,600 mAh coming from Mi 10 was probably necessary to significantly bump up the charging speeds. The Mi 11 supports 55W wired charging and blazing-fast 50W wireless charging while the reverse wireless charging output has been doubled to 10W. Some may say it's a worthy trade-off especially if the battery life hasn't suffered as much.

As for the design, at first glance, there's almost no way to distinguish the Mi 11 from the Mi 10 when looking at them from the front but the rear camera island has been totally revamped. Now instead of a simple vertical stack, the three cameras are arranged in a complex, oval module.

Lastly, the Mi 11 comes with Xiaomi's latest MIUI 12 out of the box based on Android 11 and the improved under-display fingerprint reader can now measure your heart rate too.

The full review is underway - it should pop up on our homepage next week so stay tuned!