Like its Pro brother, the Xiaomi Mi 8 is a curvy glass-bodied phone set in a 7-series aluminium alloy frame. There’s also a more traditional fingerprint sensor on the back of the Xiaomi Mi 8, positioned just below and to the right of a dual-camera array. That fingerprint sensor might seem like a step back from the in-display alternative found in the Pro, but it’s actually a faster and more reliable way to gain access to the phone. For the display, Mi 8 has a large 6.21-inch AMOLED with a 2244 x 1080 resolution. As a result, colours really pop here, and there’s full HDR10 support for all relevant media. Conversely, there’s none of that uncanny over-saturation of which lesser AMOLED screens can be guilty of. All in all, this is a balanced, well-calibrated display. 

Powered by the Snapdragon 845 which is a very capable processor enables the phone to tackle anything you throw at it. For the camera, Mi 8 has the dual 12-megapixel rear camera setup. This is a very well-equipped camera system, with 4-axis OIS, 2x optical zoom, and an AI mode that smartly and reliably recognizes the scene you’re trying to capture (from an impressive-sounding 206 options), and makes the necessary tweaks to bolster the results. The quality of the shots taken with the Mi 8’s telephoto lens is pretty consistent with the main one, as long as you feed it with plenty of light. It has a much smaller aperture (f/2.4 versus f/1.8) and significantly smaller 1.0µm pixels (the main camera produces 1.4µm pixels), so zoomed-in low-light shots will be a lot grainier. You can also grab 1080p video at an impressive 120fps, or 4K at 30fps. There’s also a slow-motion mode that records footage at 240fps for super-silky slowed-down playback.