Yep, I suspect this is a xiaomi thing, not something really bad with the soc, as I would expect mediatek engineer to be able to test power consumption of their soc before releasing it to the market.
Yes, I had the Nord 2 and battery life was great. I think it is likley that anandtech got a faulty 11T unit or that 11T has some kind of software bug draining the battery. I am suprised that Andrei does not mention this a possible explanation for the results reported in this review.
Thanks for the test, especially taking a close look at power management of the SoCs! I guess the overheating issue with the 888 indicates both the appetite of the X1 for power, and the need for good thermal design when used in a close, confined space like a Smartphone. Almost looks as if Xiaomi assumed that designs for older, lower powered SoCs would work just fine with the 888, and was in for a nasty surprise when it didn't. It's too bad that Xiaomi seems to then insist on "improving" these phones with their idea of enhancement by software, which clearly doesn't work. Those results for the Dimensity are also surprising, and not in a good way. The temperatures measured remind me of an old phone with the SD 808 many years ago; probably the worst SoC QC I ever had the displeasure of owning.
Curious if Xiaomi is using 'power' cells instead of 'energy' cells on their phones. Or if they are simply pushing energy cells with obscene C rates (at 4V * 4Ah, that's a mere 16 Wh of energy capacity), charging this at 100+ Watts to full is basically 6+ C charging rates.
Either they have great battery tech, not sure who is their supplier for these... or the customer will just have to contend with rapid aging of their battery as they fast charge it everyday.
Hence you should disable fast charging and only enable it when your really need it. Plus not go below 20% too often and not leave it plugged in at 100% overnight.
Myself I have a balance between battery and lifestyle. I'm not rearranging my life around battery longevity and I've a local phone shop that does reasonably priced battery swaps. You lose waterproofing, though. I slow charge with a slow wireless charger overnight (to preserve the USB port which is a known weakness on my phone) and have "fast cable charging" disabled. So when I go on holiday, I take a normal wired charger and the super fast one. The super fast cable charging is enabled but there's no way of mixing it up as it's the only time I ever use that charger and I have to consciously get it. When you're in a rush, the last thing you want to do is mess around with charging options.
It's not the most optimal solution for battery life, but I also bought a phone with a battery that would easily last a day and a half when I got it, so there is room to drop before it really impacts my routine.
I'll be very interested to see what this article has to say on the effect of fast charging on battery life. It's infuriating that people just aren't aware of the problems to the point that they'll actively challenge something that has been well established for decades - fast charging repeatedly damages batteries.
Well, it is becoming more and more difficult to achieve the miracles vendors want to sell and consumers want to brag about...
But will consumers be unhappy with these devices, even when they are throttled to where they no longer burn their fingers (and the battery)? Probably not.
The main message for me is: Little benefit from new devices in terms of performance.
Limited battery life time, ever more fragile devices and limited software support unfortunately won't let us just keep our existing phones until things get interesting again.
Well thanks for your work an article on those FTL charging methods would be greatly appreciated.
I do have a suspicion that something is wrong with "charges in 15 minutes and 120W in phone thing" when the basics are still lithium ions and cobalt oxide housing. They do not like high currents and high temperatures. And nobody talks about negatives. All I see is fanboys screaming "ur phone charges slower than a snail !"
So a thorough deep dive would be appreciated. Should I charge my notebook at 5W then ?
Probably not at 5, but not at 120W either. For every battery chemistry and build quality there is a "maximum" charging speed for which there is no heat accumulation and no separator damage. If it's a "power" cell, aka a cell with a thinner and more permeable separator, then you can charge at higher power, but you get less Wh per volume. Power cells also tend to get higher self-discharge. At 5000mAh, so 5Ah, for an average 3.8V, 1C charging is 18W. 18W is surely safe, and probably somwere between 18 and 36W is safe too below 80% SoC. For more than that, it depends on the cell, heatsink/phone and charging curve - which is why I'm with Andrei on testing the battery inside the phone, as opposed to on a table with open airflow and maybe too keeping temps in check.
