Redmi Note 3 (Snapdragon version) can finally taste the all new MIUI 8 now! I'm very excited and thrilled to share my very own review of MIUI 8. I will also share my own personal experiences on every details and corner of the new MIUI 8 ROM.
Let's cut the introduction short and go in the real contents straight away!
This thread will have two main contents:
1. Detailed Review on New Changes in MIUI 8 for Redmi Note 3 (Qualcomm)
2. Introduction of New Features in MIUI 8 for Redmi Note 3 (Qualcomm)
Warning:
This thread contains a lot of photos and GIFs that will take some time to load them.
You should think twice if you are using limited Data Plan to read this!
*MIUI 7 Default Font on the left, MIUI 8 Mi Lanting Font on the right
MIUI 8 China Developer ROM comes with its new font, called as "Mi Lanting". You may say "What's the big deal over this little thing?", but when you're using it for couple of days, you may notice that this little change does make a difference. The new font of MIUI 8 optimizes the spaces of title and status bar, while letting the large font looks smoother and more elegant. I have already used it since MIUI 7 and feel that this font is amazing!
I'm not sure whether we will automatically obtain this font after flashed MIUI 8 (as I already installed it before MIUI 8).
You may get the font from here: Xiaomi MIUI 8 Default Font--Mi Lanting! Download Now! (Credit to @LaVenJun )
Lock Screen
**MIUI 7 on the left, MIUI 8 on the right
After updated to MIUI 8, the lockscreen wallpaper has been changed as well. MIUI 8 uses the rainbow color and diamond design as its lockscreen design. You may notice that the clock has been redesigned as well.
Phone & Call
In MIUI 8, the contact app looks much cleaner and neater than MIUI 7. The grey background has been replaced by the white background in MIUI 8, and more contacts are displayed in one view after add button is designed as a floating button. While adding contact, the input for 'Name', 'Company' and 'Title' have resized into full page.
**MIUI 7 at 1st, 3rd photo, MIUI 8 at 2nd, 4th photo
Unfortunately in MIUI 8, some features have been removed from the Security App. The Data Saver has been removed (do not function well anyway), and battery profiles as well. Now we can no longer have different battery profiles to switch, and I have no idea why developers removed it. The "Schedule power on/off" is hidden in the setting, which can be accessed at top right of battery menu.
Battery saver option in MIUI 8 is simplified compared to MIUI 7, as the battery profile option has been removed. However, we have a new battery analyzer feature in MIUI 8, which can be accessed at Battery Menu. Just click the button "analyze battery usage" and it will give us a details preview on our battery status (as shown in 3rd and 4th screenshots above).
**MIUI 7 at 1st, MIUI 8 at 2nd and 3rd
The camera app has been redesigned into a new optimized interface. There will be no more camera setting and effects by sliding left or right. All these modes have been designed as small icons on the interface. We also get more effects to play with the camera. However, the shortcut of sliding up or down to switch between rear and front camera has been removed. Honestly, I think this shortcut is really cool and I really want it back in MIUI 8! Developers, why did you remove it?
In the meantime, the animation of changing between camera and video mode is changed as well. I prefer the new MIUI 8 animation because it looks minimal and smooth compared to MIUI 7.
The interface of sound recorder in MIUI 8 has been improved. The sea blue color theme is super match with the waving pattern of the recorder. All the recorder features remain the same though.
No additional feature is added to Calendar, but the interface has been modified and become more interactive. The top bar will switch color when switch between months, and the current date will transform into a floating icon at below when viewing in other days or months.
Calculator app in MIUI 8 has been significantly enhanced compared to previous version. The calculation display becomes larger than before, and finally there is '%' added in MIUI calculator. Other than that, we have a lot more of calculation features hidden at the top right icon.
Now we have currency converter, mortgage calculator, taxes calculator, scientific calculator and other features that will definitely help a lot in mathematic subjects! I find the currency converter really helpful as I always want to check the price of Xiaomi products in Malaysian Ringgit.
The Note app has been improved a lot in MIUI 8. The note list display has changed to grid style and timeline style (screenshot below). While writing the note, its background is changed to full page color.
Other than that, we can now apply some special theme on our notes, making it more artistic than before. The drawback is that these themes are not applicable on the note widgets at homescreen. Other than that, the note list view can be changed between grid style and timeline style by tapping on top right icon.
Additionally, we can now hide our notes in a hidden place, secured with a password. We just have to pull down the note list and the hidden place will be accessed.
