After 2 years of imposed limits from the iPhones I was sick of it. Using my phone as both work and personal, with all the requirements of being in IT it was starting to hold me back. My remote access software didn’t have an iOS version, I needed a terminal program to access linux servers over SSH and I was also just missing the freedom of Android. I bought this device myself and put the iPhone 6s in a drawer, but when my boss found out he paid me back for the device to keep it as a company device.
Xiaomi have always been absolutely chaotic in the amount of devices they release and their terrible naming conventions. It’s almost impossible to gauge when a device was released and where it stands in their line up by name, and this was no exception. I still don’t really know where this device stood, however it was quite cheap at £150 brand new.
I remember the phone shipped with a Chinese ROM, and to flash the global ROM you had to unlock the bootloader. This was a laborious process and it involved signing up to their online account, performing certain actions (can’t remember what they were) and then putting a request in for an unlock code. It took a few days either way. However when done I had the correct ROM flashed and once again had my rooted Android experience I’d been missing.
MIUI was a bizarre skin of Android though, it felt like a knock off iOS in that it had no app drawer with everything being on home pages. They’d also heavily changed all aspects of the operating system such as the status bar, quick settings and normal settings menus. All in all it wasn’t a bad experience, it took quite a bit of extra effort to get the phone to a place where I was happy with it but it was something I was willing to accept considering how cheap it was for the hardware specs offered.
This phone met it’s demise on my Birthday. I was on holiday and sat out having drinks by the pool one evening. A few people I’d got friendly with there knew it was my birthday and had decided to buy me lots of drinks. Inebriated I stumbled out of my chair and my phone took a tumble out of my pocket. It hit the tiled floor, smashed the screen and fell straight into the pool. The phone actually survived, but the screen didn’t. I ordered a replacement screen but with Xiaomi being so fragmented with multiple revisions of the same model I unsurprisingly ended up with the wrong screen. At this point I decided it wasn’t worth chancing another incorrect screen and retired the phone.
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