Xiaomi Mi 11i HyperCharge: charging test, battery life and benchmarks

Electronics giant Xiaomi has announced the Mi 11i series in India. The series includes the regular Mi 11i which comes across as a well-rounded phone in its own regard but the 11i HyperCharge, which is priced starting at Rs 26,999, is where all the hype is. Charging speeds have steadily been increasing year-on-year with many phones claiming speeds of up to 65W. Now for the first time in the Indian market, Xiaomi is offering to nearly double that speed at 120W on its new Mi 11i HyperCharge. To see just how fast the device can juice up its battery I ran it through a charging test and came away mightily impressed. 

Mi 11i HyperCharge: Battery charging time

Out of the box, Xiaomi keeps the phone’s supercharging capability limited. You have to specifically go into the battery settings and turn on the ‘Boost charging speeds’ toggle to get the full 120W benefit. Once turned on, the familiar animation of the battery percentage rapidly getting filled up is visible on the lock screen. It seems incredulous to me exactly how fast the 4,500mAh cell is juiced up, with one percent of battery being added every 5-6 seconds.

Of course, the speed is faster when the battery is low and as the level reaches near the 80 percent mark, the charging speeds drop slightly. I wanted to test how long it really took for the phone to charge from 0-100 percent after seeing Xiaomi’s claims of 15 minutes. However, the 120W charging speeds fill up the battery so swiftly that it’s almost impossible to start from a perfect 0 percent. So I compromised with a 10 to 100 percent charging test and it took about 17 minutes for the battery to fully charge. 

While the Mi 11i HyperCharge’s battery charging speeds are exemplary, the device scored 11 hours and 40 minutes in PCMark’s Battery test, which seems slightly lower than what you can expect from a 4,500mAh capacity battery. On the other hand, the incredibly fast charging speeds mostly offset the need for splendid battery life. Also note that in some cases, the PCMark battery test results differ from real-life results, so do wait for our full review. 

Benchmarks

The device is also the first phone in India to come with the new MediaTek Dimensity 920 5G SoC. How well it performs as compared to other smartphones in its price range is a story for another time. What I can tell you right now is that benchmark numbers for the device look promising. On Antutu V9.2.6, I got an overall score of 433,354 while Geekbench 5 churned out a multi-core and single-core score of 2,221 and 736 respectively. I also ran a CPU Throttle test to see how well the Dimensity 920 responds to sustained load. The CPU was able to keep at least 85 percent of its maximum capacity during the 30-minute test, which is a decent result.

Of course, this is not a full review of the device and just an initial assessment, but I do feel that Xiaomi has given more weight to the phone’s charging capabilities than to the rest of the phone. Stay tuned to find out what I really think of the Mi 11i HyperCharge when the full review drops.