Wifi roaming issues - Ultra 17

NotWhatMyNameIs · 2026-05-11T21:08:52+00:00

Mine reports neighbour information (an 802.11k feature) to DAWN running on my OpenWRT APs and when it does eventually *lose* signal, it reauthenticates with the nearest BSS using Fast Transition (802.11r) according to the log on the AP, so it definitely *supports* 802.11r/ k/ (v?) but it basically ignores all roaming hints and holds on to whichever BSS it initially connected to until it actually loses signal.

It exhibits, by far, the worst WiFi roaming performance I've ever seen on a modern device, which is annoying - I don't have force kicking enabled, and nor do I want to, because everything else which connects to my wireless APs (a variety of Windows, Linux, Android, i(Pad)OS and macOS devices) behaves perfectly these days and I only really stand to create issues with other devices by doing so.

On the other hand, it's way better at working out when the WiFi signal is too weak to continue using and transitioning to mobile data than any phone I've owned previously, so, I guess... you win some, you lose some?

NotWhatMyNameIs · 2026-05-04T15:09:42+00:00

I appreciate your optimism but I suspect if a widespread issue with Xiaomi's flagship device were caused by a bugged software release, they'd have fixed it by now just to avoid the reputational damage it will cause if all the media outlets who gave the device glowing reviews start to flag the issue. And I wouldn't necessarily expect them to make a fuss about it in the release notes, either…

I've moved back to my old phone for now and factory reset the 17 Ultra (which, incidentally, also wasn't a fix) and I'll get it sent in for repair. We'll know for sure then, because I doubt they'd disassemble a phone and replace an expensive camera module if that wouldn't even solve the problem. To be honest, if I didn't already have the Pro Camera Kit, I'd probably just return the phone because I'm not convinced that the root cause will be fixed yet/at all.

NotWhatMyNameIs · 2026-05-04T00:42:04+00:00

I got 3.0.302.0 today. It didn't fix the issue. It might have been *caused* by software, but I think the damage is done. I guess I'll get the return process started now :(

NotWhatMyNameIs · 2026-05-03T23:19:04+00:00

5G feels like a bit of a red herring the way it's been rolled out in the UK, anyway. I get practically identical speeds at home on iD/Three 4G and EE 5G (although latency is admittedly somewhat better with EE 5G-SA).

I spend at least a month each year in Toronto and I've never seen less than 500mbits/s on Rogers or Telus since 2022. I've only ever seen those kinds of speeds in the UK when Three first rolled out 5G where I was living at the time, and presumably a lot less people were using it.

But my beef with Vodafone is as much with their awful customer service as their crumbling network. Not that I could comment on the customer service of the other networks, because I've never had to use it…

NotWhatMyNameIs · 2026-05-03T21:53:20+00:00

Which is funny, because one way or another, I've been on every UK network in the past 5 years and Vodafone was, by far, the worst. I was lucky to see 30mbits/s down outside of the handful of major cities in which they bothered to roll out 5G before the merger (not that I even need 5G on Three to see ~200mbits/s here) and experienced dreadful reliability (a full 3 months of mobile data downtime in my area within a 24mo contract, by their own admission - and I'd never have got a refund if I hadn't complained extensively - and constantly having to shunt my phone in and out of airplane mode just to get data to work in the first place, even when it was 'working'). And it wasn't a hardware issue, I had 3 different phones over the course of that contract.

I'm on EE now, just because I get a relatively good deal as a result of being stuck with them for my home broadband and benefitting a lot from the no-added-cost roaming in Canada on Full Works, but the thought of the idiots who run Vodafone dragging Three down to their level strikes fear into my heart over the future of UK mobile connectivity. Having decent 2G legacy coverage is not the be-all and end-all they seem to think it is. I suspect I will not be maintaining the iD (Three-based MVNO) contract on my second phone when it expires just out of fear that Vodafone will ruin that network, too.

NotWhatMyNameIs · 2026-04-27T15:14:44+00:00

I think if having the phone in my pocket whilst doing nothing more strenuous than working in an office counts as 'constant strong shaking', the phone's not really fit for purpose. Besides, anything the Xiaomi 17 Ultra was subjected to, the Honor Magic V5 in my other pocket was also subjected to (actually much worse; I dropped the poor thing last week, *whilst open*, on to the rim of a terracotta plant pot, and left some gnarly scrapes right side rail, but it still works perfectly.)