There is already so much one can do with lithium and cobalt (or manganese sometimes).. what it boils down to is how good the design is and how well it's manufactured. Remember years back when we worried about whether 15W quick charging would lead to shortened lifespan compared to 5W charging? You could say back then designs were less advanced - production methods were not as refined, and the product has to be perfect btw, one mistake and a fire erupts in someone's pocket.
I'm of course curious about how much degradation happens at 120w peaks compared to 15 or 25w. Someone will have to test that long-term. And then we'll have to ask whether that's significant or practically meaningful. Degradation is not really a fixed percentage; it's more like an added resistor to the battery. Draw high testing current and you'll see much higher % aging than if you draw low current. All that is relative to battery size. That's why Apple had that "fiasco" with performance throttling on older iPhones. Their battery designs tend to be smaller and more conservative (less cutting-edge). I will say I appreciate seeing a contrasting manufacturer who keeps pushing the edge - all this research prepares us for what we might see as standard tomorrow.
Small (but funny typo): after making a point of talking about how Xiaomi has dropped the Mi branding from the 11T series, you then proceed to call them just that in the spec comparison table right afterwards haha
IMO a 108MP camera that gets binned down to 27MP is no better than a 48MP camera that gets binned down to 12MP (8.3MP for 4K image + EIS margin). Massive waste of sensor area.
(And no, it's not for 8K photo/video, that would require a sensor that gets resolved to at least 33MP)
It's nona-binning...108MP to 12MP... With binning, pixel's size is 2.1microns (3x0.7) On 48MP, pixel's size is 1.6microns (2x0.8) Light received by pixel is (2.1/1.6)^2=1.72. Pixels received +72% light compared to 48MP
I use 50MP IMX766 on Nord 2. Binned Pixel's size is 2.0microns...in low light conditions, it has nothing to do with most 48MP sensors.
Lack of OIS is the weakness on these devices, not sensor.
From the label, it looks like this charger only achieves 120w output when it is connected to a 220~240V AC supply. (Otherwise, the max output at when connected to 120V AC is only 96W) Was this tested in the US or in Europe? The output rating on the label should be a true output rating, and not a measurement of input power consumed.
not only does 120w charging is crazy, it also appears to charge at a high rate even at 80% battery state. tricks I know is to use two batteries in series and using larger capacity batteries than advertised or lower voltage cutoff. however, those tricks don't appear enough to get up to 120w.
very much agreed I will not ever go for an iPhone sorry... but I want the size in between something like the 13 mini and the regular 13 or just a smidge smaller than the s21, the s21 is actually almost perfect coming from an s10e I hope the overall size of the 22 is slightly smaller or the same size as the s10e
So, on a phone like this, how would that work with US carriers? It's not officially sold here, will it work with VoLTE or will these phones be bricks once the 3G networks go down?
ATT and verizon are very picky about what is allowed, and while most US sold phones are supported they say nothign about xaiomi.
If you ever own a fast charging phone and power meter, you will know the 'algorithm' behind the fast charging. The charge current is reduce in staggered, however from what i saw, it is based on temperature capped rather than preset according to SoC. You will noticed that it will reduce the charge in order to keep temperature under 40'C. So if your phone temperature is at the high side when you plug in the charger, the fastest charge rate will not even activated/sustained for any longer, however it will sustain longer if the charge temperature is low. I'm using the Mi 11 Ultra with 67W charger, to preserve the battery life i normally charge using my old QC3.0 samsung charger at home and only charge until 4.3V which is 85-90% full, the sustain charge current is at around 3.5A for the whole charging period. The bundle 67W Xiaomi charger serve as my quick 'travel' charger where i will use when i need a fast top up, which not often based on my use case.
Installation of monitoring apps can show problems with CPU behavior...why wasn't it done on the first test? ROM was responsible of the problem.
