Xiaomi Mi 4i officially announced with an affordable price and in an array of colors

The Xiaomi Mi 4i was officially announced today by the Chinese manufacturer at an event which took place in New Delhi, India. Former Google executive Hugo Barra took the stage to present the handset which is offered in an array of vivid colors.

The Xiaomi Mi 4i is nearly identical to the Xiaomi Mi 4, but comes with a polycarbonate (plastic) body like the Apple iPhone 5c and aims to be an affordable alternative to their flagship. Xiaomi explained that the 'i' in the Mi 4i name stands for India, as the phone is inpisred by the country and its culture. The phone will be available in India only, at least initially.

The Xiaomi Mi 4i features a 5 inch Sharp/JDI fully laminated display with 1080 x 1920-pixel (Full HD) resolution, 16GB of internal storage, a 13MP rear camera with f/2.0 lens, a 5MP front camera with an f/1.8 lens, a 3120 mAh battery and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 processor with 2GB of RAM. The handset is offered in black, white, red, cyan and pink. On the software front you get MIUI 6 running on top of Android 5.0 Lollipop

The handset itself is 12% thinner, 13% lighter than Xiaomi Mi 4. The big part of the unique appeal of the Xiaomi Mi 4i comes from its battery that is smaller in terms of physical size than the one one the original Mi 4, but has a larger actual capacity. Xiaomi is also adding support for quick charging on the Mi 4i with a 2A 5V charger in the box that recharges the phone to 40% in one hour.

In terms of camera, Xiaomi boasted that it has further improved its already excellent HDR mode and new capabilities of the camera include automatic gamma tuning, color correction, and low-light de-noising. The camera also offers a dual-tone flash with the rear camera for more natural images.

The Xiaomi Mi 4i is powered by a 2nd generation Snapdragon 615 system chip, which promises improved performance over the first generation. This 64-bit chip comes with four higher clocked Cortex A53 cores running at up to 1.7GHz and four additional Cortex A53 cores running at up to 1.1GHz for better power efficiency. An interesting fact is the Snapdragon 615 chip is fully designed by Qualcomm India, another tribute to the country that Xiaomi pays with its new device.

The handset has been priced very aggressively, costing only 12,999 Indian rupees (around $200 USD) off contract. The phone will be available in a variety of Asian markets (India first) with registrations kicking off on Flipkart on April 30th.

source - Mi