Xiaomi Mi4i Review

After the success of Mi3, Redmi 1S and Redmi Note, Xiaomi announced their flagship phone the Mi4 in India. But unlike their previous phones, the pricing of Mi4 was not very well accepted in India. Couple of weeks back, the company launched their first device specifically for India and also the first global launch outside China.

Mi4i comes with 5.0 inch Full HD display at 1920 X 1080p and a fully lamination Corning Concore OGS display. The display has a pixel density of 441ppi and has a sunlight mode which increases the quality of display in sunlight.  The device is powered by second generation Snapdragon 615 Octa core processor, instead of Snapdragon 801 on the Mi4. There is also 2GB of RAM and 16GB internal storage available on the device. The phone is priced Rs 12999 and available on Flipkart. So does the phone live up to the expectations of Mi3? Here is the detailed review of Mi4i.

Related Reading: Xiaomi Mi4i Unboxing

Design and Build:

Design wise, while there are lots of similarities with Mi4, the Mi4i comes with a unibody plastic finishing. But unlike Xiaomi Mi4, the rear panel isn’t glossy and features finely textured and matte-sprayed for resistance to fingerprints and grease. The device is very compact and feels great in hands. The device is a lot shorter than Mi3 and also is pretty slim and lightweight.

The volume rocker and the power button are on the right hand side are made of steel and have a great feedback. The dual SIM tray is located on left hand side. On the top you have the 3.5mm audio jack and at the bottom there is the micro USB charging port.

The bezels of the device has been kept to low levels and this makes the device pretty compact for a 5 inch phone. Use of One Glass Solution makes the device slim and this uses glass laminated on the display. The rear panel has the 13MP camera (without any projection), dual LED flash, Mi logo and the speaker located at the bottom. The front panel has the 5 inch display, front 5MP camera and also three capacitive backlit buttons.

Overall, the design and build quality of the phone is very good and there are more resemblances to Redmi 2 on the device.

Display:

Xiaomi Mi4i features a 5-inch full HD IPS LCD display and it has a pixel density of 441ppi. The display is made extra tough with Corning OGS Glass. The display is sharp and vivid and looks great. The brightness levels are also good and the sunlight readability looks decent. The reading experience is very good on the device and the texts looks crisp. The phone also features Sunlight display which make the display adapt to the light conditions getting you the best experience. The viewing angles of the display is again good. The default font size may seem tiny for some people, but this can be easily adjusted in the settings.

The touch response is very good and it was precise. Watching movies should be a great experience on the 1080p display. Overall, we were pretty happy with the display offered on the device. The display is definitely one step ahead than what was offered on Mi3.

Software and Performance:

Xiaomi Mi4i runs MIUI6 on top of Android 5.0 Lollipop and this is the first Xiaomi phone to feature Lollipop out of the box. Similar to MIUI v5, the latest version 6 also offers a plethora of options to customize and get a great experience from the device. You can virtually customize every bit of the software and it is one of the most feature rich ROMs for an Android. Visually there is no difference between MIUI 6 on KitKat and Lollipop.

The notification center has a beautiful implementation with almost all quick toggles featured and you can also customize it. You can skin the UI with hundreds of free themes available from the theme store. MIUI has custom lock screen and also the home screen. Unlike stock Android, there is no app drawer instead it features multiple home screens.

Xiaomi has also added lots of useful apps like FM radio, recorder, Compass, torch and much more. Xiaomi’s attention to smaller details is simply amazing and the UI looks very much polished with no lags or crashes. The device also comes pre-loaded with all the Google apps along with WPS office, a beautiful File manager, weather, calendar and a notes app.

The phone also features a Security app which includes Cleaner, Data usage, Blocklist, battery, Virus Scan and also permissions.

The phone runs on Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 SoC which has a 1.7GHz Octa-core processor along with an Adreno 405 GPU. There is 2GB RAM along with 16GB storage space. The biggest disappointment of the device is that there is no micro SD expansion slot and out of the 16GB, only a little below 12GB is available to user. If you need more storage, you need to pick the higher priced Mi4 which comes in 64GB storage option as well. The performance of the device wasn’t as good as it was on Mi4 or Mi3 which came with Snapdragon 8XX SoC. You can see some lags which switching apps when running multiple apps in the background. But having said that it can definitely perform most of the day to day tasks with ease.

The gaming performance of the device was just average and not of the great quality and standard set by Mi4 and Mi3. There were frame drops and minor lags while playing heavy games, but we did not notice any considerable heating issue. We tested highly graphic rich games and you can definitely play almost any game on the device.  Watch: Xiaomi Mi4 Gaming Review

The device has good reception and the call quality was also good. The phone also offers recording calls, which is not offered in most of the phones. The speaker volume and performance was also good. The phone also comes with Mi Cloud, which is the cloud storage from the company and you can upload files there.

Overall, while we can say this is one of the best ROMs available on Android, the performance was not comparable to Mi3. With the amount of features and customizations it offers, it will take a long time for you to get all the features tested. The phone supports dual 4G LTE, but we couldn’t test the 4G speeds as we do not have 4G in our area.

Camera:

Xiaomi Mi4i features a 13MP camera with backside illuminated Sony/ Samsung made sensor and has f/2.0 aperture. The difference between Mi4’s 13MP camera and Mi4i’s 13MP camera is the lens, the former has 6 lens layout, while the latter has 5 lens. There is a dual tone LED flash for shooting in low light. The MIUI 6 interface is pretty feature rich and offers settings like HDR, Panorama, scenes, focus mode, white balance, exposure and ISO manual settings, among others. The Face Detection and Image stabilization are also available in additional settings. You can swipe down for the filters and swipe up for the different modes.

The photos taken in daylight, Xiaomi Mi4i camera has plenty of detail, color reproduction is very good and the white balance is right most of the time. The phone also comes with Normal and Live HDR and at times you might feel that the images are a bit oversaturated. But the overall quality of the daylight shots are very good. The daylight macro captures have come really good and the detailing is very good. Again the colors look vivid and are closer to real colors.

The low light images taken with the camera with just average. The low light photos had plenty of noise when the artificial light was low. But with the dual tone flash, the details were pretty good.

The video recorder has the same interface as that of the photos and the Xiaomi Mi4i can record videos in 1080p. The details in the video are very pretty good and the colors and contrast are great too. The phone can also record videos in slow motion (available only for HD videos), fast motion and HDR recording.

The front 5MP camera is pretty good for selfies and video calls and also comes with beautify mode.

Here are some of the samples taken with the device.

Battery Life:

The Mi4 comes with a 3120mAh battery which is slightly higher than the capacity found on the Mi3. We tested the battery performance by running a host of background apps from social sites like Twitter, Facebook, Viber, WhatsApp, Instagram and more along with Mailbox and Gmail apps syncing two email accounts. The phone was connected to both 3G and Wi-Fi. With this settings we managed to get around 24 hours of battery life with 4.15 hours on screen time. Even if you are a heavy phone user, you will still get a day of usage.

The battery performance on the device is pretty good and you wouldn’t have too much to complain here.

The phone also features Quick Charge that charges up to 40% in an hour.

Verdict:

Priced at Rs 12999, the Xiaomi Mi4i makes excellent value for money with great build quality, excellent display and good camera with latest Android 5.0. But if you have been using the Xiaomi Mi3, the Mi4i does not match up with it in terms of the performance. Overall, if you are looking for a good mid range device, the Mi4i is totally worth the money you spend.