Xiaomi has set its sights on India, and it’s got a brand-new, mid-range smartphone called the Mi 4i designed specifically for its fans in the country. The Mi 4i takes a lot of cues from Xiaomi’s more costly flagship Mi4, which launched in July last year, but it offers a mid-range processor and plastic body to cut the price down to just $200.
Updated on 04-27-2015 by Andy Boxall: Added in video showing the Mi 4i being stripped down by Xiaomi’s head of international products, Hugo Barra.
The Mi 4i sports a 5-inch Full HD screen with a 1080p resolution, and it’s powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 615 octa-core processor along with 2GB of RAM. Xiaomi placed only 16GB of storage inside the device, which is unfortunately not expandable. The device does, however, accept two SIM cards, and supports 4G LTE. Inside, a large 3,120mAh battery should keep things running for a sensible amount of time.
The Mi 4i runs the most recent version of Android, 5.0 Lollipop, with the company’s MIUI 6 skin on top. To appeal to Indian users, Xiaomi added a few cool features such as Visual IVR — which makes interactions with automated phone systems easier to handle — and support for six Indian languages, including Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam. The extra language support is especially key, as India has 22 official languages and more than a thousand unofficial ones.
A very high-resolution 13-megapixel camera with an f/2.0 aperture sits on the back of the device next to a dual-tone LED flash, and there’s a 5.1-megapixel camera with an f/1.8 aperture in the front of the device. It’s not every day that you see a mid-range smartphone that costs a mere $200 sport such high-resolution cameras.
Xiaomi’s head of international development, and former Google employee, Hugo Barra said he has been working on the Mi 4i project for 18 months. Proud of the company’s achievement, he can be seen in the video below tearing down the Mi 4i to show its inner workings, while pointing out what makes it so special. In particular, he notes the small size of the dual-sided motherboard, the thinness of the battery, and the specially made Corning glass screen cover.
Xiaomi will offer the plastic Mi 4i in several color options, including black, white, orange, blue, and pink. The device is only available in India through Flipkart, and will start selling on April 30, for Rs. 13,000, which amounts to about $205. Preorders for the phone start today. If you’re interested, check out the phone on Xiaomi’s site.
Article originally published on 04-23-2015
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