Xiaomi Announces Mi 6: 5.15-inch, Snapdragon 835 SoC, 6GB LPDDR4x

At an event today in Beijing, Xiaomi revealed its latest flagship phone, the Mi 6. Like the Mi 5s it’s replacing, the Mi 6 comes with a 5.15-inch 1080p IPS LCD display and benefits from Xiaomi’s attention to design. The Mi 6 will be sold exclusively in China initially, but will find its way to select global markets at a later date.

Style is just as important to Xiaomi as performance, so it’s no surprise it spent most of the event talking about the Mi 6’s updated design and materials. This generation moves back to edge-to-edge glass on the front and back like the older Mi 5, but the frame is now stainless steel rather than aluminum, which should give it a solid, rigid feel. The sides of the glass back are curved like previous models, but Xiaomi has taken the next step with the Mi 6 by curving the top and bottom edges to match. The curved edges flow smoothly into the polished, rounded metal frame, giving the phone a smooth in-hand feel. The Mi 6 does not use a curved display, but the 2.5D front glass compliments the rounded sides and back.

The standard Mi 6 comes in three different colors: Black with matching black front and sides, White with a white front and silver sides, and Blue with a blue front and gold sides. There are also two special edition models; the Silver color still uses a glass back, but the black model with 18K gold accents comes with a ceramic back. All of the colors are polished and highly reflective (and fingerprint magnets) similar to the HTC U Ultra, which is particularly obvious with the Blue and Silver colors that look like shiny chrome. Matching reflective colors are used on the front too, giving the Mi 6 a cohesive design.

The power button is on the right side just below the single-piece volume rocker, which lines up perfectly with the dual NanoSIM tray on the left side. The USB Type-C port on the bottom supports Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 3.0 fast charging technology and is flanked by a symmetrical series of holes that hide a microphone and a downward-firing speaker. Like the HTC 10, the Mi 6 also uses the earpiece speaker to complement the primary speaker in a pseudo-stereo arrangement. There appears to be an IrLED blaster on the top edge, but you will not find a 3.5mm headphone jack; the Mi 6 joins the growing list of phones omitting the analog port.

The front of the splash resistant but not IP68 rated Mi 6 has relatively large bezels at the top and bottom. The lower bezel has a recessed, non-clickable, pill-shaped fingerprint sensor mounted below the cover glass similar to Huawei’s P10. Xiaomi opted for a balanced look by making the upper bezel the same size as the lower. This design choice also provided enough space to mount the dual rear camera module above the display rather than behind it, allowing Xiaomi to reduce thickness by 0.8 mm to 7.45 mm and increase battery capacity by 5% to 3350 mAh relative to the Mi 5s. The battery boost gives the Mi 6 an advantage over the Huawei P10 (3200 mAh) along with the HTC 10 and Samsung’s Galaxy S7 and S8, all of which come with 3000 mAh batteries and similar sized displays.

The Mi 6’s 5.15-inch 1080p IPS LCD panel reaches a peak brightness of 600 nits, the same as the Mi 5s, according to Xiaomi. It’s not clear, however, if the Mi 6 is also using 16 LEDs in the backlight assembly like the Mi 5s to boost brightness and improve power efficiency, or if it’s using 12 to 14 LEDs like most edge-lit IPS displays of this size. With 4096 brightness levels, instead of the usual 256, display brightness can be adjusted more accurately all the way down to just 1 nit. The extended color gamut panel will show vivid, saturated colors, but Xiaomi generally includes an sRGB mode for people who prefer more accurate colors too.

Packed inside the Mi 6 is Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 835 SoC, whose octa-core big.LITTLE CPU configuration uses four semi-custom ARM Cortex-A73 performance cores and four semi-custom Cortex-A53 efficiency cores. In our early testing, it showed a small performance advantage over the Snapdragon 821 SoC in the Mi 5s and Mi 5s Plus when running some common workloads and browser JavaScript benchmarks. There’s also an updated Adreno 540 GPU that delivers around 25% better peak performance on average than the Adreno 530 in the original Mi 5.