Problem with Anandtech is how fast they're to accuse Mediatek without asking them questions on how the device and sometime some benchmarks (such as PCMark) behave. That was already the same with so called cheating.
Unfortunatelly post people won't read the corrected article. The damage is done! Should made a separate article to apologize! Premade thought leads to unfair review.
The Cortex X1 is a bad core. Not bulldozer bad but pentium hot/bad/inneficient, which is doubly bad in a mobile environment. ARM added lots of cache and didn't add enough functional units to make it worthwhile. It's half the M1 design - all the cache but lacks the pipeline. bad.
Hot Take 2
Manufacturers (qualcom/xiaomi) know this but can't avoid using latest/"best" core in their latest designs because product spec sheets > actual real world utility.
Hot Take 3
Manufacturers know this too (hot take 2) but still need to use the "bad" X1 cores in their flagships because they need to be "flagship". But the core is crappy and give bad battery life. So they're compensating by essentially disabling as much as they can. (pretty much fact and not hot take)
A ide Hot Take 4
Snapdragon 888 is a "bad" chip too, and not just the X1 core, also the GPU. Quallcomm use the node advantage (5 vs 7nm) to squeeze extra frequency out of their designs, They claim +50% ALU in the new chip (vs 865) but/and clock it at 840 vs 650MHz (+29%). But performance is only +25%. There's real world evidence that the 888 runs hot and thermally throttles in phones way earlier than 865, despite being on 5nm -
So valuable information. But I have heard Xiaomi has a heating issue and lags after using a while. IDK it's true or just a fake review is given by a user. https://saverzon.com/
We’ve updated our terms. By continuing to use the site and/or by logging into your account, you agree to the Site’s updated Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
41 Comments
Back to Article
arayoflight - Wednesday, September 15, 2021 - link
The battery life test of D1200 phone is rather surprising. The OnePlus Nord 2 which uses the same chipset does pretty well in GSMArena's battery test: https://fdn.gsmarena.com/imgroot/reviews/21/oneplu...yeeeeman - Wednesday, September 15, 2021 - link
Yep, I suspect this is a xiaomi thing, not something really bad with the soc, as I would expect mediatek engineer to be able to test power consumption of their soc before releasing it to the market.flipp0 - Thursday, September 16, 2021 - link
Yes, I had the Nord 2 and battery life was great. I think it is likley that anandtech got a faulty 11T unit or that 11T has some kind of software bug draining the battery. I am suprised that Andrei does not mention this a possible explanation for the results reported in this review.Spunjji - Monday, September 20, 2021 - link
Crappy software. Glad to see they fixed it, but that was pretty poor to be releasing a review unit in such a bad state.eastcoast_pete - Wednesday, September 15, 2021 - link
Thanks for the test, especially taking a close look at power management of the SoCs! I guess the overheating issue with the 888 indicates both the appetite of the X1 for power, and the need for good thermal design when used in a close, confined space like a Smartphone. Almost looks as if Xiaomi assumed that designs for older, lower powered SoCs would work just fine with the 888, and was in for a nasty surprise when it didn't.It's too bad that Xiaomi seems to then insist on "improving" these phones with their idea of enhancement by software, which clearly doesn't work. Those results for the Dimensity are also surprising, and not in a good way.
The temperatures measured remind me of an old phone with the SD 808 many years ago; probably the worst SoC QC I ever had the displeasure of owning.
shabby - Wednesday, September 15, 2021 - link
Interesting to see the price difference when the only difference is the soc, Qualcomm sure charges a premium.shabby - Wednesday, September 15, 2021 - link
But ouch that battery life, shirley some software updates might fix this?Spunjji - Monday, September 20, 2021 - link
And they did!PEJUman - Wednesday, September 15, 2021 - link
Curious if Xiaomi is using 'power' cells instead of 'energy' cells on their phones. Or if they are simply pushing energy cells with obscene C rates (at 4V * 4Ah, that's a mere 16 Wh of energy capacity), charging this at 100+ Watts to full is basically 6+ C charging rates.Either they have great battery tech, not sure who is their supplier for these... or the customer will just have to contend with rapid aging of their battery as they fast charge it everyday.
