[Xiaomi Mi 9 Guides, News, & Discussion] picitup:
Hi All

I bought a P20 Pro around October last year hoping I could make use of the 40MP camera for my latest hobby, microscope photography.

I really like Open Camera which works really well for the kind of thing I like to do. I've been very active on the Huawei forum at https://uk.community.huawei.com/ but have kind of given up trying to make the P20 Pro work in the way I want.

What I really wanted was 40MP RAW for 3rd Party apps and I've banged on for months now but got absolutely nowhere. During that time, I think I've got a bit of a feel for Huawei as a company.

If you have a suggestion, they say nice things like "hopefully it will be included in a future release". But there is no further feedback about any issue. I get the feel that what they want to do is innovate a new phone every 6 months but do no support.

If you check out the customer service reviews at TrustPilot:

https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/www.huawei.com

You can see their rating is only 1 star with users saying they left 1 star 'cos you can leave 0 stars!

A few months ago they stopped offering bootloader unlock to "protect us". Well, don't you just love it when someone takes something away from you and tells you it's for your own good? Reminds me of being a child!

Do you know what OS I use on my computer? Well, any one I fancy! It's my hardware!

The above is all a pity because the hardware is excellent, but the software included not much so. For example, jpegs are over sharpened and there's no option to adjust this feature or turn it off.

The phone only allows RAW for it's own stock app. There's no feature in the stock app to save anywhere apart from Internal memory. I want to use the camera software on my LCD monitor, but through HDMI, the stock camera app doesn't rotate, so the image on the LCD is always portrait! I can fix this with Open Camera but there's no support for RAW which I need for heavy post processing.

This all might sound quite negative but I've enjoyed participating in the Forum and the nice administrators sent me a Joby tripod to review (which I kept) and a 10,000mah power bank to say thanks. The forum admins are very nice, but the one thing that does stick in my craw a little bit is to keep being chivvied along saying an update would be soon, but after a few months of hearing the same thing, you know it ain't never going to happen.

If they told me 3 months ago they have no intention of fixing the issues, I would have sold the P20 Pro and got something else, so a bit of a waste of time.

But any road up..... I spotted the Mi9 with a luvverly 48MP camera and started to read the specs and ask questions on this forum. It sounded quite good and I was in Spain last week so I bought one.

I'm still learning, but am astounded that the phone is so cheap and in many ways, better than any Huawei phone, even the P30 Pro particularly with benchmarks. The battery in the P20 Pro is 4000mah and the Mi9 only 3300mah so which is better? Well, according to gsmarena, the Mi9 lasts longer as the Huawei Kirin chipset runs so hot. Maybe the P20 Pro is better if you fancy a fried egg? :eek:

But the real game changer for me is, of course the ability to unlock the bootloader and then the availability of ROMs. I'm still learning, but Xiaomi seem to like feedback and are offering weekly dev builds. In the 4 months I've owned the P20 Pro, there have been a couple of security updates and a Pie update, but none of the features anyone has asked for. My latest update was the Feb. 1st security update which I got in March. Now it's almost April...

By contrast, Xiaomi release the source code of their ROMs on day 1 so developers love them! If you check out the activity on the P20 Pro XDA forum, it's much lower than the Mi9.

So as I say, it's all a bit new for me, but I have high hopes of getting a phone that does exactly what I want. Somewhere between the developers and Xiaomi lies the features I'm looking for.

All in all, a good move for me. I'll likely be putting my P20 Pro on eBay soon. Unlocked an rooted lol.

Sorry to drivel on.....

Cheers

Steve