The Mi 6 is one of the first phones to use LPDDR4x RAM, which saves power by using a lower operating voltage than the more common LPDDR4. It pairs the Snapdragon 835 with 6GB of RAM and either 64GB or 128GB of UFS NAND, although there’s no microSD support for supplementing internal storage.

All of the camera hardware is new. Xiaomi did not say much about the 8MP front-facing camera—which improves resolution by a factor of two relative to the 4MP sensor used by the Mi 5 family—but it did offer some details about the new dual rear camera. Unlike the Mi 5s Plus, whose dual rear camera module included both a color and a black-and-white sensor used in tandem to improve image quality, the Mi 6 gives each of its 12MP color sensors a lens with a different focal length to provide different levels of magnification, similar to how the iPhone 7 Plus uses its dual cameras. The primary camera uses a wide-angle lens with a 27mm equivalent focal length, which captures a larger field of view where objects appear smaller than what you see with your naked eye. The secondary camera uses a different 12MP sensor and a 52mm equivalent focal length lens that provides a 2x optical “zoom” where objects appear roughly the same size as they do when viewing them with your eyes. This is not a true zoom lens, however, because any zoom level between 1x and 2x or greater than 2x is still using digital zoom. The two cameras can also be used to create a depth-of-field bokeh effect that blurs the background of photos.

The primary rear camera supports PDAF for faster autofocus performance and comes with the 4-axis OIS system previously seen on the Mi 5, which should improve low-light image quality. An f/1.8 lens, which allows more light to enter the camera, and larger-than-average pixels should also help improve image quality. The secondary camera’s “zoom” lens is slower at f/2.6—a byproduct of its longer focal length—and does not appear to have OIS, which may limit its usefulness in lower-light conditions.

The Mi 6 will be available in China on April 28 at Mi.com and Mi Home stores. The versions with 64GB of storage will cost ¥2499, while the 128GB models will cost ¥2899. The special ceramic edition with 18K gold accents around the rear cameras will cost ¥2999. The larger Mi 6 Plus that was rumored to be launching alongside the Mi 6 did not materialize, however. It’s possible it will be announced in the near future when Xiaomi is ready to expand sales of the Mi 6 to additional markets.

Display Report: Huawei P10 and P10 Plus

Huawei recently added the P10 and P10 Plus to its lineup, which focus on fashion and photography like other P-series phones. The Huawei P10 has a 5.1-inch IPS LCD panel with a typical 1920×1080 resolution (431ppi) and a 16:9 aspect ratio. The P10 Plus, as its name implies, is an upscaled version of the P10, with a larger 5.5-inch IPS LCD panel. It also bumps resolution to 2560×1440 (534ppi), which is not really necessary for an IPS panel at this size. Both panels are covered with Gorilla Glass 5 and come with a plastic screen protector pre-applied. Some people may appreciate the extra protection included out of the box, but the cheap protector does not allow your finger to slide smoothly across the screen and gets gunked up with skin oil very quickly. The glass underneath does not appear to have an oleophobic coating either, which is an odd omission for a flagship phone.

A well-calibrated, quality display would be a nice compliment to the dual rear cameras on both phones, allowing you to view the captured photos accurately. Previous Huawei phones have suffered from poor calibration, however, so we’ll take some measurements to see if there’s any improvement with the new P10s. As always, we use an X-Rite i1Pro 2 spectrophotometer for color measurements and an i1Display Pro colorimeter for luminance measurements, profiling it with SpectraCal’s CalMAN software.

Both the P10 and P10 Plus exceed 500 nits at peak brightness, a little shy of the 600+ nits a few phones can achieve, including Huawei’s Mate 9, and a little less than last year’s P9. It’s not clear if the P10’s backlight is using 20 LEDs like the P9 or if it has gone back to using 16 LEDs, which is more common for a 5-inch class display.