**MIUI 7 on top, MIUI 8 at below
The settings page of MIUI 8 has been optimized and utilize the dark grey color as the theme color of MIUI 8 Settings Page. Several modifications have been made on the setting page, such as App Lock and Permission have been added on Setting Page. There are two new MIUI 8 features added to the settings page: Second Space and Cloned Apps. These new features will be introduced below.
The Status Bar in MIUI 8 has been modified into a card deck style which is super awesome! The length of the status bar is depend on the number of existing notification types. Furthermore, the color of the status bar will change according to today's weather, i.e. green for Sunny or blue for Cloudy. Thus we can easily know the weather by one glance on the status bar! The animation of pulling down and up on status bar is flawlessly smooth and awesomely fluidic. This has naturally becomes one of the selling points for MIUI 8.
Don't really like this status bar style and want to stick with the old one? No problem, just go to Setting > Notifications & Status Bar, choose toggle layout and select "Separate". There you go, the usual status bar we have in MIUI 7 is back.
There is some improvement on the recent tray as well. A music player control is added on top of recent tray to utilize the big space. There is an icon on top right to switch the recent apps between icon view and page view, hence we don't need 2 fingers to enlarge or shrink it. On top of that, we can also notice the overall layout has been optimized to have more space in MIUI 8 recent tray.
MIUI 8 has a circular design in its updater app compared to MIUI 7 which uses triangular. It also gives us a more spacious feel with its interface.
Editing Tool for photos and videos is no longer a simple tool in MIUI 8. Now we have more options, resources and features in the editing tool.. Other than edit a photo, we can now edit our video with the stock video editing tool as well. We can simply change the effect of video, add some text, crop it or even add related music in the video. This is really useful to make a quick short video from your video recording with our phone.
This is one of MIUI 8 awesome features, long screenshot! We can now take screenshot on our phone in a more professional way. After a screenshot is taken, it will be floating at the top right, and we can further edit it by tapping on it and extend! Be reminded that Long Screenshot is only applicable on scrollable page, which makes sense. Besides that, after taking a screenshot with MIUI 8, we can directly edit or send the screenshot while it is floating. The animation of screenshot in MIUI 8 is so smooth that it will definitely blow your mind! Who would have think that this little feature (screenshot) can be further improved to be something that so cool and useful?
To learn more on how to use long screenshot, read here: [Device Team] All New MIUI 8 Long Screenshot Feature : How to Use It? (Credit to @sepneela )
Uhhh... I guess everyone knows that this feature already existed in Apple smartphones or Samsung. But MIUI 8 floating icon is much simpler than you think. It provides up to 5 shortcuts and also provide customization whether it can be hid in some apps. The icon will become almost transparent when it is not used for 2 seconds. That's why MIUI named it as "Shortcut Menu". We can find this setting in Settings > Additional Settings > Shortcut Menu.
There is a new feature of MIUI 8 called Second Space. By activating this, we will get another new space with whole new apps and items. It is similar to our PC Window which has different users to login. After set up a password for second space, we can enter different spaces with its password on the lockscreen. It's quite useful if your friends always want to check your phone.
For more details, read here: Second Space - Dual-Device Mode - Unique MIUI 8 feature explained!(Credit to @Raaj52 )
Now we can create another copy of app in MIUI 8. This feature is known as Cloned Apps. Why they implement this for us? Here's a reason: We can have two different accounts login into our social media apps at the same time! The data of the apps have been separated in two so that we can use two similar apps with different accounts. The cloned app has a yellow symbol at its bottom left. I find this very useful when I can have two different Facebook accounts login at the same time, without switching accounts.
More details of this feature, read here: [MIUI Device Team] [MIUI 8] Cloned Apps! Run 2 Instances At Once! (Credit to @BharatG )
This one is my most favorite feature of MIUI 8, the all new MIUI 8 scanner. Now it is in-built with more features which are really useful in our life! There are now 6 options to be chosen in scanner. First option is the ordinary scanner which used to scan QR codes, and the second option is the shopping scanner. With this option, we can take a photo of an item and it will search in taobao (China's famous online store) for the similar items, details and prices. It's really useful even for global users if you know how to use taobao for purchasing items into your country.
