MIUI 13 Review – Top 5 improvements of this new system

At the launch event of the Xiaomi 12 series, the company also released its latest Android skin, MIUI 13. This system is coming after a long wait with the abysmal MIUI 12. We can safely say that MIUI 12 is one of the worse systems from Xiaomi. The company struggled with bugs and malware and aat some point some users thought their smartphones were bad. However, the company was able to savage the situation with the arrival of MIUI 12.5 enhanced edition. Even with this edition, there were still issues. Takle the Xiaomi 11 as an example, this device easily heats up, suffers from frame loss and has a bug prone system. However, after upgrading to the MIUI 13, all these issues are gone. Thus, it was never a hardware issue but a software problem.

Before the arrival of MIUI 13, MIUI 9 is arguably the best Android skin from Xiaomi in recent years. Without further ado, let us look at the new features that MIUI 13 brings

1. MIUI 13 Widgets

The most obvious upgrade of MIUI 13 is probably the series of new widgets. Click the “+” sign in the upper right corner of the screen, or pinch with two fingers on the desktop, to call up the widget interface. MIUI 13 provides a wide variety of widgets. In addition to regular system widgets such as clock, weather, and calendar, there are also many personalized widgets and third-party application widgets.

The biggest difference between these new widgets on MIUI 13 and the original widgets is that they have been specially adapted. The aesthetics is not only better, their practicability is much stronger. Take the clock as an example. On MIUI 12.5, it has only very few simple clock widgets. These widgets are so ugly that many users really do not use them. However, the MIUI 13 comes with over 30 widgets of various styles for the clock alone. There is always one that will catch your eye. 

Although there are not many third-party application widgets at present, popular apps such as Alipay, NetEase Cloud Music, Weibo, AutoNavi Maps, etc. have widgets. With the help of these widgets, users can now directly enter the secondary interface of these third-party apps by clicking on the widgets in the desktop. This undoubtedly improves the operation efficiency. 

The most interesting of these widgets is the “personalize widget”. Whether it’s personalized signatures, personalized tools, or personalized stickers, they are very practical. We can still make the mobile desktop look better even without the help of third-party launchers. 

2. MIUI 13 wallpapers

This time, MIUI 13 also adds 10 glass wallpapers and 9 crystal wallpapers to the system wallpapers.  These dynamic crystallization wallpapers are taken by polarized light microscope, recording the crystallization process of different crystals such as vitamin C and citric acid. Although the view is not entirely perfect, they are quite interesting to look at. 

The glass wallpapers seem to be more interesting as they can echo the colour of your smartphone.

3. MIUI 13 XiaoAI Assistant

In addition to the previous widgets and wallpapers, MIUI 13 also supports personalized XiaoAi assistant. In all honesty, if you are not a Chinese user, forget about this feature. Now XiaoAi’s image, voice, and wake-up words can be customized according to user preferences. After the customization, once you call XiaoAi, the customized image will appear. 

4. MIUI 13 Privacy

MIUI 13 comes with a very strong privacy protection. This system also brings useful new features, namely face verification protection, document privacy watermarking, and full-link fraud protection.

Face verification protection can achieve system-level occlusion of other pictures except for the users face. It does this by intelligently recognizing faces during video calls or face verification. This allows the user to show only the face instead of the entire upper body. The occlusion effect is very ok, it follows only the face and ignors the upper body. 

The certificate privacy watermark allows users to quickly add a watermark to sensitive documents such as ID cards to limit the use of the certificate. This feature also works perfectly and it quickly adds watermarks. 

As for the last privacy feature, full-link fraud protection, we can not ascertain its effectiveness. However, this feature allows the system to run through the entire link and provides multiple guards such as “electronic fraud warning”, “official identification”, “fraud application installation interception”, and “transfer protection”. This makes telecommunications fraud practically impossible on this system.

 

 5. MIUI 13 fluency and stability

Theoritically, MIUI 13 has improved by 15% – 52% compared with MIUI 12.5 enhanced version. Relative to the MIUI 12.5 enhanced version, the system application fluency is improved by 20% – 26%. There are also a number of high-frequency usage scenarios where the frame drop rate exceeds 90%. The system not only perceives core scenarios such as full-screen gestures but also tilts computing resources toward the core system for core third-party applications. This significantly improves the fluency of these applications.

Practically, the improvement in fluency and stability is the most surprising aspect of this system. From user experience, whether you are entering the desktop from the lock screen or swiping to load a picture, or interrupting the opening of an application mid-way, the feedback is very fast. The MIUI 13 also solves the problem of slow image loading in the dual-open software mode. This is one of the most obvious improvements that the MIUI 13 brings. However, only users who have attempted to use this mode in both systems will notice this. 

Conclusion

In all honesty, the MIUI 13 system makes your smartphone feels new especially if you used the MIUI 12 on the smartphone. According to Xiaomi, the MIUI 13 solves no less than 400 problems. Of course, after upgrading from the original MIUI 12.5 enhanced version to MIUI 13, the new system can make users a bit uncomfortable. This is because it is new and will need some getting used to. 

However, it is important to note that MIUI 13 has fewer apps that support forced dark mode than MIUI 12.5. This new system comes with almost not bugs  because the few bugs fo not really affect users everyday usage. Although the new features of MIUI 13 this time are limited, its improvement in stability and fluency is huge. After more than a year of condemnation, MIUI is finally no longer a major shortcoming of Xiaomi.