The values in the chart above were measured by setting the brightness manually. Many phones, especially those with OLED displays, can temporarily boost brightness to increase visibility in extreme cases such as direct sunlight when using the auto-brightness mode. The iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, for example, hit 706 and 618 nits, respectively, and Samsung’s Galaxy S7 hits 532 nits using this boost mode. The P10s do not have this auto-brightness boost feature; however, their peak brightness is still sufficient for outdoor use. At the other extreme, brightness drops all the way down to 2-3 nits at the minimum setting, making the P10s easy to use in a completely dark room.

Black level and contrast ratio are measured at the panel’s maximum brightness. Because black level increases with brightness, the numbers in the chart above are not directly comparable; however, after accounting for this effect, black levels for the iPhone 6s Plus, iPhone 7 Plus, Mi MIX, and both P10s are comparable, so the P10 displays are likely using photo-aligned crystals to improve black level and contrast ratio.

The phones with OLED panels are not shown in these charts because they are able to achieve a black level of zero and a mathematically infinite contrast ratio by being able to completely turn off individual pixels.

P10:                        

P10 Plus:                 

SpectraCal CalMAN

Huawei is notorious for calibrating its displays to an overly cool white point, and the P10s are no exception. With an average white point of about 8,400K when using the “Default” setting, a little higher than both the P9 and Mate 9, the P10s show an obvious blue tint when looking at a white screen. The imbalance between the blue and red primaries leads to poor grayscale accuracy. Average ΔE2000 grayscale error is greater than 6 with peak error reaching 8-10 at higher luminance values.

Like other Huawei phones, the P10s allow you to adjust the white point by selecting predefined “Cold” or “Warm” color temperature modes. You can also set a custom white point target by dragging a finger around a color wheel. The Cold setting shifts the average white point to about 9,000K, giving the screen an even darker blue tint. The Warm setting still shows a deficit in red, giving it an average white point of 7,400K, still well above the D65 target value, shifting the screen’s tint from blue to aqua.

The “Custom” white point setting for both the P10 and P10 Plus

Using the P10’s color wheel, I was able to adjust the RGB balance, giving a small boost to the red primary while pulling green closer to the ideal value. In the “Custom” graphs above, you can see how this reduces grayscale error over the full luminance range. Despite these improvements, I was not able to get average CCT below about 7,600K, so the screen still has a blue tint.

The P10s use adaptive display technology that adjusts both the backlight intensity and gamma based on the content being displayed and the ambient light conditions. This technology aims to reduce power consumption and improve the display’s visibility, especially when using the phone outdoors.

SpectraCal CalMAN

P10:                            

P10 Plus:                     

Both P10s use wide color gamut displays that nearly cover the entire DCI-P3 color space, only falling short of the blue target value. This leads to oversaturated colors when viewing content that targets the sRGB color space (shown by the inner triangle in the graphs above) because of Android’s lack of color management. The Default and Cold settings exhibit the greatest saturation error, especially for color shades beyond the 50% saturation level. There’s also a significant shift in hue towards blue because of the cool white point. The Warm and custom settings achieve a better RGB balance, significantly reducing both hue shift and saturation error to more acceptable levels, at least out to about the 60% mark. The P10s do not have an sRGB mode, so people that prefer accurate rather than vibrant colors are out of luck.

Measuring the spectral power distribution (SPD) of the P10 Plus’ backlight with a spectrometer shows how it and the smaller P10 cover a wider color gamut. Typical sRGB panels use blue LEDs, resulting in a sharp peak around 450nm. These are coated with a yellow photoreactive phosphor that creates smaller, broader peaks in the green and orange portions of the spectrum. The backlights used in the P10s still use blue LEDs, which is evident from the same sharp peak at 450nm, but the sharper peak output in the green and red portions of the spectrum are the result of using red and green phosphors instead of a single yellow phosphor.

P10:                        

P10 Plus:                 

SpectraCal CalMAN

Using the P10’s Default setting provides similar color accuracy to the Mate 9 and is a little better than the P9, both at their Default settings. For the colors tested, ΔE2000 error hovers around the critical threshold of 3, above which color error is easily noticeable. Most of the error results from the wide gamut panel and oversaturated colors, but the cool white point also produces significant hue shift. The Warm and customized settings produce better results by reducing the error from hue shift.

