The Samsung Galaxy S8 is undoubtedly one of the best Android smartphones of this year. It has a beautiful design and an impressive specs sheet. The recently announced Xiaomi Mi 6, on the other hand, is also an astonishing handset. Is the Samsung flagship impressive enough for people to pay double the price of the Xiaomi Mi 6 in order to get it? Of course, this depends on the customer. For the majority of people, the answer could be a negative one, however. Let’s take a look at each of them and what they have to offer.
Xiaomi Mi 6
The Xiaomi Mi 6 is a nice smartphone with a more than decent design. Of course, it is not a bezel-less smartphone, and that seems to be the trend, but it isn’t an ugly one either. The Mi 6 has a clean, simple design which can be appealing to many people. Xiaomi could have made a better effort at reducing the top and lower bezels, but we couldn’t say that the handset doesn’t look all right. The combination of aluminum and glass is always a winner, ensuring a premium look to the smartphones that are made from these materials. To be honest, the Xiaomi Mi 6 strikes me as being similar to previous versions of the Galaxy S smartphone with its fingerprint scanner underneath the screen.
The 5.15-inch display only has a 1080p resolution which could be better. Even so, the images on this display will look clear and sharp. The Xiaomi Mi 6 also offers a feature for tired eyes and its luminosity tops out at 600nits. This is quite a lot, but it can be reduced in order not to be tiring for the eyes.
The Xiaomi Mi 6 is powered by the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 chipset, clocked at 2,45GHz. The handset includes 6GB of RAM, which is quite impressive, and 64GB or 128GB of internal storage. One bad thing about the Xiaomi Mi 6 is the lack of a microSD card slot. The majority of smartphone users would settle for 64GB of storage, but others would like to have more than 128GB and they can’t, because this is the maximum of storage the Mi 6 has to offer. Most of the flagship smartphones nowadays feature expandable storage, so Xiaomi’s option not to offer this is a little surprising.
The Chinese smartphone has one thing in common with the iPhone 7 Plus, another flagship handset. It’s its dual rear camera setup. The Mi 6 features a 12MP telephoto lens and a 12MP wide-angle lens on the back of the device. This offers 10x digital zoom and 2x optical zoom. The front-facing camera of the handset has an 8MP sensor. Users will be able to capture some great images and videos thanks to these cameras. The Xiaomi Mi 6’s 3,350mAh battery is able to ensure a decent battery life and easily take users through the day on a single charge. The smartphone also features fast charging, through Quick Charge 3.0 technology.
Other features of the Xiaomi Mi 6 include an ultrasonic fingerprint sensor, USB Type-C connector for charging, and dual-SIM functionality. The device runs on MIUI 8, Xiaomi’s software which is based on Android 7 Nougat. All these features ensure a nice user experience. The price of the smartphone is quite a low one. The 64GB storage version of the handset will be available for approximately $360, while those who opt for the 128GB version will need to pay $420. There is also a ceramic version which will cost $435.
Samsung Galaxy S8
First of all, the Samsung flagship of this year has an astonishing design. Finally, the South Korean company gave up the design we all came to know and replaced it with a truly amazing one. Instead of keeping the physical home button on the front of the smartphone, they went for an all-screen design. The infinity display of the smartphone makes it look great and it also turns the handset into the perfect gadget to watch videos on. The curved edges sometimes distort the images, but this can be solved by adjusting the size of the images. The 5.8-inch display of the Samsung Galaxy S8 is a huge one and it is a better one than that of the Mi 6. It also offers a higher, 1440p resolution, so the images will be even greater. When it comes to design, it’s just obvious that the Galaxy S8 is the winner.
In terms of power, the US version of the Samsung Galaxy S8 is quite similar to the Xiaomi Mi 6. It has the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor and Adreno 540 GPU as the Chinese manufacturer’s handset. In other parts of the world, the handset is available with Samsung’s Exynos 8895 chipset and the Mali-G71 MP20 GPU. Both versions come with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage. As opposed to the Xiaomi Mi 6, the Samsung Galaxy S8 also offers users the possibility to expand the storage by up to 256GB. Even if they do not need the extra storage, it’s nice to know the possibility to have it is there.
The cameras of the Samsung Galaxy S8 are also great, but they aren’t quite as impressive as the ones of the Xiaomi Mi 6. The 12MP Dual Pixel back camera is able to capture some seriously high-quality images, however, they can’t deliver such great images as the Xiaomi Mi 6’s dual camera system. However, it could make up for it with the animations in the camera app that are there to deliver AR effects. Surprisingly, even though it has a larger screen and the same processing power, the Samsung Galaxy S8 has a smaller battery. It only packs a 3,000mAh battery, which is not as great as the Xiaomi MI 6’s 3,350mAh battery. Just like the Mi 6, the Galaxy S8 features fast battery charging, and in addition to this, it also offers wireless charging.
Besides all of the above, the Samsung Galaxy S8 also has a number of other great features. These include the Android Nougat with Samsung’s custom skin, Bixby, the AI assistant, a rear-mounted fingerprint sensor, an iris scanner, and face recognition. Unlike the Mi 6, the Galaxy S8 only features a mono speaker, but at least it has a 3.5mm audio jack. The Mi 6 has stereo speakers, and it lacks an audio jack. Another major difference between these two handsets is their respective prices. The Samsung flagship’s price starts at $720, which is double the price of the Xiaomi Mi 6.
The verdict
Even though on paper the comparison seems to have a clear verdict, things are not quite simple in real life. If we simply look at the specs sheet, the Xiaomi Mi 6 needs to be the winner of this competition. It has the same processor as the Samsung Galaxy S8 does, more memory, and it costs half as much. However, in real-life use, the Samsung could prove to be a lot better than the Xiaomi Mi 6 is. Apart from this, the Xiaomi Mi 6 will only be available in China first. It doesn’t support some of the bands without which it can’t function in Europe and the USA, so it could be useless in these areas. The Samsung Galaxy S8 is going to be available all over the world, and it will work everywhere too. This could turn it into the better phone out of the two.
However, in case you are in China, the clear winner of this comparison is the Xiaomi smartphone. The mostly minor differences between it and the Samsung flagship just can’t justify the extra $360 customers need to pay for the Galaxy S8.
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