Xiaomi Mi 4i: The inside story

25 April 2015 6:51 PM IST

Xiaomi’s stated that Mi 4i has been built with the parts from top manufacturers

Hugo Barra shows off what goes inside the Xiaomi Mi 4i

Xiaomi finally unveiled the Mi 4i in India, stating that the ‘i’ in the product’s name means ‘India’. The Xiaomi Mi 4i was launched at the global event held in Delhi on April 23, 2015. The following day, Hugo Barra, VP global for Xiaomi, gave us an insider of what goes inside the Xiaomi Mi 4i. The device was a project for almost 18 months and finally made it to limelight.

The Xiaomi Mi 4i sports the Snapdragon 615 second generation chipset, a 64-bit SoC with a quad-core processor and designed by Qualcomm in India with collaboration with Xiaomi. The Xiaomi Mi 4i is a completely manufactured by Foxconn in China. Ripping apart the Xiaomi Mi 4i unit for us was Hugo Barra himself. With a pry tool and a single screw driver, and slightly shivering hands, he opened the unit, piece by piece to show off the inside story.

Shown above is the dual-sided motherboard and the second PBC

The Xiaomi Mi 4i is a dual-SIM Android smartphone with a unibody design. The device does not sport a removable rear panel and has a non-removable battery. The display is a 5-incher full HD IPS panel with an OGS display. The display panel is as thin as a credit card as the top protection layer is sandwiched with the LCD display into a single unit, with no air-gap. This display was designed in collaboration with Corning and helps reduce the smartphones thickness, while keeping the quality intact. The LCD display is provided by Sharp and JDI.

Below the display is a single motherboard PCB with a dual-sided design. Squeezed onto the motherboard are all the components, on both sides. Below the motherboard is the battery housing and below the battery goes in a second PCB, connected with two flat, flexible plastic copper cables. The lower PCB is mounted with the speaker, microphone and USB connector. The PCB also features a Smart PA to help amplify the audio output.

Shown above is the opened smartphone

The main motherboard features the Snapdragon 615 chipset, the internal storage (16GB) and the necessary electronics. The SD615 chipset features a quad-core 1.7GHz + 1.1GHz processor with 2GB of RAM and an Adreno 405 GPU. The motherboard also features the dual-SIM (micro) compartment, RF chips and others. Attached to the motherboard are the front and rear cameras, the earpiece and sensors. The cameras, designed by Sony and Samsung (13MP), are designed with compact components and housing, simply keeping in mind to reduce the thickness of the smartphone.