Our P10 and P10 Plus did not show any backlight bleed or issues with luminance uniformity. Viewing angles are also very good, avoiding the noticeable white, red-tinted glow that affects the Mate 9 even at shallow viewing angles. The P10s have some IPS glow, but it’s very minor when viewing the screen normally in portrait or landscape mode, only becoming noticeable when looking across the screen diagonally, which is not something you would normally do. There are not any significant issues when viewing the displays through polarized sunglasses either, with only a very slight reduction in brightness in landscape mode.

Display performance for the P10 and P10 Plus is similar to other recent Huawei phones. The wide gamut panels are bright enough to view outside and produce vibrant, but not particularly accurate, colors. They also share the same overly cool white point, which gives the screens a noticeable blue tint. Using the Warm setting, or adjusting the white point manually, improves both grayscale and color accuracy, but accuracy remains elusive even when using the manual option because of poor calibration. The viewing angle improvements are certainly a step in the right direction, but the P10s cannot match the display quality of other flagship phones.

Display Report: Huawei P10 and P10 Plus

Huawei recently added the P10 and P10 Plus to its lineup, which focus on fashion and photography like other P-series phones. The Huawei P10 has a 5.1-inch IPS LCD panel with a typical 1920×1080 resolution (431ppi) and a 16:9 aspect ratio. The P10 Plus, as its name implies, is an upscaled version of the P10, with a larger 5.5-inch IPS LCD panel. It also bumps resolution to 2560×1440 (534ppi), which is not really necessary for an IPS panel at this size. Both panels are covered with Gorilla Glass 5 and come with a plastic screen protector pre-applied. Some people may appreciate the extra protection included out of the box, but the cheap protector does not allow your finger to slide smoothly across the screen and gets gunked up with skin oil very quickly. The glass underneath does not appear to have an oleophobic coating either, which is an odd omission for a flagship phone.

A well-calibrated, quality display would be a nice compliment to the dual rear cameras on both phones, allowing you to view the captured photos accurately. Previous Huawei phones have suffered from poor calibration, however, so we’ll take some measurements to see if there’s any improvement with the new P10s. As always, we use an X-Rite i1Pro 2 spectrophotometer for color measurements and an i1Display Pro colorimeter for luminance measurements, profiling it with SpectraCal’s CalMAN software.

Both the P10 and P10 Plus exceed 500 nits at peak brightness, a little shy of the 600+ nits a few phones can achieve, including Huawei’s Mate 9, and a little less than last year’s P9. It’s not clear if the P10’s backlight is using 20 LEDs like the P9 or if it has gone back to using 16 LEDs, which is more common for a 5-inch class display.

The values in the chart above were measured by setting the brightness manually. Many phones, especially those with OLED displays, can temporarily boost brightness to increase visibility in extreme cases such as direct sunlight when using the auto-brightness mode. The iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, for example, hit 706 and 618 nits, respectively, and Samsung’s Galaxy S7 hits 532 nits using this boost mode. The P10s do not have this auto-brightness boost feature; however, their peak brightness is still sufficient for outdoor use. At the other extreme, brightness drops all the way down to 2-3 nits at the minimum setting, making the P10s easy to use in a completely dark room.

Black level and contrast ratio are measured at the panel’s maximum brightness. Because black level increases with brightness, the numbers in the chart above are not directly comparable; however, after accounting for this effect, black levels for the iPhone 6s Plus, iPhone 7 Plus, Mi MIX, and both P10s are comparable, so the P10 displays are likely using photo-aligned crystals to improve black level and contrast ratio.

The phones with OLED panels are not shown in these charts because they are able to achieve a black level of zero and a mathematically infinite contrast ratio by being able to completely turn off individual pixels.