The third option is the in-built translator. I really love this one because it works effectively and super cool to show off with friends! Currently this translator can translate up to 7 languages: English, Chinese, Japanese, French, Spanish, German and Korean. But most of the languages will be translated to Chinese, and it makes sense as this is a China ROM anyway. The forth option can be used to solve complicated mathematic questions, but I haven't try this though. The fifth option is used to acquisite business card details and save as a contact in phone. It will take several time to capture accurate info, but it will never get 100% correct details. So just get the most accurate info and edit a little bit, it saves up our time from typing one by one.
The last option is a real gem of MIUI 8. We can use scanner app to capture a document. Then we can adjust and crop the document after captured. After confirm it, we can get our document in flat view, convert it to greyscale and even extract the texts from the documents! The only drawback is that it can only extract in one language. Anyway, this is a super powerful tool on MIUI 8, which will cost us some money to get the similar software or tool. I bet you will love MIUI 8 more with this in-built feature!
In overall, I must say that the leap from MIUI 7 to MIUI 8 is a lot greater than MIUI 6 to MIUI 7. There are a lot of great features implemented and space optimization made in MIUI 8 that make our life smarter and much convenient. Even though people are still complaining about the Android Version, I am really satisfied with this new MIUI version upgrade. Nevertheless, I am still looking forward for the Android Marshmallow update on Redmi Note 3, which is still under going Beta testing in some lucky users in India.
**MIUI 7 on 1st and 3rd, MIUI 8 on 2nd and 4th
Phone App has some obvious changes as well. The MIUI 8 dial pad surface becomes larger than MIUI 7, the top border uses sea green instead of standard grey, and search bar is now available on Recent tab. Other than that, I also notice that MIUI 8 displays more contacts than MIUI 7 when dial pad is minimized. We can see how attentive MIUI Developers are in giving us better user experiences with their ROM.
The call interface has also been redesigned with a better preview. MIUI 8 uses round icon contact photo to replace the half page photo in MIUI 7. The speaker icon has switched into text at bottom left, and the position has been replaced with note icon, which is convenient for us to take any notes while calling. When selecting speaker mode, the background will slightly change to lighter color and vice versa. MIUI Developers also design with a better animation effects during accept call and end call. This is quite an improvement on the Phone App.
Phone App has some obvious changes as well. The MIUI 8 dial pad surface becomes larger than MIUI 7, the top border uses sea green instead of standard grey, and search bar is now available on Recent tab. Other than that, I also notice that MIUI 8 displays more contacts than MIUI 7 when dial pad is minimized. We can see how attentive MIUI Developers are in giving us better user experiences with their ROM.
The call interface has also been redesigned with a better preview. MIUI 8 uses round icon contact photo to replace the half page photo in MIUI 7. The speaker icon has switched into text at bottom left, and the position has been replaced with note icon, which is convenient for us to take any notes while calling. When selecting speaker mode, the background will slightly change to lighter color and vice versa. MIUI Developers also design with a better animation effects during accept call and end call. This is quite an improvement on the Phone App.
Contacts
**MIUI 7 on 1st and 3rd, MIUI 8 on 2nd and 4th
In MIUI 8, the contact app looks much cleaner and neater than MIUI 7. The grey background has been replaced by the white background in MIUI 8, and more contacts are displayed in one view after add button is designed as a floating button. While adding contact, the input for 'Name', 'Company' and 'Title' have resized into full page.
**MIUI 7 on the left, MIUI 8 on the right
The contact info in MIUI 8 has been optimized as well. The options has been moved up with clearer view and edit option is floating at the bottom right. Besides that, there is an option "history" newly added in the contact info. Despite that, the contact info of MIUI 8 still looks more spacious than MIUI 7. Instead of having the same color, each contact cards will be assigned with 7 type random designs. The other 6 are shown below:
Theme Store
Theme stores app has been optimized in MIUI 8 as well. Now we can switch to Wallpaper, Ringtone and Font by swiping the title to the left and right. The top bar will change color when you switch between the titles.
**MIUI 7 on 1st and 3rd, MIUI 8 on 2nd and 4th
In customize page, MIUI 8 has reduced the options into 8 items. However, none of the options in MIUI 7 has been left out except the "Notification" option. Though we can still set notification via "Ringtone" page. Meanwhile, the "Lock screen" and "Home screen" options are merged into "Wallpaper" page. There is also a shortcut key to backup our current theme under the options.
When selecting a theme, MIUI 8 has modified the way of preview a theme as well. We can now easily delete a theme on the top right, instead of scrolling up the page to select "Delete". Also the theme designer, size and price also shown on top of the theme screenshots.
