Top 5 Reasons to consider the Xiaomi Mi 4i when it arrives on May 21

A couple of weeks back, I’ve shared my views on why Xiaomi’s Mi 4i isn’t truly a global phone, the phone will be launched in Malaysia on May 21 which we shall expect Xiaomi to offer some similar sales strategy similar to its previous product releases. The Mi 4i isn’t perfect, of course, but it isn’t totally bad and it is still one decent smartphone to own if you aren’t complaining too much, the Mi 4i is set to retail at RM769.

At this price range, it is difficult to resist on the Mi 4i’s Full HD (1920×1080) display and a great camera setup – 13-megapixel main and 5-megapixel front. No doubt I’m still maintaining my say about Xiaomi’s decision to downgrade the camera from the original Mi 4, the Mi 4i’s cameras have the best in class sensors, coupled with Xiaomi’s superb MIUI camera algorithm that delivers great picture quality, this could be your best travelling point and shoot if you don’t want to lug around a heavy camera. What really excites me personally is the company’s Sunlight Display feature and we shall find out if the Mi 4i’s display is truly readable under direct sunlight.

Xiaomi hasn’t been stingy at all in offering huge battery capacities on their phones and the Mi 4i should be able to offer great battery life out of it’s 3,120mAh juice, the phone has a 2nd generation Snapdragon 615 Octa-Core CPU that has 4 performance cores and 4 efficient cores on it, coupled with MIUI’s power saving feature we could expect the device to offer a great one full day of heavy usage or probably more if you are a power conservative user.

This is probably Xiaomi has called the Mi 4i a global phone (a world phone sounds better though), because the phone supports a wide range of FDD-LTE and TD-LTE bands, which will mean if you travel to places like China or the US, you will be able to enjoy LTE connectivity on their networks. In addition, the Mi 4i comes packed with WiFi 802.11ac dual band, Bluetooth 4.1 and Dual SIM4G LTE standby, there’s no other smartphones that can offer such connectivity features below RM800.

I really have to commend Xiaomi on this as they have truly gone all way out as the first Chinese phone maker to deliver Google’s latest operating system on their new smartphone. The Mi 4i will apparently still come with MIUI v6 running on top of Android 5.0 Lollipop, the operating system will allow the Mi 4i to take advantage of its 64-bit processor for improved performance and introduces significant power saving features. Again, no other Chinese phone makers and most big names out there are still not able to deliver Android Lollipop to their mid-range devices.

The Xiaomi Mi 4 was an incredible smartphone with superb aesthetics and slim screen bezels, the Mi 4i continues to deliver that great design from the company, although it no longer comes with that steel frame that CEO Lei Jun once emphasized back then, the phone still features a futuristic and attractive unibody design that most mid-range phones do not offer. With that slim screen bezel and that dense screen to body ratio, the Mi 4i’s 5-inch display could mean easy one handed operation for huge hands.

Hard to resist all the goodies the Mi 4i has to offer? We look forward to it as well and can’t wait to receive our review unit from Xiaomi. The Mi 4i however, has things that users should be looking out – 16GB of non-expandable memory and only 2GB of RAM, which either one of them could be a problem in the long term as you won’t get to install a lot of apps and most importantly, MIUI v6 takes up a huge chunk of RAM in our past experience, let’s hope Android Lollipop resolves this and we shall be updating you soon.