Such quirks are easier to overlook in light of how powerful this device is. It's one of the few phones we've tested this year with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 chipset, and it breezed through every task I threw at it. The rare hiccups that did pop up all seemed like pre-production issues with some of the MIUI 9 features Xiaomi layered on top of Android Oreo. Overall though, the Mi Mix 2S left with me few complaints on the performance front — it certainly doesn't hurt that our test model sits at the top of the range with 8GB of RAM.

That premium version also comes with 256GB of storage and support for 43 global radio bands, so it'll hop onto just about every wireless network in the world. At time of writing Xiaomi hasn't confirmed how this model actually costs; ditto for the lower-spec models with 6GB of RAM and either 64 or 128GB of storage. No matter which version you splurge on, you'll at least get Qi wireless charging -- a first for the Mix line.

There's another first for the Mi Mixes here, too: a dual camera. There are two 12-megapixel cameras around back — one wide angle and one telephoto — and Xiaomi's decision to use Sony's IMX363 sensor with an f/1.8 aperture and 1.4-micron pixels as the primary camera means the Mi Mix 2S does surprisingly well in low-light. And like almost every flagship smartphone we've seen in 2018 so far, Xiaomi tried to imbue the Mi Mix 2S's camera with some level of artificial intelligence. In theory, you can point the 2S at a landscape or a person's face and the phone will tune the resulting image appropriately. In fact, the 2S is supposed to be especially good at beautifying faces: engineers "taught" the camera to divide faces into separate areas that get processed and tweaked differently. In theory, anyway.