Xiaomi Mi 9 Lite - Three months of experience

I have been using my Mi 9 Lite every day since mid-October. I think this time has been enough to draw the final conclusions about the device. Let's get started!

The last time I did this was in the last decade, with a test of this very device. Time has passed since then, and I must say that I still stand by what I said then. The Mi 9 Lite is a well-made upper-mid-range smartphone that I can confidently recommend to almost anyone who is a power user, but not a true Android hard-core, I mean the latest, most expensive hardware I need. There's everything here to please the eye, but I'd rather not speculate on what exactly, the unpacking here, the first impression of this, and the test following this you can read.

Three months of experience

1 a 3

As I mentioned, I used it every day, as my primary phone, along with a Redmi Note 5. I browsed on it, watched videos on it, listened to music on it, sent and received messages and calls on it, created and consumed content on it, and navigated on it a few times.

In my experience, the two days of operation were usually always met, and sometimes three, three and a half. Of course, for someone who checks Facebook every minute, scrolls through Insta feeds and sends Snap streams every hour, the screen-on-time will be much less than that.

A big disadvantage of the notification LED is that it does not work in muted mode, so in some ways this feature is meaningless. And speaking of whistles, the built-in fingerprint reader in the display is quite accurate and works quickly.

One thing that makes me sad about the device, however, is that no security or other updates have been released since the MIUI 11 update, which means that the security pack is dated October 2019, and that's not very encouraging. As the product range grows, the attention of developers is spread across different devices, which is why it wasn't a sensible decision to expand the range so widely, if you look at the software part of the equation. What's certain is that patches arrive more slowly, if they arrive at all.

Other than that, I'm completely satisfied with the Mi 9 Lite, I haven't experienced any stuttering or slowdowns in my everyday life. We get what we expect from it.

Overall

The Mi 9 Lite is a well-done phone from Xiaomi with MIUI, perhaps one of the best in the 2019 Q4 mid-range line-up. As far as I can judge, it's timeless, at least in this three-month period it has held up well. If you're picking a handset for yourself right now, I'd say look around the range to see if you can find a better one, but if you've come to this point, you might be eyeing the EU version of the CC9 (this phone), in which case I'd say feel free to go for the Mi 9 Lite.

Thank you very much for the Xiaomishop.hu-for letting me use the device for this test. If you are interested, what price you could currently get for the model I tested, click on this link to go to their site.