From the time Xiaomi has entered the Indian market, The name “Budget Series” got a new meaning. They have been releasing phones with great price to performance ratio. THey have bought phones like Mi3 and Redmi 1S which were one of the biggest hit and used to get of the shelves in merely 2 or 3 secs. Coming to the present, Xiaomi launched their Flagship, Mi4. People bought Xiaomi phones for two reasons, reason number one being that it has great specs on paper, reason number two being, Their phones were limited, they had flash sales, which eventually created more hype. I bought my Mi3 and Redmi 1S seeing the specs. When a person buys a phone, he never touches it,never see how it look. He would at most see some reviews on Internet about it but still couldn’t touch and feel the phone. The sale used to be always xiaomi’s side as they made great spec phone. Today when I write this article, I write as a proud Mi4 owner. Mi4 is one phenomenal phone which can not be compared to anyone. This Xiaomi phone has a lot more than just specs. Mi4 has a solid metal frame. It has endless numbers of features and many other things. SO what are we waiting for? lets start
Display
Mi4 has a full HD 1920 x 1080p Reolution 5inch display. It has a great ppi of 441. The colours are sharp and clear. It is a IPS panel and supports 10 point multi-touch. Whenever xiaomi does something, they do it the cool way, Mi4 has a Super thin (0.55) OGS Gorilla Glass. OGS is a new protective display from Corning, It is One Glass Solution. It has similar protection to Gorilla CLass class 3 but is thrice thinner than it. Mi4 Review specification
It has a contrast ratio of 1000:1 which makes it stand out of the crowd. The saturation of colours is high and the display is just perfect. After using it more than 3 weeks, I would say, Xiaomi has done pretty neat work in display.
Built
On the back, Mi4 has a noice cancellation Microphone, 13MP Camera and a flash. In the bottom it has Mi branding and some info on the model and manufacturing.
Ont the right it has the volume rocker and the power button. On the left it has the sim tray. On top a IR blaster and 3.5mm jack and on bottom it has Micro-USB port and speakers.
Build of the phone is most exciting part, As I stated above, Mi4 is one of the best craftsmanship work seen on any smart phone. It has a full metal frame, which is extremely sturdy. Belive me or not, I had dropped it from a height of 9 feet 4 times and it was as good as a new phone.
Mi4 has Gorilla glass on front and a textured plastic back. The plastic can often get scratches but you can recognize it only at some specific angles. The buttons are tactile and seems solid.
Hardware
Mi4 is powered by a Snapdragon 801 (Qualcomm MSM8974AC) processor clocked at 2.5 GHz coupled with 3GB of RAM. This combination makes Mi4 a power house which can handle Everything you put on it. It has Adreno 330 which helps it to play massive games like Nova 3 as smoothly as possible.
A full HD display on the front with thin bezels on the sides is such a bliss to look at. The device has got a 13MP camera on the rear and 8MP camera on the front. Both the cameras sport a fast f/1.8 lens.
On the storage front, Mi4 comes with an inbuilt 16GB/64GB memory without any external memory card slot. The 64Gb one is a better buy as you a hell lot of storage for just few bucks.
Also, Mi4 Indian variant doesn’t come with LTE support though the Chinese version has it. We can still explain that There are very few cities which have 4G connect but Xiaomi seriously? 4G will be soon coming to more cities and by it if you would like to upgrade to 4G, you will have no choice. That’s one of the major con of Mi4.
Performance
Mi4 Performs really well in every sector. We did some gaming on Mi4 and it was playing every game on high settings well. There were no frame drops neither were any lags. We did some benchmark tests and the results are really impressive.
So that would definitely give you an idea on how it performs. It performs well. It sometimes not able to handle multitasking when we are switching between may be 4 apps but other than that, it performs smooth.
Software
Mi4 is running MIUI 6 which is a custom skin made by Xiaomi. MIUI 6 carries a flatter design and developed on top of Android 4.4.4 aka Kitkat. Xiaomi has added all those beautiful features which we saw on Mi3 with MIUI 5 in this version as well. However, few of the handy shortcuts like swipe up on music app to open quick music player window are missing.
Also, MIUI 6 consumes 1.4GB of RAM, which is almost half of device RAM capacity. So the users will have to manage with the other half. This RAM consumption of MIUI OS is one of the negative points which company has to look into. We have seen same in its previous versions as well. Xiaomi has bundled Mi4 with SwiftKey and Fleksy along with Google Keyboard, to give you the option to choose your favorite keypad app. As said, MIUI has a lot of features and one of them is Security app, you have a cleaner, Data checker, Blocklist, Battery manager, permission manager and a anti virus.
Camera
The camera of Mi4 is one of the best part in it. The pictures are sharp and vivid. Sometimes due to its high dynamic range, the picture comes over exposed but other than that the camera is just perfect. Every camera now days can click a good picture in outdoors so we went to our studio and clicked some pictures of Redmi 2 in low light.
As you can see the picture with HDR comes sharp. The picture which was clicked without HDR was also not that bad but was underexposed. The picture with flash has some grains and suffers with ISO mismatch. Overall the camera works great and we will soon be posting some pictures shot with it in outdoors.
Mi Remote
Mi Remote is another feature of MI4, it has a IR Blaster on the top which makes your phone a portable Remote controller. You can control many things, but right now in INDIA, it is only compatible with TV and Ac’s.
Final Verdict- If you have a budget of around 20,000 – 25,000 then Mi4 is the best buy. It has a great screen, great build and an awesome UI.