Xiaomi 17 Pro Max: An iPhone... But Better!

- So this is the iPhone 17 Pro Max

and this is the Xiaomi 17 Pro Max.

And at first glance,

it would be very easy to dismiss this

as just another Chinese iPhone clone

because it kinda is,

and that's kind of how it first hit my radar.

Xiaomi has been making their flagships very friendly to iPhone users for years now,

and this one's no exception.

It's an extremely similar shape.

It has the same flat sides, the speakers and the antenna lines,

and just the general aesthetic look familiar.

Like this one's camera plateau is very reminiscent of the new iPhone's,

and it doesn't end there.

The software experience has also, for years,

taken some not so subtle cues from iOS,

from the quick control pull down to certain stock app aesthetics to even certain

widgets and icons.

They have their own dynamic island going on up there and Xiaomi even, yes,

changed the name of their whole flagship phone lineup, skipping a number,

to match the iPhone's.

So yes, there is a base Xiaomi 17, 17 Pro,

and 17 Pro Max this year.

But as I talked about in my switching video, link below the like button,

that stuff's just to get you in the door.

That's just to make you comfortable.

But then, once you start looking into the rest of this phone

and actually using it like I have,

that's when you're exposed to all the rest of what makes it so good.

And this phone is a spec monster that feels, I guess,

specifically designed to one up the iPhone.

It's like an iPhone but better.

Like take this display, for example.

This is the Pro Max, so it's the same size, 6.9 inch diagonal,

as the iPhone Pro Max.

Pretty similar, even bezels all the way around.

Now it's actually slightly beat on resolution,

but you can never tell that with your eyes.

What you can tell is it does get noticeably brighter

and it has a much smaller cutout at the top

because it trades face ID for a super fast ultrasonic fingerprint reader underneath the

display.

So you know, like an iPhone, but better.

But you know, maybe all that's not that impressive to you.

Like the iPhone's display isn't that unbeatable.

What about the chip?

Because the iPhone Pro Max is the one you get

when you want the absolute maximum performance

and that A19 Pro chip with the vapor chamber is pretty sick.

But the Xiaomi 17 Pro Max is one of the first phones shipping with

the new Qualcomm flagship chip,

the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5,

and turns out it's made some solid strides in performance over the already impressive

Snapdragon 8 Elite to the point where it's essentially now matching the iPhone's record

breaking single core performance bar for bar

and it's actually beating it in multi-core

and GPU.

So now it has credible claim to just be the world's fastest mobile chip,

period, and it's paired with 16 gigs of RAM

and up to a terabyte of fast UFS 4.1 storage.

So yeah, I'd say like an iPhone, but better.

But okay, every flagship phone is fast these days.

That's just bragging rights, you know, a little higher benchmark scores here or there,

whatever.

What about battery?

That's where the Pro Max is supposed to excel, right?

Yeah.

So the smaller Xiaomi 17 Pro is already super impressive,

thanks to this highest density silicon carbon battery we've ever seen.

It is a 6,300 milliamp hour battery.

That's already bigger than the S25 Ultra, bigger than the OnePlus 13,

bigger than any iPhone ever made by a mile,

and that's without getting rid of the sim card tray.

But then this Pro Max,

well this Pro Max has a 7,500 milliamp hour battery. 7,500 milliamp hours

and it has 100 watt wired charging with a charger

that comes in the box

and it has 50 watt wireless charging.

This thing is ridiculous.

You know, I haven't really had it long enough to test it,

just a few days, and I can't even really daily this phone,

since it's the China only model, which is a bummer,

but I kind of have zero doubts

that this is gonna be a great battery performer.

So if that's something you care about at all,

with a Pro Max flagship phone, it's all here.

And the fact that it's silicon carbon means you get all this extra capacity

but the phone's not any thicker

or heavier because of it.

Matter of fact, this phone is lighter than the iPhone 17 Pro Max.

My favorite stat, though,

might be that it has 22 and a half watt reverse wireless charging.

So you can use this phone

as a battery bank to wireless charge all kinds of other accessories

and could charge up an iPhone from I think dead to 100%

if you really wanted to.

So yeah, the battery is kind of nothing like the iPhone, just better.

Now if it's cameras that you care about,

well naturally the triple 48 megapixel cameras on the iPhone 17 Pros will appeal

a lot to you.

I don't think it's a coincidence, though,

that this Xiaomi is nicely outfitted also with triple cameras

that are 50 megapixels each for a nice little one up.

But it's not the megapixel count that matters.

What matters is all three of these cameras are actually really good.

They're super impressive.

They each take very detailed, crisp shots with a naturally shallow depth of field,

and honestly mostly decent colors with some different tastes.

You know, they tend to overexpose my skin tone on my face,

like a lot of other phones from this region do.

But my own skin tone with no faces detected is way more accurate.

The telephoto has also been really impressing me.

It's a 5x optical zoom

and it has even more natural bokeh

and naturally a really nice portrait look.

And these are all just the 12 megapixel stills,

not even full 50 megapixel shots.

And then there's a bunch of other really nice customizations in the camera app

UI,

things like 8K video, which you're watching right now.

Also the little exposure slider in auto mode, which is always there,

I actually use that a lot and it's sweet.

