After teasing its audience over the last few days, Xiaomi unveiled the Mi Note and the Mi Note Pro at a press event in Beijing today. The Mi Note is the company’s latest flagship that will compete against the iPhone Plus.
The Mi Note is only 6.95mm thick - it uses an aluminium frame, and 3D curved Gorilla Glass 3 panel on the front and back. It has a 5.7-inch Sharp/JDI Full HD display and is powered by a 2.5GHz quad-core Snapdragon 801 CPU, 3GB RAM, and a quick charging 3000mAh lithium-ion battery. The Mi Note will support 4G networks in a dual SIM, dual standby configuration, and has a 13 Megapixel Sony camera and a 4 megapixel secondary camera. It's also equipped with a new Hi-Fi audio chip, which supports lossless playback formats. The Mi Note will be available in 16 and 64 GB variants at at 2299 Yuan(Rs 23,000) and 2799 (Rs 28,000) respectively.
The Mi Note Pro is the same size as the Mi Note, but with better internal specs - it features an octa-core Snapdragon 810 processor and 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM. It uses a superior 2K display (2560x1440 @515 PPI) and LTE-CAT 9 connectivity providing up to 450Mbps download speeds. The Note pro is priced at 3299 Yuan, which will work out to around Rs 33,000.
While the Note Pro runs on a skinned version of Android 4.4 KitKat, the Note Pro will run on Android 5.0 Lollipop. Xiaomi introduced an extended warranty program at the launch event, which covers damages including water and glass breakage for 199 Yuan (Rs 2,000) a year.
At the launch event, Xiaomi founder and CEO Lei Jun talked about how Xiaomi is developing an open ecosystem of smart home devices that can be controlled through the Mi phone - an intelligent module will be sold at cost to manufacturing partners, which can be controlled under a single app.
The Mi Note will be available next week in Beijing and in Xiaomi’s international markets in Q2 2015. Local prices and availability will be announced closer to each market’s launch date, a press statement said.
At the Xiaomi event in Beijing, Hugo Barra, Head of International operations for Xiaomi, confirmed to the Economic Times that the Mi 4 smartphone will launch in India by the end of January, and the device would be priced between Rs 17-20,000.