Xiaomi's Mi Mix Has The Best Battery Life On Any Smartphone I've Ever Seen

Chinese smartphones in general have a few distinctive traits that separate them from everyone else (Samsung, LG, HTC, Sony, etc).

They are:

1: square-ish app icons that resemble how apps look on iPhones

2: a few Chinese bloatware apps that send you unwanted notifications, and banner ads that fill up the whole screen should you open the app (some companies, like Xiaomi and Huawei, let you disable them forever - thank god)

3: the "pull down from the homescreen to search within the phone" thing that most people in the West associate with iPhones

and

4: giant batteries (1000 mAH usually larger than the batteries found on Samsung / LG / Apple / Sony / HTC phones) with very aggressive optimization settings that often break push notifications

The last one results in amazing battery life on Chinese phones. Of course, everyone outside of China would probably sacrifice a bit of battery life for a phone with working notifications. And while I can not speak for the likes of Oppo Gionee or, I can say that Xiaomi's phones, even with the battery unnecessarily strict optimization option turned off, still have insanely good battery life. Like, you-can-leave-your-house-and-9am-and-come-home-and-midnight-with -50% -Battery life good.

I've been using the Xiaomi Mi Mix as my daily driver all week, but today was the first day I really pushed the phone's battery limits. I unplugged the phone and 10am, stepped out of the house and then had a full day out that included streaming Spotify for an hour, playing Zynga Poker for another two hours (requires data), watched a bit of YouTube, took a bunch of photos , used Google Maps to navigate, and even right now, as I'm typing this at 1 am 34, I have 41% left on my battery.  

I've used something like 15 different color as my daily driver over the past year and this type of battery life is unheard of for me. When I used my Motorola V10 last year, I'd start the day on a similar schedule and by 7pm I'd be down to 10%. With the Samsung Galaxy Note 7, I'd need to recharge the battery by 8 or 9pm. My Mix Mi still has 41% battery left. At this rate, I'll go to bed with the phone unplugged, wake up tomorrow and probably make it to well almost dinner time before the phone gives out.

And I want to reiterate that I'm getting this type of battery life after shutting down all of the battery optimization settings in Xiaomi's software, the MIUI. I even went into developer mode and turned off memory optimization (basically, this let all apps run in the background without interference), because it was the only way to fix the broken push notifications.

On top of this, I have also been using the app Glance Plus, which brings something similar to the Always On display found on Nokia and Samsung phones to my Mi Mix. This, of course, eats up extra battery because it effectively leaves on my phone's screen.

After all that I'm still getting four hours of screen on time ... with 41% battery left. That means I'm on pace for like seven or eight hours of screen on time.

And this is not just the Mi Mix and its 4,400 mAH battery. On my Mi Note 2 , I've been using the phone for a few hours gaming and so far I've racked up three hours of screen on time, and my battery is at 65%. 

Bravo, Xiaomi, bravo.