Security App
Unfortunately in MIUI 8, some features have been removed from the Security App. The Data Saver has been removed (do not function well anyway), and battery profiles as well. Now we can no longer have different battery profiles to switch, and I have no idea why developers removed it. The "Schedule power on/off" is hidden in the setting, which can be accessed at top right of battery menu.
**MIUI 7 at 1st, MIUI 8 at 2nd, 3rd and 4th
Battery saver option in MIUI 8 is simplified compared to MIUI 7, as the battery profile option has been removed. However, we have a new battery analyzer feature in MIUI 8, which can be accessed at Battery Menu. Just click the button "analyze battery usage" and it will give us a details preview on our battery status (as shown in 3rd and 4th screenshots above).
Camera
The camera app has been redesigned into a new optimized interface. There will be no more camera setting and effects by sliding left or right. All these modes have been designed as small icons on the interface. We also get more effects to play with the camera. However, the shortcut of sliding up or down to switch between rear and front camera has been removed. Honestly, I think this shortcut is really cool and I really want it back in MIUI 8! Developers, why did you remove it?
In the meantime, the animation of changing between camera and video mode is changed as well. I prefer the new MIUI 8 animation because it looks minimal and smooth compared to MIUI 7.
In MIUI 8, gallery now display the total number of the photos we selected. This is an additional thing to be added as there is already a total number shown at the top. Well, no harm adding this right?
The interface of sound recorder in MIUI 8 has been improved. The sea blue color theme is super match with the waving pattern of the recorder. All the recorder features remain the same though.
No additional feature is added to Calendar, but the interface has been modified and become more interactive. The top bar will switch color when switch between months, and the current date will transform into a floating icon at below when viewing in other days or months.
Calculator app in MIUI 8 has been significantly enhanced compared to previous version. The calculation display becomes larger than before, and finally there is '%' added in MIUI calculator. Other than that, we have a lot more of calculation features hidden at the top right icon.
Now we have currency converter, mortgage calculator, taxes calculator, scientific calculator and other features that will definitely help a lot in mathematic subjects! I find the currency converter really helpful as I always want to check the price of Xiaomi products in Malaysian Ringgit.
The Note app has been improved a lot in MIUI 8. The note list display has changed to grid style and timeline style (screenshot below). While writing the note, its background is changed to full page color.
Other than that, we can now apply some special theme on our notes, making it more artistic than before. The drawback is that these themes are not applicable on the note widgets at homescreen. Other than that, the note list view can be changed between grid style and timeline style by tapping on top right icon.
Additionally, we can now hide our notes in a hidden place, secured with a password. We just have to pull down the note list and the hidden place will be accessed.
**MIUI 7 on top, MIUI 8 at below
The settings page of MIUI 8 has been optimized and utilize the dark grey color as the theme color of MIUI 8 Settings Page. Several modifications have been made on the setting page, such as App Lock and Permission have been added on Setting Page. There are two new MIUI 8 features added to the settings page: Second Space and Cloned Apps. These new features will be introduced below.
The Status Bar in MIUI 8 has been modified into a card deck style which is super awesome! The length of the status bar is depend on the number of existing notification types. Furthermore, the color of the status bar will change according to today's weather, i.e. green for Sunny or blue for Cloudy. Thus we can easily know the weather by one glance on the status bar! The animation of pulling down and up on status bar is flawlessly smooth and awesomely fluidic. This has naturally becomes one of the selling points for MIUI 8.
Don't really like this status bar style and want to stick with the old one? No problem, just go to Setting > Notifications & Status Bar, choose toggle layout and select "Separate". There you go, the usual status bar we have in MIUI 7 is back.
There is some improvement on the recent tray as well. A music player control is added on top of recent tray to utilize the big space. There is an icon on top right to switch the recent apps between icon view and page view, hence we don't need 2 fingers to enlarge or shrink it. On top of that, we can also notice the overall layout has been optimized to have more space in MIUI 8 recent tray.
MIUI 8 has a circular design in its updater app compared to MIUI 7 which uses triangular. It also gives us a more spacious feel with its interface.
**MIUI 7 on the left, MIUI 8 on the right
There are some obvious changes in MIUI 8 as well. The clock's "minutes" has been aligned to be the same height as "hours", and the overall clock size is reduced as well. The toggle icons (Lock Screen Toggle) has different design too. If you noticed it, the Google Search Bar in MIUI 8 becomes smaller in size compared to MIUI 7. This has significantly makes MIUI 8 looks more spacious than MIUI 7.
