62 ANDROID ADVISOR • ISSUE 44
REVIEW
7.1.1. It is quite the
departure from the
Android to which
you will likely be
familiar, with a
quite different
settings menu and
the loss of the app
tray. Fortunately
there is a search
bar within the
settings menu
that helps you to
find what you’re looking for, and it should all become
familiar fairly quickly anyway.
We’ve heard several comment that there’s a lot of
bloatware on this phone. We reckon that’s an unfair
comment. Sure, there is some, but all of which can
be uninstalled very easily. The remaining apps are not
bloatware, but alternatives to the Google services UK
users are familiar with, since Google services are not
preinstalled. It is these apps that cannot be uninstalled,
and the fact everything is sprawled over the home
screen makes that more apparent. Our advice: group
them all in a single folder and forget about them.
This is the biggest problem with the Mi Mix 2.
Setting it up for UK use (on the assumption you don’t
speak Chinese) can be a headache. Fortunately, we
found it easier on the Mi Mix 2 than we did some
Xiaomi handsets, since we were able to download
the Google Installer from the Mi App Store, and then
download a UK keyboard and all our apps from there.