Almost 3 months after it was launched in India, Xiaomi Mi 4i is now in the Philippines. I was there at it's launch last night at Yardstick Cafe, Makati to check it out.
Mi Philippines will be selling the dark gray variant which is my personal fave for my rugged and active hands. True to it's words, the back cover is really tough against smudges and finger prints. It also has 13 MP rear camera with dual tone flash and Sony sensor. The front has the 5 inch IPS Full HD JDI display and 5 MP front camera with f/1.8 aperture. No surprise that it's display was an eye-candy for me.
The top has full CTIA compliant 3.5 mm. audio jack while at the bottom, you can see the pin hole mic and OTG capable micro USB cable
The left side has the dual micro SIM port which can do dual LTE. The right side has the volume rocker and power/unlock button.
I maximized the OTG capability of this device so I got more of my first impressions thru the device's screenshots. These are the "main pages" of Mi 4i with the latest version of MIUI 6
Like it was annnounced in India, the device's ROM was made by Samsung. As I checked more of the device, good thing that it has 7 working sensors including accelerometer, light, gyro, proximity, orientation, sound and magnetic.
Checking the Antutu score with 64-bit enabled and set in performance mode, it managed to get 35,188 verified score.
Before I went into the launch, I knew from the India launch (thru the slide) that it supports LTE 1800 band which is for Globe LTE. I thought that when they announced that they have a partnership with Smart, Mi 4i can support Smart LTE but according straight from Mr. John Chan, Xiaomi's PR Manager during my conversation with him that Mi 4i doesn't have LTE 2100 band (which is for Smart) but can support Smart 3G. Quite unfortunate that even though that I brought a Smart LTE SIM, there's no Smart LTE signal at the venue to go for an actual test. I got this verified strong Globe LTE signal with my sample Speedtest set at Globe's Makati site. I hope I'll gonna see the official Mi 4i box soon so that I can see the full list of LTE bands
And the camera samples. The rear camera sample was shot in a not-so-bright angle while there's a good lighting condition at the selfie camera sample. I'm happy that both cameras maxed out at 16:9 aspect ratio.
Xiaomi Mi 4i 13 MP rear camera sample
Xiaomi Mi 4i 5 MP front camera sample
First impressions: Display and sound were the first tests I had done to this device so I installed MX Player with a live performance video of a band in HD MP4 format. The same quality that I liked in Redmi 1S and Redmi 2 - great sounds with my Mi Pistons V2 and crisp display. I just noticed that it was smoother to play the video in HW+ decoder. Camera shutter speed was fast and based on my camera samples, it can produce quality pics. What impressed me so far was the 5 MP selfie camera as you can see, the menu is still clear from afar. Going back and forth on the setting to the main page was snappy. One downside that I saw from the device is the over 10.5 GB of storage out of 16 GB.
Xiaomi Mi 4i will be available on July 24 thru pre-registation on Smart (you can check out my previous article for the site link), July 29 on Lazada Philippines and August 1 on over 200 Mi authorized resellers around the country. All Lazada and offline buyers will gonna receive a free Smart SIM.
