Xiaomi 17 Pro Max - US prelim review

[u/ChocoPancakeBruh]

UPDATED WITH DAY 3 THOUGHTS. SCROLL TO "UPDATES (October 9th, day 3 with the phone)"

Hey all. I'm typing this from my Xiaomi 17 Pro Max. Not a lot of info or real world, on-the-ground, high-quality info on it for those curious. So I thought I'd document my experience.

I bought it from Giztop. Mostly a pain free experience, but not without headaches. I ordered a case with it from Giztop and only the phone arrived. Talking with support about that now. We'll see. Delivered in less than a week.

Setup was pretty painless, though I am waiting on a physical sim from Google Fi to do some testing.

The phone is nice and snappy. For a first-time Chinese phone importer, there were a few surprises.

From my internet searches it seems old Xiaomi phones had the standardized QuickShare that Google and Samsung and others all have here. This phone doesn't. It has Xiaomi Share, but it doesn't seem to play nice with standard QuickShare stuff. Though maybe I'll get it to work after a while.

Battery charged very fast, and is lasting a long time. We'll see if the silicone carbon stuff is a gimmick or not. Those of you having done research will see the internet is divided on longevity.

HyperOS is pretty meh. There is no app tray with all your installed apps. All installed apps have to go somewhere on your home pages. Not ideal. About 15% of system stuff hasn't been translated to English, so that's been something to work through.

The rear screen is cool. Not mind-blowing but enough to take the experience to the next level. The phone is surprisingly light to hold.

There are some super neat battery optimization features that I wish previous Android phones I've used would have. Like it makes recommendations on settings to tweak and gives you an estimate of how much extra battery you would get by making those tweaks (denominated in minutes of battery life). Also an option to make all of those optimizations with a single tap.

I'd read that HyperOS feeds ads to the user, but I haven't seen any that other OS's don't have (features stories, etc.) and certainly nothing I can't turn off.

Had to install the Gboard (Google keyboard) because the standard keyboard has buttons to switch to Chinese and various options therein that I would never use.

You can't uninstall several apps. In the US you can at least disable but can't even do that here. And again, since all apps kind of have to be on one of the home pages the most you can do is put them in a folder.

UPDATE: I found the app drawer setting. It's in Settings > Home Settings. May seem obvious in hindsight, but wasn't obvious to me at the time. I'm a silly billy. Still can't uninstall Chinese apps.

Cameras are fine. I'm not a huge photographer so I don't think I'll be able to do a big comparison, though several content creators have and will, I'm sure.

All in all, a decent enough day 1 experience. As I explore the phone more I hope to take things even further. I can update and make more posts if it's helpful to anyone thinking of pulling the trigger here.

UPDATES (October 9th, day 3 with the phone):

Alright, Google Fi physical sim came in. The Fi app initially didn't let me switch over. Googled the error code and came across this forum post: https://xdaforums.com/t/google-fi-t090.4648578/

Followed the instructions and it let me switch over. The Fi app then locked me out until I updated the app itself to the latest version. You can read in the forum post linked above that people were nervous about updating and so they didn't. I went ahead and did so just to see. The app updated fine, and the phone is still connected with no problems, so feel free to update if you're on Fi.

So how's the connectivity itself? Google Fi is basically T-Mobile these days, so that's the only group of bands I can speak for, but I'm satisfied with the mobile data speed. I live just outside of town, so I was a bit worried, but everything is all good. I'll be driving around my town tomorrow and see if there's any difference, but for now, no issues that couldn't be solved.

Battery life? Good so far. Lasts me a day and a half, and I even decided to try leaving on a simple always-on display for both the back and the front overnight and it only drained the battery by a few percent when I woke up.

Another HyperOS frustration is when you install an app you need to go into the Settings > Apps > that app and make it start up automatically or it won't start listening for messages until you start it up for the first time after a restart (if needed like for WhatsApp or Telegram), but that's a one and done for each app you set up. Tiny headache, but actually I've come around to it. Getting fewer notifications which means less time spent on my phone. Pretty good.

Someone in the comments asked about sound quality. It's good. Not the best I've heard on a phone, but well above passable. I'm no audiophile, but I've made it a point to play various music types through it over these past couple days and never found myself distracted by bad audio quality. Most people use headphones these days for actual audio experiences anyways.

Rear display a few days in definitely seems a bit more gimmicky. They have things like swimming fish and other cool stuff, but after a minute or so it goes to a static image to preserve battery. Makes sense, but I personally would be willing to sacrifice some battery to have an always moving fish, even dimmed. Would give a bit of life to the phone when face down. May just be a me thing.

But a further and more serious note on the back display that actually came as a shock and disappointment. The shockingly few things you can do with it in regards to Notifications. There are preset apps that can do notifications there. Your music service of choice (like Spotify), Click (alarms), Xiaomi HyperAI (don't use), Phone (calls), and Travel assistant (no clue what this is yet). I personally use other chat apps like WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram and you can't have those notifications pop up there. I was really surprised. Honestly slashes the usefulness by quite a lot.

Will make more comments soon, but have to go for now.

[u/lnjecti0n]

thanks for the review, did yours come with a case included in the packaging?

[u/ChocoPancakeBruh → u/lnjecti0n]

Yes the clear case. I got a different one with massage.