Xiaomi Mi 4 Review: A completely refreshed flagship

Xiaomi hasn’t failed to impress its fans across the world, and has managed to keep its Indian fans excited throughout its existence, till date. With the launch of its first flagship, the Mi 3, Xiaomi managed to steal the market away from rival smartphone giants who stole the show with high-end hardware and exorbitantly priced handsets. The Mi 3 offered its users a taste of what a high-performance smartphone can do for less than half the price of the competition. The next flagship handset, the Mi 4 was unveiled while the Mi 3 was selling like hot cakes in India. Most fans awaited the new flagship, but Xiaomi had to cater to the Indian fans with localised content, and hence the delay. At last, the Mi 4 showed up in India with the debut in January 2015. The smartphones will be up on sale from February 10, 2015. But before you put an end to the craving one the Mi 4, here’s a glimpse of what you could experience on the Mi Flagship.

The Xiaomi Mi 4 is a premium smartphone at the lowest cost available. Although there are other smartphones with almost similar hardware, available at marginally higher costs, the Xiaomi Mi 4 does stand superior in terms of build and user interface experience.

The Xiaomi Mi 4 is a premium smartphone with a powerful hardware below the hood. Built with a single piece, stainless steel, all-metal frame, the premium design of the Mi 4 will definitely excite its fans. The Mi 4 is nothing similar to what the Mi 3 offered—in terms of design, build and performance.

Though many people stated that the Mi 4 steals its design from the Apple iPhone, we disagree completely. The Mi 4 sports a great form-factor for a product with a 5-inch display. Designed to fit your palm comfortably, the Mi 4 offers a good grip—thanks to the arched back design that sports a glossy finish and offers a decent grip. However, the sandblasted outer frame that is built from a single piece of stainless steel plate is a little slippery if the device is held with just the fingers.

The front panel sports a large 5-inch display with the front camera, sensors and earpiece residing at the top, while the back, menu and home capacitive backlit buttons take their place at the bottom. The display is an OGS Corning Gorilla glass, which offers the capacitive touchscreen and the strength of the Gorilla Glass 3 in a single piece of glass. This feature (OGS, or One Glass Solution) helps reduce the distance between the LCD panel and the protective glass by a huge amount, resulting in a slimmer profile for the entire handset. The OGS also makes the display seem like the pixels are closer to your finger.

Moving on, the steel frame has a very neatly chiselled design, giving it the premium look with a sandblasted surface, merging into the chrome polished chamfer edges. Flushed against it is the OGS display panel, which is mounted with a 0.05mm edge coating. This coating has replaced the conventional glass, rubber frame, which is used on other smartphones between the glass and the chassis. The rear panel has a high-gloss surface and an arched back, with a textured design. The rear panel sports the chrome Mi logo along with the primary camera and LED flash. The rear panel is a non-removable design and the battery is not user-replaceable.

The right side sports the volume rocker and power buttons, while the top and bottom feature the headphone jack and IR transmitter and the Micro USB port and speaker grille respectively. The micro SIM card is housed on the left side of the device. Under the hood is a set of powerful hardware squeezed within the 8.9mm slim body. The entire phone weighs 149g.

Diving deeper, the Mi 4 is built using a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 chipset, which comprises of a quad-core processor clocked at 2.5GHz each and clubbed with 3GB of RAM and an Adreno 330 GPU. At this time, the Snapdragon 801 chipset is two generations below the recent flagship SD810 chipset that has already managed to get under a few other smartphones, but the SD801 is equally powerful, and definitely cheaper at this point of time. Xiaomi has already launched the Mi Note Pro, which is the latest flagship in the phablet segment and uses the SD810 chipset.

Moving ahead the Mi 4 sports a 5-inch IPS LCD full HD display panel (by JDI) with a resolution of 1080x1920 pixels at 441ppi. It is protected by a 0.55mm thin Corning OGS Glass which is scratch and shatter resistant. The 2014 flagship is available in two internal storage variants—16GB and 64GB, but India presently sees only the 16GB version for now. Xiaomi has plans to introduce the 64GB version in a few weeks time. The internal storage is not expandable. However, the Mi 4 features USB OTG, using which, one can extend the storage by connecting a USB flash drive by using a USB OTG connector.

The primary camera features a 13MP sensor, while the front camera contains an 8MP sensor. Xiaomi claims both the front and rear camera to be built using Sony stacked CMOS sensors. The rear camera is built with a 6-piece lens, while the front camera has a 5-piece lens, capable of capturing capture 2K resolution videos. Both the rear camera and the front sport an aperture of f1.8, helping in wide-angle photo capturing. The rear camera is coupled with a chroma flash, which helps capturing photos that are equivalent to HDR-type pictures.

On the connectivity front, the Mi 4 features the regular, but not usually found on all devices. Unlike the Redmi Note 4G, the Mi 4 does not support 4G LTE. 3G, Wireless 802.11 a/b/g/b/ac dual band, Bluetooth v4.0, A-GPS, GLONASS, infrared port and USB host are available as connectivity options. The built-in IR port is presently limited to use as an IR remote control. Xiaomi has supplied a remote controller app with the device, which can control various equipment, ranging from televisions to air conditioners. However, the database of the IR controllers is presently low and Xiaomi needs to keep up the pace with adding most controller databases.