- Introduction To MIUI App
Editing Tool for photos and videos is no longer a simple tool in MIUI 8. Now we have more options, resources and features in the editing tool.. Other than edit a photo, we can now edit our video with the stock video editing tool as well. We can simply change the effect of video, add some text, crop it or even add related music in the video. This is really useful to make a quick short video from your video recording with our phone.
This is one of MIUI 8 awesome features, long screenshot! We can now take screenshot on our phone in a more professional way. After a screenshot is taken, it will be floating at the top right, and we can further edit it by tapping on it and extend! Be reminded that Long Screenshot is only applicable on scrollable page, which makes sense. Besides that, after taking a screenshot with MIUI 8, we can directly edit or send the screenshot while it is floating. The animation of screenshot in MIUI 8 is so smooth that it will definitely blow your mind! Who would have think that this little feature (screenshot) can be further improved to be something that so cool and useful?
To learn more on how to use long screenshot, read here: [Device Team] All New MIUI 8 Long Screenshot Feature : How to Use It? (Credit to @sepneela )
Uhhh... I guess everyone knows that this feature already existed in Apple smartphones or Samsung. But MIUI 8 floating icon is much simpler than you think. It provides up to 5 shortcuts and also provide customization whether it can be hid in some apps. The icon will become almost transparent when it is not used for 2 seconds. That's why MIUI named it as "Shortcut Menu". We can find this setting in Settings > Additional Settings > Shortcut Menu.
There is a new feature of MIUI 8 called Second Space. By activating this, we will get another new space with whole new apps and items. It is similar to our PC Window which has different users to login. After set up a password for second space, we can enter different spaces with its password on the lockscreen. It's quite useful if your friends always want to check your phone.
For more details, read here: Second Space - Dual-Device Mode - Unique MIUI 8 feature explained!(Credit to @Raaj52 )
Now we can create another copy of app in MIUI 8. This feature is known as Cloned Apps. Why they implement this for us? Here's a reason: We can have two different accounts login into our social media apps at the same time! The data of the apps have been separated in two so that we can use two similar apps with different accounts. The cloned app has a yellow symbol at its bottom left. I find this very useful when I can have two different Facebook accounts login at the same time, without switching accounts.
More details of this feature, read here: [MIUI Device Team] [MIUI 8] Cloned Apps! Run 2 Instances At Once! (Credit to @BharatG )
This one is my most favorite feature of MIUI 8, the all new MIUI 8 scanner. Now it is in-built with more features which are really useful in our life! There are now 6 options to be chosen in scanner. First option is the ordinary scanner which used to scan QR codes, and the second option is the shopping scanner. With this option, we can take a photo of an item and it will search in taobao (China's famous online store) for the similar items, details and prices. It's really useful even for global users if you know how to use taobao for purchasing items into your country.
The third option is the in-built translator. I really love this one because it works effectively and super cool to show off with friends! Currently this translator can translate up to 7 languages: English, Chinese, Japanese, French, Spanish, German and Korean. But most of the languages will be translated to Chinese, and it makes sense as this is a China ROM anyway. The forth option can be used to solve complicated mathematic questions, but I haven't try this though. The fifth option is used to acquisite business card details and save as a contact in phone. It will take several time to capture accurate info, but it will never get 100% correct details. So just get the most accurate info and edit a little bit, it saves up our time from typing one by one.
The last option is a real gem of MIUI 8. We can use scanner app to capture a document. Then we can adjust and crop the document after captured. After confirm it, we can get our document in flat view, convert it to greyscale and even extract the texts from the documents! The only drawback is that it can only extract in one language. Anyway, this is a super powerful tool on MIUI 8, which will cost us some money to get the similar software or tool. I bet you will love MIUI 8 more with this in-built feature!
Verdict 
In overall, I must say that the leap from MIUI 7 to MIUI 8 is a lot greater than MIUI 6 to MIUI 7. There are a lot of great features implemented and space optimization made in MIUI 8 that make our life smarter and much convenient. Even though people are still complaining about the Android Version, I am really satisfied with this new MIUI version upgrade. Nevertheless, I am still looking forward for the Android Marshmallow update on Redmi Note 3, which is still under going Beta testing in some lucky users in India.
I hope this review will benefit you guys in knowing more about MIUI 8.
Feel free to vote in the simple polls below and voice out your comments on MIUI 8!
Source
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