Smartphone market has change dramatically and drastically over past few years. People tend to attract at smaller and much more affordable offerings from any perspective brands ! Well ,if you are getting same processors clocked slightly lower coupled with decent amount of ram ,a swappable battery and an external expansion slot! why wouldn’t you go for it ? This is generally the time where mostly high end offerings of top smartphone brands like Samsung , Htc and Sony are likely to appear in the market and so are they.. Put forth people these day’s prefer buying an affordable smartphone to perform their day to day tasks and since these so called “Affordable” segment is developing well since past 1year ,that consumers tend to attract here ,these days ! #period
Well bringing in Mi3 ,Xiaomi showed everyone what its called to be an affordable smartphone ,back in 2013 ,which was followed by Redmi 1s : company’s lowest offering , then followed by Its flagship device : Mi4 ,Xiaomi together with Hugo barra(former Google executive) redefined what its called to be an flagship smartphone loaded with specs ,well still retaining its affordable segment price point ,back in 2014 ,they even launched a couple of tablets and phablets on the way too ,which were quite phenomenal.
Today at the company’s huge global event at Delhi(India) ,Hugo barra(VP ,Xiaomi) took the stage for the announcement of their latest pricewise mid-range smartphone : Mi 4i (i is for india) ,I is for India and it’l be sold exclusively via flash sales through flipkart.
So what’s the catch with Mi-4i ? lets find out in specs department :-
- Firstly it comes with MIUI 6 running on top of Android 5.0 Lollipop. hopefully it might get updated to MIUI 7 with Android Lollipop 5.1 soon.
- It has a Display of 5-inch Sharp/JDI fully laminated display with 1080 x 1920 (Full HD) resolution having a pixel density of 441ppi.
- It comes with Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 (2nd generation)
64-bit octa-core chip with one Quad-core chipset clocked at 1.7 GHz at Cortex-A53 cores & another quad-core chipset clocked at 1.0 GHz Cortex-A53 cores. It has 2GB of RAM, 16GB of internal storage with no room for expansion !! Bad move there ,Xiaomi ! - Its built like a tank with unibody polycarbonate wrap-around body , which is 12% thinner, 13% lighter than Xiaomi Mi 4.
- Its well bolsterd in camera dept with 13-megapixel main camera (Sony/Samsung sensors used) with f/2.0 lens and dual-tone flash capable of recording 1080p video @30fps & 5-megapixel front camera with f/1.8 lens.
- Has an 3120mah battery, which is about 38% larger than other flaghips of the same size.
- Funny thing about Xaiomi devices is they closely resemble Apple inspired move ! Just have a look over MIUI ,what you visualize is iOS’ness ,they have similar approach in Mi4i here designwise(shells) ! Just like iphone 5c ,Mi 4i will be available in black, white, red, cyan, pink colours
So Indian folks might be thinking ,whoa whoa wait a sec ,snapdragon 615 ? Well that’s the same like micromax yureka ! and that’s even available at low price ? Hold on a second fellas ! This for sure is Snapdragon 615 64bit octacore chipset ,but this time it’s 2nd generation chip designed in India by Qualcomm India,and that’s why MI 4(i) gets it’s name from ! It evens comes with bigger battery in terms of capacity which is small in actual size ,xaiomi even topples Quick charging technology which charges the phone to 40% in one hour with a 2A 5V charger. It even supports both sims with Indian LTE bands!
The only disappointment so far is the lack of an external sd card. Xiaomi always brings something interesting to the table.. and with Mi 4i it surely does.. It will be available at Rs.12,999 (200$approx) on flipkart going live via flash sales on 30th April, 2015.
Sameer