Also teleprompter mode, which lets you read text

while you are talking to the camera

and no one would ever know,

mostly.

But there's one more important thing,

one more very important thing

that I've somehow gotten this far into the video without mentioning it,

which is that if you hit this little button all the way up in

the corner,

that turns on the preview on the rear display, the back display.

Because yes, that entire back camera plateau I mentioned earlier is actually a full,

corner to corner, 3,000 nit 120 hertz OLED display.

And it's kind of a lot of screen, actually.

On the 17 Pro, it's 2.7 inches diagonally.

Here on the Pro Max, it's 2.9 inches,

and it's only really interrupted by the camera cutouts.

So turning into a viewfinder for those primary cameras makes a lot of sense

to take just the highest quality selfies mankind has ever seen.

Kind of a no-brainer.

And then you get all of the normal photo controls too.

You can do zoom, you can control aspect ratio,

and video modes and stuff like that.

So that is the number one use of this back display.

But now that it's so much bigger,

there's also way more that you can do with it.

You might remember a couple years ago,

this is not the first time Xiaomi's done a screen on the back camera

bump of one of their flagships.

The Xiaomi 11 Ultra wasn't that long ago and it had the same thing,

an absolutely gigantic camera bump and a little screen on the back.

But the thing is, this concept is kind of evolving now,

just like the outside screen on flipping phones.

Like when they were small,

you could kind of only really use it

as a clock or maybe a notification alert banner

and that's about it.

But then it got a bit bigger

and it was enough to see yourself in the camera view finder.

So that was nice.

And now the year is 2025

and it's a full screen edge to edge with just camera cutouts

and there's way more you can do with it.

So on this phone, you can double tap to wake it up,

where it's showing clock in whatever style you want.

Could be an analog style, could be a cartoon style,

could be an Apple Watch ripoff style, whatever you want.

But once it's awake,

then you can swipe down to check your notifications and manage them there.

You can also swipe over from the cameras to open straight to the camera

app and you can swipe over from the right edge to close whatever's open.

And then a lot of the customization on the back here is frankly just

like an Apple Watch.

And that's probably exactly how Apple would do it

if they suddenly had a screen on the back of the iPhone.

So you can hold down

and then swipe to go back

and forth between your watch faces

or clock faces.

And then if you want to add more options,

the settings app has a whole section dedicated to personalization,

changing colors and dialing in all sorts of looks and themes.

Everything from complicated watch complications to fitness themed widgets to anime characters.

It's everything.

And there's a whole marketplace of all sorts of other options.

So there's something for everyone.

And then just beyond even the always on clock on the back of the

phone that you can always see

and see your notifications

and the camera view finder,

there's all sorts of other little extra stuff too.

Like this feels very well considered.

It's like a real, genuine feature, a reason to buy the phone.

I feel like they've pushed it over beyond gimmick into actual useful thing.

Like this can also show ongoing notifications.

So if you've got a timer running, flip the phone over,

and it shows this nice little draining liquid animation to show your progress on

that timer.

Why would you do this over watching a countdown on the main display?

I don't know, but looks cool.

And then it also shows me other ongoing stuff,

like phone calls or music playback,

and then I control them from that back screen.

Why would I do this on the back screen instead of the main screen?

I still don't really know, but looks cool.

They even made this ridiculous retro handheld gaming case for the phone with real

buttons and a D-pad.

So if you put that on the back of the phone,

it connects via Bluetooth,

and it becomes a controller to play these mini games on that back screen.

I can't believe they actually made and sold this.

Now why?

Why would anyone wanna play games on the tiny back display with two huge

camera cutouts poking through it instead of actually some real impressive games on

that awesome main screen?

I still don't know and I probably wouldn't do it,

but nostalgia really does some crazy things to some people's brains.

But really I bring up all this just to highlight

that this is clearly the most well thought out,

most complete version of this screen on the back idea

that I think we've ever seen.

Like I said, we've seen it before.

We saw Xiaomi do it with that 11 Ultra,

but we also saw the Nothing Phone 3, which did that dot matrix thing,

which was kind of useful sometimes,

or even the ROG Phone 9 for that matter,

but none of them quite past the threshold of gimmick for me.

This back screen really has me taking more selfies than I ever thought I

would in my life,

just because of how good the cameras are,

and the fact that they've done it all with basically no drawbacks,

that's the other thing, like it's edge to edge, it's corner to corner,

it somehow doesn't disrupt the weight distribution of holding the phone.

And like I said, it's lighter than the Pro iPhone.

It's still IP68.

You can dunk the whole thing underwater if you want to.

And it even has a screen protector pre-installed on both the front

and the back screen

because,

you know, you're gonna put

that phone down on some debris once in a

while,

and yeah, you could still break it if you smash it,

but so would a normal glass back anyway.

So I'm impressed.

I'm very impressed.

I am bummed that I can't use this phone as my daily,

because like I said, it's straight from China.

This is a China version of it.

And shout out to Dbrand for actually going and getting one in my hands,

'cause a lot of you were tweeting at me to check it out.

So I'm glad I did

and I hope we can get some more phones like this over in these

parts 'cause it's kind of embarrassing what it does next to the stuff

that we have available.

Anyway, that's been it.

Thanks for watching.

Catch you in the next one.

Peace.

♪ Oh I can't get ♪