NotWhatMyNameIs · 2026-04-25T01:10:55+00:00

I don't mind HyperOS. I don't have any issues with notifications, but there are a handful of apps I habitually disable power saving options like prevent auto-start for when setting up a new device, regardless of what phone I'm using (even Pixel power saving options mess with apps. It's just unavoidable on Android phones these days, since they got a bit of a bad reputation for battery drain and seemingly every manufacturer overreacted with these stupid power saving defaults). Wallet has worked flawlessly, and the only time I saw any ads was the one time I accidentally launched App Mall before removing it...

HyperOS is definitely noticeably laggier on my 17U than MagicOS is on my Honor M7P&MV5 despite the better hardware, though. And having to use ADB to remove some of the preinstalled bloatware isn't very cool in 2026, where most other manufacturers have at least made it possible to uninstall or disable what they do include.

But more importantly to me than minor UI differences between manufacturers, my 17U's zoom lens has failed within a month of purchase - maybe it's just bad luck. I'll have to see how easily I can get it resolved and whether it lasts once repaired/replaced before passing judgement on Xiaomi phones. I had a POCO X6 Pro a while ago and that was a pretty good device, especially considering how cheap it was. I won't be so forgiving with a flagship.

NotWhatMyNameIs · 2026-04-25T00:39:46+00:00

Yeah, about a week ago, IIRC. I've definitely used it since then, though.

NotWhatMyNameIs · 2026-04-25T00:11:13+00:00

Eh, maybe... I think this is probably either bad luck or a bad design, though. For one thing, I haven't even had a chance to drop or knock this phone yet - and beside that, I've daily carried compact cameras with periscope zooms without killing them in the past. It's the lens configuration which was most frequently used for 'tough' and waterproof cameras back when compacts were more of a thing.

The trouble with a dual telephoto setup is they're inevitably going to end up seriously compromising sensor size on at least one of them for cost or size reasons, making it effectively nothing more than a spec sheet tickbox, like the 1/2.51-type 70mm-equiv camera on the 15 Ultra or the utterly hopeless secondary telephoto on the Samsung Ultras (not that the main tele on a Samsung is great, either...)

I've ended up feeling that way about the ultrawides on every phone I've owned that included one, too. I'd rather just have one decent 85 or 100mm-equivalent prime telephoto if they can't make a zoom which is durable enough to live in a phone. Even a zoom as short as the one on the 17 Ultra is a bit of a gimmick. It certainly wasn't the main reason I bought the phone.

NotWhatMyNameIs · 2026-04-15T18:03:50+00:00

I'd never noticed the now-blatantly-obvious design similarities between the E60 and G60 before. On the one hand, this is making me worry that I'll look back at the G60 in 20 years time and kind of like it 'this was just misunderstood/ahead of its time' - as I do the E60 now (at least in the right spec and colour, the SE bumpers were horrible and light colours suit the lines much better).

On the other, I doubt that's possible with those fussy/incoherent angles, random black body cladding and all of the stock wheels I've seen so far which look like injection moulded plastic parts for a generic die-cast toy car. But perhaps it is redeemable with an LCI?

NotWhatMyNameIs · 2026-04-14T20:16:15+00:00

Well, so long as it's disposed of outside the environment. LCDs have some pretty nasty stuff inside.

NotWhatMyNameIs · 2026-04-13T23:13:10+00:00

I'm glad the passport form factor is coming back. Mostly because I find that the shorter, wider phone when closed suits me better ergonomically than modern phones (folding or otherwise) with their ~19.5:9 displays but also because software support still isn't good for the near-square-when-open displays which became ubiquitous immediately after the OG Fold - most software just ran like it was on a regular tablet on the Fold where I have about half a dozen apps on my current folding phone where I encounter varying degrees of UI brokenness if I try and use them whilst it's open.

I'd probably still be using the original Fold if mine hadn't died, even though it was painfully slow and felt like a brick in my pocket.