DanNeely - Wednesday, September 15, 2021 - link
Killing batteries early goes right with making battery replacement difficult as a means to drive more sales of new phones.beginner99 - Thursday, September 16, 2021 - link
Hence you should disable fast charging and only enable it when your really need it. Plus not go below 20% too often and not leave it plugged in at 100% overnight.philehidiot - Thursday, September 16, 2021 - link
Myself I have a balance between battery and lifestyle. I'm not rearranging my life around battery longevity and I've a local phone shop that does reasonably priced battery swaps. You lose waterproofing, though. I slow charge with a slow wireless charger overnight (to preserve the USB port which is a known weakness on my phone) and have "fast cable charging" disabled. So when I go on holiday, I take a normal wired charger and the super fast one. The super fast cable charging is enabled but there's no way of mixing it up as it's the only time I ever use that charger and I have to consciously get it. When you're in a rush, the last thing you want to do is mess around with charging options.It's not the most optimal solution for battery life, but I also bought a phone with a battery that would easily last a day and a half when I got it, so there is room to drop before it really impacts my routine.
I'll be very interested to see what this article has to say on the effect of fast charging on battery life. It's infuriating that people just aren't aware of the problems to the point that they'll actively challenge something that has been well established for decades - fast charging repeatedly damages batteries.
timecop1818 - Wednesday, September 15, 2021 - link
xiaomi makes a lot of USB power banks, so they should have experience with high charge/discharge battery cellsssdj - Thursday, September 16, 2021 - link
Xiaomi has a share in sunwoda, world's leading battery manufacturer on par with coslight.abufrejoval - Wednesday, September 15, 2021 - link
Well, it is becoming more and more difficult to achieve the miracles vendors want to sell and consumers want to brag about...But will consumers be unhappy with these devices, even when they are throttled to where they no longer burn their fingers (and the battery)? Probably not.
The main message for me is: Little benefit from new devices in terms of performance.
Limited battery life time, ever more fragile devices and limited software support unfortunately won't let us just keep our existing phones until things get interesting again.
GC2:CS - Wednesday, September 15, 2021 - link
Well thanks for your work an article on those FTL charging methods would be greatly appreciated.I do have a suspicion that something is wrong with "charges in 15 minutes and 120W in phone thing" when the basics are still lithium ions and cobalt oxide housing. They do not like high currents and high temperatures. And nobody talks about negatives. All I see is fanboys screaming "ur phone charges slower than a snail !"
So a thorough deep dive would be appreciated. Should I charge my notebook at 5W then ?
dragosmp - Wednesday, September 15, 2021 - link
Probably not at 5, but not at 120W either. For every battery chemistry and build quality there is a "maximum" charging speed for which there is no heat accumulation and no separator damage. If it's a "power" cell, aka a cell with a thinner and more permeable separator, then you can charge at higher power, but you get less Wh per volume. Power cells also tend to get higher self-discharge. At 5000mAh, so 5Ah, for an average 3.8V, 1C charging is 18W. 18W is surely safe, and probably somwere between 18 and 36W is safe too below 80% SoC. For more than that, it depends on the cell, heatsink/phone and charging curve - which is why I'm with Andrei on testing the battery inside the phone, as opposed to on a table with open airflow and maybe too keeping temps in check.Wrs - Wednesday, September 15, 2021 - link
There is already so much one can do with lithium and cobalt (or manganese sometimes).. what it boils down to is how good the design is and how well it's manufactured. Remember years back when we worried about whether 15W quick charging would lead to shortened lifespan compared to 5W charging? You could say back then designs were less advanced - production methods were not as refined, and the product has to be perfect btw, one mistake and a fire erupts in someone's pocket.I'm of course curious about how much degradation happens at 120w peaks compared to 15 or 25w. Someone will have to test that long-term. And then we'll have to ask whether that's significant or practically meaningful. Degradation is not really a fixed percentage; it's more like an added resistor to the battery. Draw high testing current and you'll see much higher % aging than if you draw low current. All that is relative to battery size. That's why Apple had that "fiasco" with performance throttling on older iPhones. Their battery designs tend to be smaller and more conservative (less cutting-edge). I will say I appreciate seeing a contrasting manufacturer who keeps pushing the edge - all this research prepares us for what we might see as standard tomorrow.
