Xiaomi Mi4i is finally official. The company has managed to nail it once again with this brand new offering. The phone provides one of the best cost to hardware ratio, making it truly a flagship for masses. The best part of the device is its price tag, as Xiaomi will start selling the Xiaomi Mi4i from April 30 for an amazing Rs. 12,999 i.e. $205 price tag. So, its even cheaper than the Xiaomi Mi3 with much advanced specs.
At the start of the event, the company said that the Xiaomi Mi4i was heavily inspired by India. The phone will feature a unibody polycarbonate body with soft touch matte finish with anti-grease coating. The polycarbonate body wraps the entire device giving it a premium look.
The phone will have the same height as the 4.7-inch iPhone 6, but it will feature a larger 5-inch display. The body is quite thin too measuring just 7.8mm and the phone weighs just 130 grams.
The Mi4i comes with a unique 5-inch sunlight fully laminated OGS display with full HD 1080p resolution. This translates into a pixel density of a whopping 441 ppi. The sunlight display uses dynamic tone mapping which keeps the image quality balanced even in bright sunlight. This in turns helps to improve display visibility under sunlight. The display is 30% more battery efficient than competitors and comes with NTSC 95 percent color gamut and 178 degrees wide viewing angles.
Coming to the performance, the phone will feature Qualcomm’s 64-bit octa-core Snapdragon 615 processor with 2GB LPDDR3 RAM and 16GB ROM. The company also reveals that the Snap 615 was created by Qualcomm India. Although Qualcomm’s new chipset hasn’t really impressed us, Xiaomi claims that the Mi4i scores above 40,000 points on AnTuTu. The phone features all the standard connectivity functions such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, OTG, dual SIM dual Standby etc.
Coming to the main area, i.e. camera, the Mi4i comes with a 13MP Sony CMOS sensor at the back with f/2.0 aperture and 5 element lens. Besides the camera unit, you will find a two-tone flash, with a cold white LED and a warm yellow LED. The company claims that the combination of these two colored lights brings out the best picture. Moreover, when the room is too dark, you have a feature inbuilt in the camera UI which can turn on the integrated flash. This will lit up the object in focus and will result into better pictures even in low light conditions.
As for the front camera, there will be a 5MP shooter with f/1.8 aperture and 80 degrees wide angle lens. The phone will have a number of interesting camera functions such as beautify and improved HDR. The beautify is turned on as default on the front camera and is ideal for taking beautiful selfies. At the event, Barra noted that the software uses 12 different profiles (6 Males and 6 Females) to improve the image captured. Finally, in the camera department, Barra said that Xiaomi’s HDR is one of the best in the market right now.
You can check out a few samples from the test units down below to judge the camera performance.
Coming to the battery, Xiaomi has made no cost cuttings in this area. The Xiaomi Mi4i gets a generous 3120 mAh battery which the company claims is good enough for around 1.5 days of regular usage. The cherry on top is the Quick Charge support which will speed up the charging process.
Finally, coming to the software, you don’t have any surprises here. The phone will run on Android 5.0 Lollipop version along with MIUI 6 on top. The company notes that the new MIUI version features a lot of interesting features. One of the highlighted ones was the Visual IVR (Interactive Voice Response). This particular options helps you bypass the boring and long IVR calls by giving you preset options in menu format. So, you can directly select these options manually from the drop down menu instead of waiting for operator to hand it out to you.
The company claims that the Mi4i is made from the materials supplied from the best companies in the world. To name a few, Corning, Sony, Samsung, Qualcomm, Panasonic have all supplied parts for the new phone.
Given the hardware and the features, the Xiaomi Mi4i turns out to be a great phone for $205 (Rs. 12,999). It will go on sale in India from April 30 on Flipkart, Snapdeal, Airtel and other stores in a number of different colors. The phone will also make it outside of India from May in countries like Hong Kong, Malaysia, Taiwan, Indonesia and Singapore.
The company also unveiled the Xiaomi Mi Band in India today for Rs. 999 ($18). But more details on that later.
Anyways, so what do you think about the Mi4i?
