Xiaomi’s Mi 4i Brings Flagship Features to Mid Range Wallets
Xiaomi debuted in Indonesia officially less than a year ago when it started selling the Redmi 1S in September and since then it has launched the Redmi 2, Mi Pad, and Mi Band alongside a handful of accessories such as phone cases, external battery packs and earphones. While the Mi 3 and Mi 4 never made it to shore through official channels, Indonesia became the second country to receive the Mi 4i shortly after the global launch in India in April.
The Mi 4i is a dual SIM 5-inch phone that runs the latest version of Xiaomi’s MIUI operating system. Although it’s billed as the budget version of the flagship Mi 4 due to the plastic body, lower class processor, and smaller memory, the Mi 4i packs near identical feature set to the Mi 4 with some enhancements.
At 7.8 mm thin, Mi 4i’s body is built out of hard plastic with matte finish, designed to provide a good grip. It’s also resistant to grease, ink, and fingerprints.
The 3.5 audio jack is located on the top left hand side of the phone, while the speaker, mic, and USB port are at the bottom end. The tray for the two micro SIM cards is can be popped open from the left hand side using a hairpin or the provided SIM ejector tool.
On the opposite side is the two stainless steel volume buttons and the power button. There’s no dedicated camera button on this phone but the camera is accessible by swiping left from the lock screen.
Screen
Upon knowing that the phone holds a 5-inch screen, it’s easy to consider this as a large phone that would be difficult to use, but thanks to its ultra compact design and very thin bezels, the phone is actually relatively easy to handle even with one hand. It also helps that the phone is very light at 130 grams.
Xiaomi describes the screen of the Mi 4i as equal to that of a 49-inch screen high definition television in the palm of your hand. The 5-inch screen holds 441 pixels per inch, giving the display a 1080 by 1920 pixel dimension. This is the equivalent of a high end high definition television with sharpness level exceeding many high end phones.
Images come out crisp and vivid due to the screen that can display 95% of the NTSC color range, whereas many other mobile phone displays achieve 72% or less for adhering strictly to the smaller sRGB color space.
Xiaomi also has what it calls Sunlight Display. This hardware level technology allows the screen to display images far more clearly when the phone is being used in very bright conditions. It does this by automatically adjusting the contrast and brightness in the darkest and brightest parts of the image to maintain image clarity and appearance of colors.
Because the adjustments are applied only on certain pixels of the screen where it’s necessary rather than the entire screen all at once, it saves battery power.
SIM and Storage
The phone has two micro SIM card slots that support LTE networks at 1800MHz. This makes it very convenient for the typical Indonesian consumer who tend to use two mobile numbers and switch between them for various reasons.
While the phone supports multiple LTE bands, it doesn’t support the 900MHz that Indonesia officially currently allows for LTE, and the company doesn’t plan to. Therefore until the government opens up 1800MHz for commercial LTE usage, most Mi 4i owners will be stuck with 3G.
The phone has 16GB of built in storage but no means of expansion through SD card as with many other Android phones. Xiaomi deliberately made the decision to not include SD card support because it needed the phone to be as compact and thin as possible to maximize practicality.
While some may lament the lack of expanded storage, online services that reduce the need for large built in storage is abundant.
There are numerous cloud storage service such as Google’s own Google Drive, Microsoft’s One Drive, Dropbox, Box, and Copy, that people can use to keep their files. Music is available through streaming services such as Deezer, Guvera, Mix Radio, Ohdio, and Rdio.
Google’s unlimited photo storage for every Gmail user makes it easy to decide which photos to remove from the phone and which to keep, if at all. Alternatively, there’s Flickr which gives 1000GB photo and video storage at no cost.
Of course, cloud services can’t beat offline storage for accessibility, such as when network coverage is lacking or Internet over WIFi is not available, but to arrive at a very low price, something’s gotta give.
