Could Xiaomi be launching a new smartphone with last year’s flagship processor?

An interesting entry popped up on Geekbench, with scores from what looked like a benchmark ran on a brand new Xiaomi smartphone. It’s a phone we haven’t seen before, but that wasn’t the most interesting thing about it. The odd thing is that it was running on last year’s flagship SoC.

Before we begin, you should know that nothing has been officially confirmed just yet so treat this with the appropriate amount of skepticism. With that out of the way, let’s forge onward.

As you can see, this entry in Geekbench belongs to a smartphone dubbed the Xiaomi Mi 6S. Interestingly, it’s powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor with what looks like 6GB of RAM. Last I checked, Xiaomi didn’t release a Mi 6S alongside their 2017 flagship Mi 6, so where did this phone come from? It seems very likely that this is a new phone especially since it’s on Android 9, an update even the Mi 8 hasn’t received.

What’s more, if they wanted to launch a watered down version of their flagship, wouldn’t they have named it after some variation of their 2018 flagship, like they did with the Snapdragon 710-powered Mi 8 SE. It’s all a little sketchy to me at this point in time, but Xiaomi have been known for being quite unpredictable with their smartphone launches so it’s also hard to dismiss the possibility of something like this happening.

That then begs the question: Would you buy a Snapdragon 835-powered smartphone from Xiaomi if it was sold as a brand new device today? I personally don’t think this would be a huge deal especially if the company offered it at a good price. The Snapdragon 835 is still a very capable processor and since I doubt that this Mi 6S (if it ever launches) would ever be priced above the Mi 8, there’s a pretty good chance people would lap this up.

What do you think? Would you buy a phone like this? Let me know in the comments below.

[SOURCE, VIA, 2]