Xiaomi launched its flagship, the Mi 4, last week, and it’s come roaring out the gates, hell-bent on spear tackling the Samsungs and Sonys in the market. But what does the “flagship” term really mean for Xiaomi? One thing’s for sure, Barra’s brought his A-game to the table.
Xiaomi launched its flagship, the Mi 4, last week, and it’s come roaring out the gates, hell-bent on spear tackling the Samsungs and Sonys in the market. But what does the “flagship” term really mean for Xiaomi? One thing’s for sure, Barra’s brought his A-game to the table.
The most obvious thing that hits you, when you unbox the phone, is how heavily Xiaomi has borrowed from the later models in the iPhone series. The Mi 4, available in white and black, comes packed in a hard plastic cover, the kind that can take a bit of a hit, with a smooth finish back and encased in a sleek steel frame running along the sides. Power button and volume rockers are easay to reach on the right frame, with the 3.5mm jack on top, and the Charging point and speaker on the bottom edge.
Call it a copycat if you will, and you might be partly right, where the general aesthetic is concerned, but that doesn’t take away from the sheer cool of the design. And that steel frame does wonders for the phone’s feel. It’s quite a heavy piece, weighing in at 149g and 8.9mm thick, but a nice kind of heavy. The hefty kind of feel a combat knife might give you. And while it’s a slippery surface to hold on to ( very slippery) there’s an inexplicable coolness to sliding this bad boy off your fingertips and onto your table top. If nothing else, the weight guarantees you’ll definitely feel the difference if someone tries to pick your pocket.
Most of the other features are standard Xiaomi fare. The 5” 1080p screen does a wonderful job with colours, but the beauty of the phone can only truly be tested when playing 4K videos, and it just sails right through them. The images look stunning and not one microsecond of stutter. The cameras, 13MP rear and 8MP front cam with f/1.8, are stellar as well. Where previous iterations in the Mi series were known to struggle a little with rendering low-light scenes, the newly-added chroma flash mode takes care of that. Turn it on, with your flash on, and it rapidly clicks two pictures in succession; one with the flash and one without. It then merges the two images in post (before you even realise you really clicked two photos) and presents you with an overall bright scene, without a washed-out foreground subject. There's a refocus mode thrown in as well, that clicks three photos in succession and renders them together as a single image, where you can later change the focus points in the picture.The Mi 4 camera also seems to be doing a bit of airbrushing (I’m normally as pimply as a teenager on a diet of only samosas) but it’s thankfully subtle enough to not kick your self-esteem in the rear.
The phone is powered by a 2.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 Krait 400 Quad Core with 3GB RAM, and 16GB of internal memory (a 64GB version will be available in a few months), in tandem with the Adreno 330 GPU. That’s enough horsepower to run any game on the Play Store with absolutely no trouble at all. While there are a few phone companies releasing pieces with the Snapdragon 810 processor, at this stage, an 801 will serve you just fine. However, Xiaomi leadership has confirmed that they will be bringing out an 810 processor phone some time in the future. Currently, the only problem with this hardware is that the phone heats up a lot, especially during extended gaming sessions, but the company is likely to fix that with a firmware update, as they did with the Redmi 1S soon after its release. Fingers crossed.
Sound quality is good on the Mi 4, however the volume on loudspeaker is seriously lacking. I suppose it’s best to not have people bugging you by blaring horrible songs on the train, during your daily commute, but it would be nice to at least be given the option to indulge in some horrible behaviour. Personal listening only.
As usual, the phone runs a modded version of Android 4.4.4 KitKat, but with the new MIUI 6. Lots of colour, lots of animations, and lots of pretty little subtleties in design here.
For more on the MIUI 6, read Xiaomi says MIUI 6 coming to Redmi 1S, Mi 3 and Redmi Note 4 in a week
Registrations for the Mi 4 are currently open and it will be on sale on Flipkart on February 10.
What we liked:
Sleek design with a good heft
Improved camera with good low light flash pictures
Good processor speed, zero lag
MIUI 6
What we didn’t like
Automatic airbrushing of selfies (don’t you beautify me against my will you scamp)
Unsatisfactory audio power
No SD card support
Key Specs:
Display: 5” 1920x1080p
Camera: 13MP rear and 8MP selfie cam ( both f/1.8)
Processor: 2.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 Krait 400 Quad Core
Memory: 3GB RAM, 16GB internal storage
OS: Android 4.4.4 KitKat with MIUI 6
Price: Rs 19,999
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 "dnaTechReview- Xiaomi- Mi 4- smartphone- Android- KitKat")
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