Raw Performance
As previously mentioned, the Mi 4i is considered as a budget Mi 4 mainly due to the choice for its processor. Unlike the Mi 4 which uses Qualcomm’s high end Snapdragon 801 clocked at 2.5GHz, the 4i uses a slower chip, the second generation 64 bit Snapdragon 615, clocked at 1.1GHz and 1.7Ghz, paired with the Adreno 405 GPU and 2GB of RAM.
According to Xiaomi VP Hugo Barra at a media gathering in Jakarta, Qualcomm specifically made a variant of the mid range 615 to optimize its performance for the 4i, splitting the 8-core processor into two sets of four. One set, Barra said, runs at 1.7GHz for performance mode in which it maximizes all available resources to ensure the best performance the phone can deliver. The other set of four cores is meant for power saving mode where resources are spared to achieve longer battery life.
Although everything seems to work as expected, the phone does run into a minor issue where YouTube videos played within a browser, whether it’s the default browser, Chrome, or in-app browsers, would lag and stutter.
Given the processor and the 2GB of memory, this is not expected and perhaps has more to do with the browser and operating system than hardware capability because videos that are played without having to open a browser, such as Twitter’s built in video posts, Snapchat, Vine, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook, run smoothly with no problems at all.
Battery
The Mi 4i is powered by a 3120 mAh battery which should be large enough to sustain the phone for a full working day or a day and a half when used sparingly.
When Performance mode is selected and usage pattern is quite heavy, it’s easy to deplete the battery from fully charged to zero in under 12 hours, but with a more reasonable usage and battery mode set to Balanced for power saving, the phone can last until the next day with a single full charge.
What’s good about the phone is that it supports Qualcomm’s Quick Charge which means that the phone can be charged to 40% in one hour using a 2A phone charger. It may not be that fast but it should be enough to last more than half a day before having to plug it in again.
Camera
A smartphone review these days would not be complete without mentioning the camera’s capabilities. The Mi 4i has a 13 megapixel rear camera with an aperture of f/20, supplied by Sony and Samsung, that takes really sharp photos with vivid colors, and a five megapixel Omnivision wide angle lens front camera with additional support for selfies. There’s also a two tone flash at the rear that allows for more natural colors to show when the situation requires it.
What can set the Mi 4i apart in the photography department is the camera software.
During the media event, Barra exclaimed the virtues of high definition range photography, or HDR, which combines the results of multiple photos taken in rapid succession to minimize background and foreground exposure issues and generate a photo that is more accurate and rich in detail.
The Mi 4i has two HDR modes, one is Enhanced, the other is called Live. Live is the simple mode in which the camera takes two photos at different exposures and combine them to produce the HDR effect. Enhanced uses three exposures and adds various post processing techniques such as color corrections, white balancing, and image tuning, to generate the final photo.
For the more technical consumers, the Mi 4i’s photo software has a manual mode in which individual settings such as white balance, exposure, shutter speed, and focus, can be adjusted.
For the video inclined, the camera can capture videos in standard, HD, and full HD mode. There is also a time-lapse mode with user-selectable capture frequencies. The settings for both unfortunately must be selected through Settings rather than from within the Camera app itself.
Although there is slow motion video mode it’s really just a regular video being slowed down rather than the camera recording a high frame rate video, so the resulting video won’t be a smooth one, not to mention the total loss of audio when recording slow motion.
Overall Impression
The Mi 4i easily lands among the best mid-range phones in the market and the price, at Rp 2.799.000 (US$ 210) is hard to beat. The MIUI 6 interface on top of Android 5.0.2 makes it easier to use and more practical while the hardware features can match that of most high end smartphones even if the processing power places it in a class below.
It won’t be difficult to recommend the phone to anyone looking for a solid, high quality, affordable smartphone.
Although as with other Xiaomi phone launches, it’s currently only available through the weekly bloodbath flash sales from Mi.com, the company will eventually make the phone available in Indonesia from other online stores such as Lazada, and BliBli, and physical stores, namely Erafone, Global, and OkeShop in the coming weeks.
For the time being, the phone is only available in white with matte finish but the company plans to release a black model and soft color models later in the year.
