Xiaomi Mi Max review: Hulked up

Gallery

The Xiaomi Mi Max comes with a custom MIUI gallery app. It defaults to showing all photos, but the tabs clearly divide them into three categories - offline (photos on the device), Cloud (Mi Account only) and finally People. This relies on the Mi Cloud face recognition to sort photos by the people in them.

All photos • Offline media • Cloud (Mi Account) • Face recognition

The editor is simple, but capable. The basics (rotation and crops) are covered, as are filters, adjustments and even free-style drawing.

Sharing and editing an image

Music Player

The MIUI music player has a strong focus on music streaming with online charts, online radio and music videos. Track recognition is available too, powered by ACRCloud.

Music streaming • Offline music • Now playing • Additional options

Switching over to the My Music tab brings a more familiar experience for playing music that's available on your local storage. The player can display lyrics on your homescreen for a homebrew karaoke experience. Or if you want to let the professionals do it, you can buy tickets for a concert through the app.

Digging into the sound settings we find a surprisingly rich set of options. You can adjust what headset buttons do and, better yet, load a preset for the type of headphones you're using.

Audio settings • Equalizer • Headset presets • Headset controls

This covers many Xiaomi Mi headphones, but also generic in-ear ones. A 7-band equalizer is available for manual tuning.

You get access to old school FM Radio too. It doesn't support RDS, but it has goodies like broadcast recording and a sleep timer.

Video player

There's no dedicated video player app (Mi Video is another online streaming service), the Gallery app handles things instead.

The video player is part of the gallery

The interface is fairly basic but in the settings menu you can control the volume and screen brightness. There's an "enhance audio" toggle and one that controls the aspect ratio.

Stellar audio output

The Xiaomi Mi Max got perfect scores in the active external amplifier part of our audio quality test. The smartphone's output was clean, while its loudness was up there with the best, making up for one of the best showings out there.

Even more impressively, plugging in a pair of headphones causes next to no distortion - outside of a moderate hike in stereo crosstalk there are no affected readings. The volume levels stay high, too, for an impressive showing.

Here go the results so you can do your comparisons.

Test	Frequency response	Noise level	Dynamic range	THD	IMD + Noise	Stereo crosstalk
Xiaomi Mi Max	+0.01, -0.03	-93.5	93.5	0.0029	0.0068	-93.8
Xiaomi Mi Max (headphones attached)	+0.04, -0.02	-93.4	93.3	0.034	0.035	-57.7
Huawei Mate 8	+0.01, -0.03	-97.8	99.1	0.0054	0.0087	-97.3
Huawei Mate 8 (headphones attached)	+0.02, -0.09	-97.3	97.9	0.015	0.078	-81.3
Nokia Lumia 950 XL	+0.01, -0.08	-91.6	91.7	0.0035	0.012	-89.3
Nokia Lumia 950 XL (headphones attached)	+0.48, -0.07	-90.4	91.5	0.011	0.293	-55.6
Apple iPhone 6 Plus	+0.04, -0.04	-94.0	94.0	0.0013	0.0064	-72.0
Apple iPhone 6 Plus (headphones attached)	+0.10, -0.04	-94.0	93.9	0.0016	0.087	-64.1

Xiaomi Mi Max frequency response

You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.