The Xiaomi Mi 4i goes official with 5" 1080p screen, 13MP camera

Just moments Xiaomi's latest handset was made official at a dedicated event in New Delhi. Just as expected, the Xiaomi Mi 4i is a more-affordable alternative to the Xiaomi Mi 4 and comes with a polycarbonate unibody.

The Snapdragon 801 has been swapped with a Snapdragon 615, which is less powerful, but does offer an important upgrade over the aforementioned chip - it is 64-bit. The SoC in question is octa-core with Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.7 GHz and the other four at 1.1 GHz. The device is equipped with 2GB of RAM an onboard storage is 16GB. Graphics are courtesy of the Adreno 405.

The smartphone is built around a 5.0" Full HD OGS IPS display with a density of 441 ppi. The panel comes with adaptive brightness technology, called Sunlight display, which improves its legibility when outdoors. Sony have been using such a technique for quite some time and it essentially boils down to brightening darker areas under direct light.

The camera setup is also changed and the Mi 4i now offers 13MP F/2.0 main snapper and a 5MP F/1.8 front-facer. The main camera packs a dual tone dual LED flash for better white balance in low light shots. There are a lot of changes on the software side as well and not just the camera app. Beautify and HDR have received a major overhaul. Low-light quality is improved and the new image filters now come with an array of clever algorithms that are custom-tailored for the best possible results on facial features, based on an estimation of your age and sex.

In terms of connectivity the Xiaomi Mi 4i offers dual-SIM slots with 4G support on both of them. There's also dual-band MU-MIMO Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/ac support - ensuring the fastest local transfer speeds around. Bluetooth version is 4.1, while the microUSB 2.0 port supports USB host mode.

The Xiaomi Mi 4i is powered by a 3,120 mAh battery. It will be available in a total of five color choices - white, blue, black, yellow and pink. It exact dimensions are 138.1 mm x 69.6 mm x 7.8 mm, and weighs in at 130 g, making it smaller and lighter than the Mi 4.

On the software side, we find Xiaomi's own MIUI 6. It is based on Android 5.0 Lollipop so you get a really up-to-date experience. Xiaomi has also developed a few interesting new features, like IVR (Interactive Voice Recognition), to simplify annoying service line calls.

The most impressive bit about the Xiaomi Mi 4i however is its pricing. The smartphone will cost $205 (INR 12,999) when it launches on April 30 on Flipkart. Registrations start today at 8PM IST. Unfortunately we didn't get anything on international availability.