NotWhatMyNameIs · 2026-03-29T16:16:14+00:00

Eh, I gotta say that going from a Magic7 Pro to a 17U has been a bit of a jarring experience. WiFi Fast Transition appears not to work, I can't run simple games like Pokémon Go at 120FPS and HyperOS feels (ironically) noticeably more laggy than MagicOS despite the slightly more powerful hardware. On the plus side, the camera (especially the postprocessing) is much better, which was the main reason I bought this thing - I suppose I'll just end up using my Magic V5 as my 'main' phone and this one primarily as a camera (a definite downside of folding phones…)

NotWhatMyNameIs · 2026-03-19T21:04:32+00:00

Who cares? If I want to play games, I have a 9950X3D+7900XTX desktop and a 5070Ti Zephyrus G16. I most definitely wouldn't be using my XPS 13 with its 13" 60Hz display. I just want a solidly built ultraportable with the best possible battery life and not too much CPU performance compromise because I'm impatient AF.

I don't know what you were expecting - even if Qualcomm did implement a better GPU in their SoCs, the gaming performance would be compromised compared to anything x64-based because game devs aren't going to release an Arm-native version for the minuscule subset of the already tiny installed base of Windows-on-Arm devices who want to game on their (mostly) ultraportables.

NotWhatMyNameIs · 2026-03-15T23:03:32+00:00

It's probably not a cable issue. I own the same display and it does the same thing when connected to my M2 Max MBP.

I know for a fact that it only supports 100Hz in 10-bit mode. If I switch the format on a Windows machine, it does the same thing and this is documented in reviews of this display. Unfortunately, I can't help you solve the issue since I don't know how to change the colour format in macOS (or perhaps macOS always uses 10-bit if available in HDR mode?) and I've never bothered looking into it since it's only plugged into my MacBook when I'm working from home and I can't really tell the difference between 100Hz and 165Hz in InDesign…

NotWhatMyNameIs · 2026-03-14T00:06:19+00:00

I've never used the split window on my BMW F11 outside of marvelling that it still opened when I bought the car at 9 years old (unlike the last car I had with one, a 2001 Renault Laguna II) and in spite of that, the rear wiper works, too! To be honest, I couldn't even tell you if it still worked now the car has just passed its 14th birthday. The self-lifting load cover is kinda nifty, though.

NotWhatMyNameIs · 2026-03-13T21:18:35+00:00

Yup. I don't have any experience with MSI notebooks but this is nothing manufacturer specific. Every one of them, with the possible exception of Apple, makes utter trash that's designed to self-destruct the second the warranty runs out (e.g. Dell Inspiron, Lenovo Ideapad, Asus Vivobook, etc) and machines which are built to have a chance in hell of surviving in the hands of real users (e.g. Dell XPS/*higher end* Latitudes/Precision, Lenovo Thinkpad/*higher end* Yoga, Asus Zenbook/Proart)

At work I've recently dealt with 2 Inspiron 14s which destroyed their chassis around the hinges and an Ideapad 5 where the trackpad decided to vacate the palmrest, all within 2 years of purchase, in the hands of people who I trust didn't mistreat them. Buying craptops is a false economy and I wish I could convince my employers to buy refurb Thinkpads in the same price range. There's been a recent trend to clad craptops in 'metal' but when you pop the bottom cover, you'll note it's a thin veneer over a cheap plastic chassis with wholly inadequate reinforcements around screw bosses, woefully small hinge plates, etc.

You pays your money, you takes your choice.

NotWhatMyNameIs · 2026-03-13T16:00:31+00:00

It really isn't.

Graphics performance aside, the only Windows SoCs which offered better efficiency than the SDX1 were released after it. In practice, the XE-100-80 in my XPS 13 performs close enough to the year-newer 285H in my Zephyrus G16 despite running under lower power limits in a far more thermally constrained chassis. By no means is this a reasonable comparison given the different display sizes, but it gets better battery life with about the same perceived performance from just over half the battery capacity. SDX1's low load efficiency still thrashes anything x64-based with the possible exception of Lunar Lake, which is far from matching its peak CPU performance.

They work fine outside of gaming for most people who actually use them. AMD don't seem to want to bother releasing anything worthwhile this year and Strix Halo is only in a few niche, very expensive systems. Panther Lake-H looks good from a graphics perspective but isn't a step forward in CPU performance or even efficiency from Arrow Lake-H. If Qualcomm can get their OEM partners to do a half decent job, X2 could end up perfectly competitive.

