Damn, that emoji struck a nerve.
Okay, around six years ago companies first got caught cheating in benchmarks. This included the big boys like Samsung. They stopped. Know who didn't? Naturally, the Chinese companies. Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO, and Honor were all offenders in 2018 including the Xiaomi line, specifically:
https://www.androidauthority.com/the-companies-we-busted-cheating-on-benchmarks-in-2018-936168/
A more reliable benchmark for CPU performance (in terms of weeding those out) is Geekbench, and Samsung reigns supreme. This is true for other benchmarks like GFX and Basemark:
http://browser.geekbench.com/android-benchmarks
Not that performance is the key difference being highlighted, here. They have the same chipset, so one wouldn't expect a large gap. 2GB of RAM and a slightly lower class SD drive won't matter a ton.
The central feature in a smartphone, quite simply, is the display, and the Chinese phones are inferior to the Korean phones on that front (just as Chinese TVs are inferior to Korean TVs). More advanced measurements of this performance are gauged by those at labs like Displaymate. One spec that stands out is that Xiaomi's Mi phones are capable of ~50% less brightness. It lacks HDR10+. It has strong contrasts, and strong color accuracy, so they've come a long way, but when you look at the more obscure metrics like viewing angles, anti-reflectance, native color gamut, smudge resistance, scratch resistance, and so on, what is apparent to the naked eye begins to show on the lab sheets.
Increasingly, as differences between smartphones have waned in recent years, indeed, the cameras have become a much more significant divider between flagships. Here is where Huawei has become a force. Their P series, in particularly, currently anchored by the flagship of the series the P30 Pro, is a Chinese phone that can contend. Xiaomi, on the other hand, has been caught half a dozen times now using DSLR photos in their ad campaigns because they
know their cameras are shit compared to Samsung, Apple, Google, Huawei, etc. This is recent:
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Huawe...in-an-ad-for-its-new-smartphone.323946.0.html
It has very good audio performance in its headphones, but not as good as the Samgung phone. It has no stereo speakers, and no FM radio tuner. It doesn't do 4K video. It doesn't have dual video conferencing capability. It has very good battery life, but not as good as the Samsung phablets. It has an inferior USB charging port. It doesn't support WiFi 6. It has no barometer or Sp02 sensor. More critically, it has no waterproofing or dustproofing, it has no SD slot, and worst of all it has a limited LTE spectrum. 5G is great. Hearing me now on 4G is better.
That's before you get into more obscure software features that it lacks like the KNOX security software, which is annoying as hell if you're a hacker, but wonderful if you're not; rather just someone who wants your stuff to be secure, and knows that vanilla Android is awful. There are useful features like Samsung Pay, or gimmicky stuff like ANT+. Then there's some cool stuff that any PC nerd should find fascinating like
Samsung DeX. Finally, there's the perk of being one of those devices that every service and website goes out of their way to accommodate with customization. From Netflix to YouTube to sports sites this is quite real, and anybody who has ever used an iPhone knows the benefit.
It's not that I disagree the Mi is a wonderful value, apparently more so in Russia than in other countries, and I was probably the first of the nerds on this forum who began negging phone hype several years ago, due to the deceleration of progress, coupled with the lack of tangible difference between phones, but you're being dumb when you try to argue that these two phones are of equal quality.
They're not. Samsung is better.