Xiaomi Mi4i announced in India, innovation made compact

Teased repeatedly before the New Delhi launch by Xiaomi over their twitter, the China giant’s mysterious global Mi phone is none other than the Xiaomi Mi4i, which is the cheaper, more plastic sibling of the Mi4.

Launched at their first ever launch event outside of China, Xiaomi’s new phone looks more like a cheaper alternative to the Xiaomi Mi4 which saw it’s debut last year as opposed to being a full on upgrade where the Xiaomi Mi4i is pretty much a ‘lighter’ version of the Mi4.

Xiaomi says that the new phone has a polycarbonate unibody design that is 12 percent thinner and 13 percent lighter than the Mi4, being only 7.8mm thick weighing in a 130g whereas it’s predecessor came in at 8.9mm and weighed 149g.

The Mi4i will have a 5 inch 1080p 441ppi IPS display with Corning Concore glass and features Sunlight Display. This will automatically adjusts the screen brightness and increases the quality of the image when in harsh sunlight. It’s supposedly much brighter and 30 percent more battery efficient as well, but we’ll find out for certain once we get to try it out.

Under the hood, the Mi 4i sports a 2nd gen 64-bit quad-core Snapdragon 615 that runs at both 1.7GHz and 1.1GHz, with an Adreno 405 CPU. The processor is mated to 2GB RAM as well as 16GB storage and dual-SIM connectivity. Like it’s predecessors there’s seems to be no microSD slot. However it does have a slightly bigger battery 3120 mAH and supports Quick Charge and is rated to last about 1.5 days with average use.

The Mi4i will also be Xiaomi’s first smartphone with Android 5.0 Lollipop with MIUI 6.0 out of the box and has been rated at 40.2k on Antutu.

The rear camera is a Sony/Samsung 13 megapixel shooter with Xiaomi’s 5-element lens and f/2.0 aperture and the front snapper will be a 5 megapixel lens with 5-element lens, f/1.8 aperture as well as a 80 degree wide angle. The front camera will have the Beautify feature on by default due to popular demand, which adjusts the levels of beautification based on your estimated age. The camera combo is just slightly better than what the Mi4 has to offer with a very minor upgrade on part of the rear camera.

Devices in India will also get to enjoy Visual IVR that will take the bite out the customer service experience on mobile letting you to skip voice prompts by displaying it all on screen instead. Visual IVR will be in the MIUI beta build in India first before it’s rolled out to everyone else.

The Xiaomi Mi4i will retail for Rs.12999 (about RM 746) and will come in blue, white, black, yellow, pink, with the Malaysian availability coming in May.