Xiaomi is announcing a new global smart phone in India on the 23rd of April. This is quite unusual for Xiaomi as they have been launching all of their key products in their home ground, China. Until now there’s hardly any clues on the new model except for its teaser that says the “i is coming“.
From some clues we’ve gathered, the upcoming device could be called the Mi 4i. We can’t confirm right now but this might be an international variant of its current Mi 4 with support for wider 4G LTE bands.
On Singapore’s IDA (Infocomm Development authority) database, a new Xiaomi smart phone with the model 2015015 was recently certified and it carries a marketing name of “Mi 4i”. This comes right after the recent Redmi 2 smart phone that went on sale in Singapore and Malaysia last month.
When we searched further, the Mi 4i had also appeared on GeekBench 3 with Qualcomm 64-bit Octa-Core processor clocked at 1.65GHz along with 2GB of RAM. In terms of performance, it showed an average score of 473 for single-core and 1422 for multi-core which isn’t much better from a Redmi Note 4G. Of course, these are pre-launch figures and what’s interesting is that it was running on Android 5.0.2 Lollipop.
As you probably know, the Mi 4 isn’t coming officially into Malaysia and the Mi 4i (if that’s the actual name) could be alternative that you’ve been waiting for. In terms of specs, it appears to be a notch below the Mi 4 with possibly a Snapdragon 615 processor (instead of Snapdragon 801) that’s mated to 2GB of RAM (instead of 3GB).
However with Lollipop out of the box, this could be an interesting contender if it is priced below RM1,000. Since it is launching in India, it has to be compelling enough to compete with the likes of Micromax. We’ll find out more in 2 weeks time.
Singapore IDA Certification
GeekBench 3