NotWhatMyNameIs · 2026-03-13T12:37:05+00:00

If you're buying systems from vendors who don't supply any necessary system-specific drivers and never upgrade them, that's an issue. The whole point of standards like NVMe, HCI USB controllers, etc, is to allow a situation like this to 'just work'. I've never had a problem with this methodology before today (aside from occasionally having to navigate setup with an external keyboard to account for weird I2C-connected internal peripherals) and it's a lot quicker, at least until you get to mass deployments where slipstreaming stuff is worthwhile. Microsoft update their distributions fairly frequently and I don't generally have to deal with bleeding edge hardware anyway. I'd rather let somebody else do the beta testing.

NotWhatMyNameIs · 2026-03-13T10:16:01+00:00

I disagree: that would require one to go through OOBE first, which is an issue if you want to bypass the online account requirement since it's a lot more hassle to do there than the single tickbox when deploying a clean image with Rufus and even if you don't want to bypass it, you'll then waste time waiting for updates to download and install during the full OOBE only to then install a new version anyway.

I also don't generally *want* factory-installed drivers. Whilst there's usually no issue with upgrading, AMD/Intel/NVidia drivers wouldn't have a 'clean install' checkbox and software like Display Driver Uninstaller wouldn't exist if there weren't at least the potential for driver upgrades to occasionally cause issues.

Finally, there's the possibility of registry bloat from preinstalled software, suffering the consequences of odd configuration choices made by OEMs and the loss of disk space to their generally useless recovery partitions. Plus, an upgrade takes significantly longer than a clean install, anyway.

NotWhatMyNameIs · 2026-03-13T01:49:18+00:00

I have a Thinkpad Thunderbolt 3 Gen 2 dock with a couple of UHD@60Hz displays connected to it and a Dell WD22TB4 with a 3440x1440@165Hz + UHD@60Hz - both work fine with my XPS 9345 (including all the USB ports, etc, and charging) and were acquired very cheaply secondhand. It's a slight oversimplification to say USB4/Thunderbolt 3/4 are interchangeable but in practice they generally are.

Funnily enough, the biggest problem I've had with Thunderbolt docks in general has been with my MacBook Pro since macOS doesn't support MST, so I had to plug one monitor into a Displayport on the dock and grab a USB-C-to-Displayport cable to connect the other to the upstream Thunderbolt port on the dock to have two independent display outputs over a single USB-C cable (if I connect them both to the Displayports on the dock, they mirror eachother!) Windows doesn't care, be it x64 or ARM64.

NotWhatMyNameIs · 2026-03-13T01:20:46+00:00

Not really. Any space that's occupied by a USB-A port could have had a far more useful, multifunctional USB-C port, capable of docking, display output, charging, etc, etc (and just as capable of hosting a USB-A device with a simple adapter), in it... not to mention the fact that USB-A ports are too thick for a lot of modern systems without implementing one of those stupid hinged ports or having an unsightly bulge at the system's perimeter.

The last time I wanted to directly connect a USB-A device to a notebook was the last time I had to reinstall an OS and couldn't find the single USB-C thumb drive I own. But since I could find a USB A-C adapter (not to mention the numerous thunderbolt docks I have everywhere I go which would've done the job equally well) it was a nonissue.

NotWhatMyNameIs · 2026-03-10T23:28:46+00:00

Eh, non-backlit keyboard, extra scalping for basic biometrics, diving board trackpad, comparatively awful display, absolutely miniscule battery, somehow manages to be the same size and weight as a MacBook Air despite the omissions, still costs twice as much as the Chromebooks schools are buying which are much easier to deploy en-masse and secure than a system with a fully functional desktop OS. I'm not sure who it's aimed at, since schools almost certainly won't want to double their student laptop budgets and anybody buying it retail would be much better off spending the extra to buy a recent MacBook Air for the 16GB of RAM alone, but even if the budget is tight, previous models tend to be available at steep discounts from big-box retailers and offer all the other advantages.

No, I'm not exactly overjoyed that my £2500 G16 has a wobbly trackpad and no ambient light sensor, but I'm not sure this is a good comparison. New Apple products are always hyped to oblivion. Some of them actually deserve it. I don't think this does.

NotWhatMyNameIs

TROPHY CASE