NextGen_Gamer - Wednesday, September 15, 2021 - link
Small (but funny typo): after making a point of talking about how Xiaomi has dropped the Mi branding from the 11T series, you then proceed to call them just that in the spec comparison table right afterwards hahaAndrei Frumusanu - Wednesday, September 15, 2021 - link
Thanks, I had written the header table before Xiaomi emphasised the Mi removal.mingogomes - Wednesday, September 15, 2021 - link
Hey Andrei,On your battery test of PCMark, can you tell me what brightness settings you were using?
Max, 50% or low?
Thanks
5j3rul3 - Wednesday, September 15, 2021 - link
Hope there's more info and review about those extremely fast cahrge system, such as:Oppo
125W / 65W
40W / 30W WL
vivo (iQOO)
120W / 55W / 44W
50W WL
Xiaomi (RedMi, POCO, Blackshark) 120W / 67W / 65W / 50W
80W / 67W / 50W WL
Lenovo
100W
RedMagic
100W / 55W
Qualcomm
100W
HUAWEI
66W / 40W
66W / 40W / 27W WL
RealMe
65W
50W WL
5j3rul3 - Wednesday, September 15, 2021 - link
Adjustment:OnePlus
65W
50W WL
Honor
100W / 66W
50W WL
RedMagic
120W / 100W
ASUS
65W
5j3rul3 - Wednesday, September 15, 2021 - link
Is there any Mi 11T series' camera review?Or just wait iPhone 13 and other smartphones to have a 21H2 smartphone cam battle?
Andrei Frumusanu - Wednesday, September 15, 2021 - link
I didn't have time to do camera, in general expect lacklustre results worse than the Mi 11.Wereweeb - Wednesday, September 15, 2021 - link
IMO a 108MP camera that gets binned down to 27MP is no better than a 48MP camera that gets binned down to 12MP (8.3MP for 4K image + EIS margin). Massive waste of sensor area.(And no, it's not for 8K photo/video, that would require a sensor that gets resolved to at least 33MP)
Plumplum - Monday, September 20, 2021 - link
It's nona-binning...108MP to 12MP...With binning, pixel's size is 2.1microns (3x0.7)
On 48MP, pixel's size is 1.6microns (2x0.8)
Light received by pixel is (2.1/1.6)^2=1.72.
Pixels received +72% light compared to 48MP
I use 50MP IMX766 on Nord 2. Binned Pixel's size is 2.0microns...in low light conditions, it has nothing to do with most 48MP sensors.
Lack of OIS is the weakness on these devices, not sensor.
pfactor - Wednesday, September 15, 2021 - link
From the label, it looks like this charger only achieves 120w output when it is connected to a 220~240V AC supply. (Otherwise, the max output at when connected to 120V AC is only 96W) Was this tested in the US or in Europe?The output rating on the label should be a true output rating, and not a measurement of input power consumed.
