If anyone started with the video and watched it, feel free to skip down a bit for the gory details, for those who prefer to read it first, I'll address those.
The Xiaomi Mi Play was launched in December 2018, somewhat unexpectedly. Back then, Krisztián wrote about it, but he couldn't put it anywhere, even though the preliminary leaks, apart from the weak hardware, would have made it a pretty cool phone. The Mi Play's raison d'être pretty much died when it came out, although maybe only us Europeans and everyone but China thought so.
The global distribution of Mi Play has recently started, although it doesn't have B20/800 MHz, it speaks to us in Hungarian and everything else is English out of the box. A xiaomishop.hu was the earliest to obtain this one copy, which he made available to us immediately. Thank you very much.
Full specification
- Mediatek MT6765 Helio P35 (12nm, Octa-core (4×2.3 GHz Cortex-A53 & 4×1.8 GHz Cortex-A53)
- PoweVR IMG GE8320 graphics processor 680 MHz
- 5.84″ IPS LCD display, 1080×2280 pixels, 19:9 ratio, 432 ppi
- 4 GB LPDDR4x dual-channel memory
- 64 GB emmc 5.1 (expandable with MicroSD card up to 256 GB)
- Dimensions: 147.76 x 71.89 x 7.8 mm
- Weight: 150 ± 5 g
- Battery: 3.000 mAh, 5V 2A with charger
- MicroUSB connector
- 3.5 mm Jack connector
- Rear camera: 12 MP, f/2.2, 1.25 μm, PDAF + depth sensor
- LED flash
- Front camera: 8 MP, HDR
- Dual Nano SIM tray + MicroSD
- WiFi 802.11a/b/g/n/ac (2.4G / 5G)
- Bluetooth 4.2, A2DP, LE
- 4G FDD-LTE TDD-LTE B1 / B3 / B5 / B7 / B8 B34 / B38 / B39 / B40 / B41 (2555 MHz - 2655 MHz) 3G WCDMA TD-SCDMA CDMA EVDO B1 / B2 / B5 / B8 B34 / B39 BC0
2G GSM CDMA 1X B2 / B3 / B5 / B8 BC0 - GPS, AGPS, Glonass, Beidou
- Fingerprint scanner, Compass, Gyroscope, Acceleration sensor, Ambient light sensor, Distance sensor
- Dream Blue, Twilight Gold, Black
- Android 8.1.0 based MIUI 10
The camera isn't amazing either, the main camera does everything on its own, the secondary camera is only needed for depth sensing. The quality is probably a good mid-range, especially as the camera on this year's phones is already at the top of the range, finishing on the podium. So the Mi Play Global release is just a trial, to see if there is demand in other countries for a small and simple, yet fashionable waterdrop camera island. Perhaps it would have been a better buy as the Redmi 6X, as we know it could have been the successor to the P22 and the final member of the series, like its predecessors.
Camera
Its camera is average, on par with the Redmi series from years ago. In daylight, in good lighting conditions, it has no problems when shooting still or moving images, but at night, in well-lit places, it doesn't capture anything too badly, but in the dark it's a mess.
Performance
The performance of the MediaTek Helio P35, if you want to compare it to a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, is somewhere between SD625 and SD636. It is not suitable for all tasks, performance-centric applications and games are difficult or impossible to run on it. In fact, if you want to run many applications at the same time, it's a good idea to clean up the memory to get everything running at the expected speed.
Summary
The Xiaomi Mi Play is average in everything, performance, camera, battery, except looks and size. The dreamy blue colour is beautiful and the fancy water drop camera island isn't ostentatious and at least the notifications are visible, unlike its predecessors. I'm just repeating myself in the video, for those who want a small and simple Xiaomi phone, it's a good choice with compromises.
Have fun!
