If you follow Xiaomi’s releases at the start of the year, you’re surely completely confused by the end of the year with the sheer amount of variants the company produces. That being said, Xiaomi is still the king as far as producing phones that give you a bang for your buck.
For the sheer experience in hand, thanks to it’s incredibly slim body and gorgeous display, the Xiaomi Mi 11 Lite 5G NE gives you most of what it’s predecessor offers at an attractive price point.
The global chip shortage has had many an effect on various industries including the smartphone industry. The Xiaomi Mi 11 Lite 5G NE seems to be one such device. With the only glaring difference being that the Mi 11 Lite 5G NE has a one generation older processor compared to its older sibling the Mi 11 Lite 5G, the phones are pretty much identical. Like the Mi 11 Lite 5G, the NE model also continues to impress us.
Design
The best aspect of the Xiaomi 11 Lite NE 5G is the design. With the aluminium frame, glass sandwich design, super slim profile and lightweight, you simply cannot get a phone that looks and feels so great in your hands in this segment.
Xiaomi Mi 11 Lite 5G NE Design and build (Image Source: The Indian Express/ Chetan Nayak)
Even areas where brands often cut corners, like the buttons on the side, feel perfectly positioned and are not wobbly at all. Also, if you happen to be someone who likes a case on their phone, do everyone a favour and skip the Diamond Dazzle colour variant, which looks absolutely fabulous.
Note that there is no 3.5mm headphone port here, but Xiaomi will throw in a USB-C to 3.5mm adapter in the retail package.
Display
The Xiaomi Mi 11 Lite 5G NE packs the same 6.55-inch display, with a 1080 x 2400 resolution and a 90Hz refresh rate, as the Mi 11 Lite 5G.
Like the the Mi 11 Lite 5G, this NE model has the added benefit of being an AMOLED panel.  not just any AMOLED, but one with 10-bit color depth support, which is capable of outputting 1.07 billion colors (64 times  more than the Mi 10 Lite).
You also get the usual AMOLED benefit of being able to output true blacks, which really comes into its own with the always-on display and subtle edge notification lighting animations.
Camera
The Xiaomi Mi 11 lite 5G NE comes with the same triple camera setup on the back as the Mi 11 Lite. Your main attention will be on the 1/1.97-inch 64MP wide sensor, which features an f/1.79 aperture and a 6-element lens system. By default, this captures 16MP shots through using a 4-in-1 pixel binning technique.
These shots can look great in good lighting. On a couple of sunny days, we were able to capture some genuinely striking shots of flowers bursting with vibrant color, with that wide aperture yielding buckets of natural bokeh.
Courstey By: The Indian Express
Xiaomi Mi 11 Lite 5G NE camera (Image Source: The Indian Express/ Chetan Nayak)
Xiaomi’s AI assistant generally does well at picking out the appropriate scene profile, and the color balance – while on the punchier side of natural – rarely rings false. The company’s image processing game is strong.
The 8MP 1/4-inch ultra-wide sensor really isn’t up to anything like the same standard, whether you’re talking about detail levels or color balance. Shots taken with this secondary sensor tend to look murky and distinctly lacking in detail, with bags of mushy noise towards the edges.
Battery life
The Xiaomi Mi 11 Lite 5G NE comes with a 4,250mAh battery. That’s not small by any means, but it is a fair bit more compact than the 4,820mAh Mi 10T Lite cell, and way less than the 5,160mAh battery of the Poco X3 NFC.
Of course, the Xiaomi Mi 11 lite 5G doesn’t have to worry about running a flat-out 120Hz LCD displays. Its 90Hz AMOLED is a far more economical component, in theory.
Thankfully the phone lasts well enough in practice, too. A light day with three hours of screen-on time would tend to leave us with a healthy 50% still in the tank. A more intensive period with 4 hours of screen time dropped that amount to 35%.
Performance and software
Xiaomi 11 Lite NE 5G excels at everyday performance and while it can handle most games out there very well, we wouldn’t recommend this device to gamers, despite the very capable Snapdragon 778G.
Don’t get us wrong, the performance is great, but the sleek build, smaller battery, average cooling and smaller factors like UFS 2.2 storage and 240Hz touch response aren’t the gold standard in gaming. However, day-to-day tasks are a breeze and you will run multiple heavy apps fairly easily.
The software experience is also consistent with other phones we’ve seen like the Mi 11 Lite. While we have MIUI 12.5 here, you get the same usual mix of handy features, rounded aesthetics and a little bloatware that you can’t get rid of. Whether you like it or not is a matter of personal preference.
Final Verdict
With a sleek design, an excellent 90Hz AMOLED display, and the older Qualcomm Snapdragon 778 5G (6nm) processor, the Xiaomi Mi 11 Lite 5G NE is still a great value-for-money purchase.
It’s an extremely well balanced device, with few of the glaring compromises that usually accompany such an affordable phone, though it faces a stiff challenge from its competitors.
The global chip shortage has had many an effect on various industries including the smartphone industry. The Xiaomi Mi 11 Lite 5G NE seems to be one such device.
With the only glaring difference being that the Mi 11 Lite 5G NE has a one generation older processor compared to its older sibling the Mi 11 Lite 5G, the phones are pretty much identical. Like the Mi 11 Lite 5G, the NE model also continues to impress us.
It manages to do just that with a sleek design that’s as skinny as it is light. It might have a plastic frame, but the Mi 11 Lite 5G NE’s glass back looks and feels reassuringly expensive.
