This post is all about a cool feature called Quick Ball in MIUI 8. MIUI 8 is the new version of customized Android released by Xiaomi. Let us look at what MIUI 8 Quick Ball feature is, how to enable the feature in MIUI 8 settings and how to customize this tool. What exactly is Quick Ball? I will use Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 to do a test.

Related: What's MIUI 9 new feautres and how to update your Xiaomi phone?

In simple terms, Quick Ball is a touch assistant with a combination of five unique shortcuts (helps to do quick functions and tasks easily) that even users can customize also. Quick Ball is aimed to give users quick and easy access to shortcuts and apps they use frequently. Quick ball can be dragged to any edges of the screen and can be accessed in lockscreen as well. Now you can experience the Quick Ball function on Xiaomi Redmi Note 4X, Xiaomi MI 5, Xiaomi Redmi 4, Xiaomi MI MIX etc.

I will show you how Quick Ball works on my Xiaomi Redmi Note 4. When we touch the dot, it becomes opaque and divided into five more dots around it, each dot stands for a different shortcut for an operation or specific app.

Just follow below steps, it's quick and easy!

Step 1: Click"Settings"on the home screen.

Step 2: Click "Additional Settings" option from "Settings".

Step 3: We can easily find the fifth menu item is "Quick Ball" option and just click it.

Step 4: Click to turn on Quick Ball and now you can see a translucent circle on the right.

Once you turn on Quick Ball, 6 menu items can be found below that. Don' t be hurry, let's go and find what the exact functions of each menu item.

Select shortcuts

This is the most important setting for the Quick Ball. It will define the specific functions you want to customize. Let's do it!

Step 1: Just tap on it, you can see five default shortcuts options.

Step 2: You can customize one of the 5 shortcuts by clicking on it. Let's try the first one and then you will see the list of frequently-used operations and functions. Those functions in gray color are indicating that they were already in your Quick Ball shortcuts.

Step 3: Choose one operation as a shortcut. Well, far more than this, you can also set a shortcut for your favorite app in your phone! Just swipe to the end of the list and click "Apps", choose one app. That's it!

Hide Automatically

This function enables you to hide Quick Ball in selected apps. For some reasons, you don't want the Quick Ball show on the screen, especially when you are playing some mobile phone games. Of course, when you stop the game, Quick Ball will show again on the screen.

Preferred gesture

You can choose the Quick Ball gesture either swipe or tap by selecting "preferred gesture". The default setting is "Tap", you need to tap the round dot and then tap the shortcut; but if you select "Swipe", you can swipe to the direction of the shortcut and bring it into effect.

Note: As I tested, if you select "Tap", you can easily drag the Quick Ball on the screen; but if you select "Swipe", your finger needs to stay a little longer on the round dot and then drag it to where you want it be, otherwise you may accidentally activate the wrong shortcut, it's kind of annoying.

Move aside when full screen

The Quick Ball will move aside when entering fullscreen mode in some applications.

Show on lockscreen

You can decide whether show Quick Ball on the lockscreen or not. But please note that the shortcuts of "menu", "home" and "back" are not accessible. Anyway, you can not do these 3 actions under lockscreen state.

Restore defaults

This action will restore default settings, including shortcuts and the order. App data on your device won't be affected.

For those who like moving from one app to another app, this will give you a new way to achieve that. Instead of using menu button, you could use Quick Ball in effective and convenient fashion!

And I believe that there will be more interesting functions to be added into the touch assistant / Quick Ball in the future, let's look forward to it!