FM radio is included and can play radio without the need of the headset. However, you need to be in a good range of the FM radio signals if you intend using it without the headset, which acts as an antenna for the FM. Lastly, the Mi 4 is fuelled with a 3080mAh battery and powered by Xiaomi’s latest MIUI V6 custom Android (KitKat-based) operating system.

On the performance front, the Mi 4 definitely impresses. The new refreshed look and feel of the fluid Mi 4 gives the user a feel of a cross between an iOS and Android. If you intend purchasing the Mi 4, we recommend that you start up the device, configure it at first and then give it a few reboots in the gaps of around 15 minutes. This will help stabilise the device and improve the performance. An Android handset needs to build its playground on a new device for smoother performance, and this takes a while. Also do note that Xiaomi’s Mi 4 handset comes pre-installed with MIUI V6 out of the box, but you also make sure you install the OTA updates, which fixes any known bugs and helps improve the performance of the smartphone too.

The MIUI V6 user interface is a huge upgrade from the MIUI V5 that is seen on present Mi 3 and Redmi devices. Xiaomi has confirmed that the V6 will arrive on all their devices in a few weeks. The user interface is smooth and fluid. The highly sensitive display does play up sometimes and causes unwanted swiped and touches, but one shall get the hang of the sensitivity after a few days of use. We did not find any lags or stutters in any usage, both on the app front as well as on the user interface—thanks to the 3GB RAM and the powerful processor within. The experience would get even better once MIUI Lollipop hits the device. Xiaomi has not confirmed the date for the Android Lollipop update as yet, but surely has it in the pipeline.

As stated earlier, the display is a JDI-based, full HD IPS OGS panel. The display panel on the MI 4 Indian version is a newer version of the older Mi 4 when launched. The new panel sports a highly sensitive touchscreen and can be used with gloves as well as with wet fingers. The new display also has brighter and higher colour saturation with NTSC 95 per cent colour gamut and a contrast ratio of 1000:1. The viewing angles of the display are also great with almost no colour inversion from any angles. Watching video or viewing pictures and reading text—no complaints. Though usability in broad daylight is great, you might need to increase the display brightness to the highest in bright sunlight.

The Mi 4 sports a single speaker on the bottom of the device. The speaker is loud and audible, but creates a thin sound due to lack of sufficient mid and bass levels. Overall, the audio is good enough for casual videos and audio, albeit using a pair of good earphones is recommended.

The camera on the Mi 4 is another USP of the device, apart from the premium looks, high-end hardware and the user interface. The 13MP camera houses a Sony IMX214 stacked CMOS sensor with a 6-piece lens in front of it. This helps create clearer imaging with minimal distortion. The camera app launches in less than a second and you are ready to shoot your subject in almost no time. The focus is very fast and so does the image saving time. Thanks to the high-speed internal storage, high-resolution photos shot at 13MP save in almost no time. The camera does not switch to review mode after you click, enhancing the experience of shooting images one after the other.

However, we did find that, though the focus is nippy, it can only benefit regular distanced subjects. Macro mode pictures take a hit due to the fast focusing and results in unfocused to blurry images. The macro mode on the camera will take a while getting used to since the camera does not manage to slowly focus on the point you are aiming to shoot.

Check above and below for a series of sample shots taken from the Mi 4. To view the images at full resolution, either download them to your desktop or right-click on the image and open it in a new tab. We leave you to judge the quality of the images taken by the camera.

The camera has a few features that we would like to highlight. The rear camera is equipped with a chroma flash which helps enhance the images similar to what HDR does. The camera, along with the chroma flash, intelligently takes two pictures simultaneously, with flash and without flash, to expose the low-light areas of the frame. Another feature is the refocus mode where you can simply shoot the photo without bothering about where to concentrate the focus on. After the images have been shot, you can head back to the gallery and select the point of focus, before saving the final picture. The camera app also has a burst shot mode, where one can take up to 100 continuous pictures in a single operation.

(Shown above are images taken in normal and HDR modes)

We did notice that the camera does not support any options for setting the resolution. It only features Standard, High and Low under ‘Picture quality’. As a factory default, the camera is set to 16:9 aspect ratio on Standard mode, which won’t give you a complete 13MP shot. Make sure you set the modes to High and 4:3 to get the best resolutions.

To wrap-up this review, the experience with the Mi 4 was great and definitely better than the Mi 3. Though there are other smartphones in the market that sport hardware and performance for a marginal price difference, the Mi 4 stands apart with its premium look and custom personalised user interface. The performance of the hardware and camera along with the new MIUI V6 interface makes this device a highly worthy product for the hot price it sells at. The Mi 4 is priced at an MRP of Rs 19,999 and the sale starts on February 10, 2015.