P10:                        

P10 Plus:                 

SpectraCal CalMAN

Huawei is notorious for calibrating its displays to an overly cool white point, and the P10s are no exception. With an average white point of about 8,400K when using the “Default” setting, a little higher than both the P9 and Mate 9, the P10s show an obvious blue tint when looking at a white screen. The imbalance between the blue and red primaries leads to poor grayscale accuracy. Average ΔE2000 grayscale error is greater than 6 with peak error reaching 8-10 at higher luminance values.

Like other Huawei phones, the P10s allow you to adjust the white point by selecting predefined “Cold” or “Warm” color temperature modes. You can also set a custom white point target by dragging a finger around a color wheel. The Cold setting shifts the average white point to about 9,000K, giving the screen an even darker blue tint. The Warm setting still shows a deficit in red, giving it an average white point of 7,400K, still well above the D65 target value, shifting the screen’s tint from blue to aqua.

The “Custom” white point setting for both the P10 and P10 Plus

Using the P10’s color wheel, I was able to adjust the RGB balance, giving a small boost to the red primary while pulling green closer to the ideal value. In the “Custom” graphs above, you can see how this reduces grayscale error over the full luminance range. Despite these improvements, I was not able to get average CCT below about 7,600K, so the screen still has a blue tint.

The P10s use adaptive display technology that adjusts both the backlight intensity and gamma based on the content being displayed and the ambient light conditions. This technology aims to reduce power consumption and improve the display’s visibility, especially when using the phone outdoors.

SpectraCal CalMAN

P10:                            

P10 Plus:                     

Both P10s use wide color gamut displays that nearly cover the entire DCI-P3 color space, only falling short of the blue target value. This leads to oversaturated colors when viewing content that targets the sRGB color space (shown by the inner triangle in the graphs above) because of Android’s lack of color management. The Default and Cold settings exhibit the greatest saturation error, especially for color shades beyond the 50% saturation level. There’s also a significant shift in hue towards blue because of the cool white point. The Warm and custom settings achieve a better RGB balance, significantly reducing both hue shift and saturation error to more acceptable levels, at least out to about the 60% mark. The P10s do not have an sRGB mode, so people that prefer accurate rather than vibrant colors are out of luck.

Measuring the spectral power distribution (SPD) of the P10 Plus’ backlight with a spectrometer shows how it and the smaller P10 cover a wider color gamut. Typical sRGB panels use blue LEDs, resulting in a sharp peak around 450nm. These are coated with a yellow photoreactive phosphor that creates smaller, broader peaks in the green and orange portions of the spectrum. The backlights used in the P10s still use blue LEDs, which is evident from the same sharp peak at 450nm, but the sharper peak output in the green and red portions of the spectrum are the result of using red and green phosphors instead of a single yellow phosphor.

P10:                        

P10 Plus:                 

SpectraCal CalMAN

Using the P10’s Default setting provides similar color accuracy to the Mate 9 and is a little better than the P9, both at their Default settings. For the colors tested, ΔE2000 error hovers around the critical threshold of 3, above which color error is easily noticeable. Most of the error results from the wide gamut panel and oversaturated colors, but the cool white point also produces significant hue shift. The Warm and customized settings produce better results by reducing the error from hue shift.

Our P10 and P10 Plus did not show any backlight bleed or issues with luminance uniformity. Viewing angles are also very good, avoiding the noticeable white, red-tinted glow that affects the Mate 9 even at shallow viewing angles. The P10s have some IPS glow, but it’s very minor when viewing the screen normally in portrait or landscape mode, only becoming noticeable when looking across the screen diagonally, which is not something you would normally do. There are not any significant issues when viewing the displays through polarized sunglasses either, with only a very slight reduction in brightness in landscape mode.

Display performance for the P10 and P10 Plus is similar to other recent Huawei phones. The wide gamut panels are bright enough to view outside and produce vibrant, but not particularly accurate, colors. They also share the same overly cool white point, which gives the screens a noticeable blue tint. Using the Warm setting, or adjusting the white point manually, improves both grayscale and color accuracy, but accuracy remains elusive even when using the manual option because of poor calibration. The viewing angle improvements are certainly a step in the right direction, but the P10s cannot match the display quality of other flagship phones.