ArcadeEngineer - Thursday, September 16, 2021 - link
Andrei lives in Luxembourg, so 230v.Andrei Frumusanu - Thursday, September 16, 2021 - link
I measured 115W on the AC side.zodiacfml - Wednesday, September 15, 2021 - link
not only does 120w charging is crazy, it also appears to charge at a high rate even at 80% battery state. tricks I know is to use two batteries in series and using larger capacity batteries than advertised or lower voltage cutoff. however, those tricks don't appear enough to get up to 120w.yetanotherhuman - Thursday, September 16, 2021 - link
It'd be nice to see some phones again one day, and not just phablets.Linustechtips12 - Thursday, September 16, 2021 - link
very much agreed I will not ever go for an iPhone sorry... but I want the size in between something like the 13 mini and the regular 13 or just a smidge smaller than the s21, the s21 is actually almost perfect coming from an s10e I hope the overall size of the 22 is slightly smaller or the same size as the s10eTheinsanegamerN - Friday, September 17, 2021 - link
So, on a phone like this, how would that work with US carriers? It's not officially sold here, will it work with VoLTE or will these phones be bricks once the 3G networks go down?ATT and verizon are very picky about what is allowed, and while most US sold phones are supported they say nothign about xaiomi.
coolkwc - Sunday, September 19, 2021 - link
If you ever own a fast charging phone and power meter, you will know the 'algorithm' behind the fast charging. The charge current is reduce in staggered, however from what i saw, it is based on temperature capped rather than preset according to SoC. You will noticed that it will reduce the charge in order to keep temperature under 40'C. So if your phone temperature is at the high side when you plug in the charger, the fastest charge rate will not even activated/sustained for any longer, however it will sustain longer if the charge temperature is low. I'm using the Mi 11 Ultra with 67W charger, to preserve the battery life i normally charge using my old QC3.0 samsung charger at home and only charge until 4.3V which is 85-90% full, the sustain charge current is at around 3.5A for the whole charging period. The bundle 67W Xiaomi charger serve as my quick 'travel' charger where i will use when i need a fast top up, which not often based on my use case.Plumplum - Monday, September 20, 2021 - link
Installation of monitoring apps can show problems with CPU behavior...why wasn't it done on the first test?ROM was responsible of the problem.
Problem with Anandtech is how fast they're to accuse Mediatek without asking them questions on how the device and sometime some benchmarks (such as PCMark) behave.
That was already the same with so called cheating.
Unfortunatelly post people won't read the corrected article. The damage is done!
Should made a separate article to apologize!
Premade thought leads to unfair review.
iphonebestgamephone - Saturday, September 25, 2021 - link
Nothing was wrong in cheating one back then. Mediatek not including the cheat mode in dimensity should be enough to tell you all about it.xol - Monday, September 20, 2021 - link
Hot take 1The Cortex X1 is a bad core. Not bulldozer bad but pentium hot/bad/inneficient, which is doubly bad in a mobile environment. ARM added lots of cache and didn't add enough functional units to make it worthwhile. It's half the M1 design - all the cache but lacks the pipeline. bad.
Hot Take 2
Manufacturers (qualcom/xiaomi) know this but can't avoid using latest/"best" core in their latest designs because product spec sheets > actual real world utility.
Hot Take 3
Manufacturers know this too (hot take 2) but still need to use the "bad" X1 cores in their flagships because they need to be "flagship". But the core is crappy and give bad battery life. So they're compensating by essentially disabling as much as they can. (pretty much fact and not hot take)
A ide Hot Take 4
Snapdragon 888 is a "bad" chip too, and not just the X1 core, also the GPU. Quallcomm use the node advantage (5 vs 7nm) to squeeze extra frequency out of their designs, They claim +50% ALU in the new chip (vs 865) but/and clock it at 840 vs 650MHz (+29%). But performance is only +25%. There's real world evidence that the 888 runs hot and thermally throttles in phones way earlier than 865, despite being on 5nm -
sweetca - Tuesday, September 21, 2021 - link
I prefer my spying domestic.Yourdailytask - Thursday, September 23, 2021 - link
hello admingrate post
saverzon - Friday, October 8, 2021 - link
So valuable information. But I have heard Xiaomi has a heating issue and lags after using a while. IDK it's true or just a fake review is given by a user. https://saverzon.com/