Xiaomi MI 4i review : Initial impressions and hands on

Xiaomi is often called the “Apple of China”, and rightly so. The company with it’s enthusiasm, marketing skills, flash sales based model and beautifully designed as well as perfectly priced products has captured the imagination of the masses. This has led to the company building a cult fan following in its homeland China as well as here in India. With the MI 3 last year Xiaomi had announced their arrival big time, and then they upped the game with Redmi, Redmi note and subsequent versions of these smartphones. On April 23 Xiaomi conducted a global launch of it’s latest flagship product the Xiaomi MI 4i. This is the successor to the widely popular MI 4 and rightly so. Every specification has been upped from the previous flagship and the design has also seen vast improvements. So without further ado we will start our Xiaomi MI 4i review and give you the details about this smartphone. Over the course of coming weeks we will keep updating this video as we get more and more insights into the working of this device.

Xiaomi MI 4i review: The spec sheet and analysis.

The under the hood components i.e. specifications of this phone are as follows:

This device is one of the few devices in the sub 15k category to pack so much in such a great budget offering. Let’s just go into more detail about this device and you can watch our initial hands on and first impressions video just below!

So now that we are done with an initial impression of this device let’s break down everything about this device in gory detail.

Design of the Xiaomi MI 4i:

The MI 4i sports a polycarbonate exterior with perforated grills at the back for the speaker and the device is incredibly thin as well as light at 130 gm. The construction is unibody. The shift from MI 4’s metallic body to polycarbonate one does hurt some of the premium feel attached with the previous flagship. But all in all this makes the price of this device much more reasonable and it’s an understandable trade-off.

The white and the black colours for this model stand apart and look really good. The back camera too is concealed really well and doesn’t protrude out like on many other devices. The front design is also good and the screen to body ratio is nice as the device doesn’t waste too much space on the bezel area. All in all Xiaomi has done real well this time and the design does stand apart from the phones available at this price point and even those devices which are sold for a premium price tag.

Camera of the Xiaomi MI 4i:

The MI 4i sports a 13 MP primary back shooter. The camera is a Sony/Samsung IMX214 13 MP camera, with f/2.0 aperture, a 5 element lens, and support for 1080p Full HD video recording. The front camera is a 5 MP camera with a wide viewing angle which makes it an excellent selfie camera. The back camera is more than decent with the shots being supported by features like Beautify, auto HDR and lots of small tweaks done to the camera software by Xiaomi to make sure that the camera experience comes out to be top notch!

Performance and battery life of the MI 4i:

The device is one of the first to come with a 2nd gen Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 chipset. Xiaomi has exclusively partnered with Qualcomm to deliver this chipset on this smartphone. It has 2 GB of LPDDR3 RAM and 16 GB of on board storage. The octa core 64 bit processor on this smart phone has four power saving cores and four cores which perform fully to complete all tasks. The device scores 40,000+ on the Antutu Benchmark and is in the league of premium smart-phones just by going by that figure. The Xiaomi MI 4i comes with a 3120 mAh battery and it is a battery which supports high voltage 4.4 volts so that it can hold more charge and even charge faster than other comparable batteries. It can hold its ground for upto 1.5-1 days on normal to heavy usage. The battery capacity is on an average 38% more than the battery found across most 5 inch premium devices.

Display of the Xiaomi MI 4i:

The devices comes with a 5 inch, 1080p full HD display with OGS i.e. One Glass solution developed by Corning, the makers of Gorilla Glass. This means that the screen is as much scratch resistant as any other smartphone with Gorilla Glass out there. The display has a density of 441 PPI and comes with Sunlight display developed by Xiaomi which dynamically adjusts the contrast of pixels on the display for extreme clarity even under heavy lighting or bright outdoor sunlight.

Software on the MI 4i:

The Xiaomi MI 4i comes with MIUI v6 on top of Android 5.0.2 i.e. Android Lollipop. It is the first Xiaomi smart phone to come with an Android L based OS. The design and features of MIUI remain almost the same with few minor changes here and there. Read on our full coverage of MIUI v6 here. You can also read our full coverage of Android Lollipop here.

Price, availability and variants:

The 16 GB version of the Xiaomi MI 4i retails for a price of INR 12,999 and has definitely raised the bar for others to follow suite. Currently only the 16 GB white version of the MI 4i is available online on Flipkart. But our reliable sources inside Xiaomi indicate that soon higher storage models will be available across all channels i.e. Amazon, Snapdeal etc. The other colours like Black etc. will also be online in a matter of few weeks. For the price of approx 13k this device delivers what the MI3 did and it does so exactly in the same fashion, though with a bit more splendor this time!

Here’s our full review video for the Grey edition of MI 4i, do watch it! 

So did you like our coverage of the Xiaomi MI 4i. Want to ask something? Have any doubts or want to share your views, then don’t forget to comment on our post.

Read more related to Xiaomi on Inspire2rise:

• Xiaomi MI pad review and specs
• Xiaomi Redmi 2 review and hands on
• Xiaomi MI 4 hands on and preview
• Xiaomi Redmi note 4G review

Summary

Reviewer

Aditya Nath Jha

Review Date

2015-04-27

Reviewed Item

Xiaomi MI 4i

Author Rating

5