Xiaomi Mi 4i With Octa-Core Snapdragon 615 SoC, 2GB RAM Launched at Rs. 12,999

Xiaomi at its Global Mi Phone Premiere event in New Delhi on Thursday launched the Xiaomi Mi 4i smartphone in India priced at Rs. 12,999, in line with our exclusive report. It will be available in Black, White, Orange, Light Blue, and Pink colours.

The smartphone will be made available in its first flash sale on April 30 on Flipkart, and go up for registrations at 8pm on Thursday. It will be available with all of Xiaomi's recently announced partners in the future, and will also be sold at Mi.com.

The Xiaomi event was attended by CEO and Founder Lei Jun, and VP Xiaomi Global Hugo Barra. The Xiaomi Mi 4i features a unibody polycarbonate body, and has a soft touch matte finish with an anti-grease coating. Xiaomi says the dual-SIM dual standby smartphone is 12 percent thinner than the Mi 4, and 13 percent lighter, at 7.8mm and 130 grams. Both SIM card slots support 4G LTE connectivity, and the phone is compatible with LTE bands in India.

The Mi 4i sports a 5-inch full-HD (1080x1920 pixels) fully laminated OGS Corning Concore IPS display, which is said to provide the same protection as the Corning Gorilla Glass 3. It has a pixel density of 441ppi, and a Sunlight Display feature that optimises the display for visibility under bright light.

(Also see: Xiaomi Mi 4i vs Xiaomi Mi 4)

The smartphone runs MIUI 6 based on Android 5.0 Lollipop, and supports 6 Indian languages - Hindi, Bengali, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam, and Tamil. It is powered by a 64-bit octa-core Snapdragon 615 processor coupled an Adreno 405 GPU and 2GB of RAM.

Barra said the second generation Snapdragon 615 processor has been designed entirely in India by Qualcomm, and features 4 'power-saving' cores clocked at 1.1GHz, and 4 'performance cores' clocked at 1.7GHz. The smartphone bears a 13-megapixel rear camera with f/2.0 aperture and dual-tone flash. The company is also touting HDR features, with enhanced alignment, ghost removal, gamma and contrast tuning, colour correction, low-light de-boosting, and halo suppression. It sports a 5-megapixel front-facing camera.

The Xiaomi Mi 4 bears 16GB of inbuilt storage, with no expansion slot. The Mi 4i bears a 3120mAh battery, and comes with a quick charge feature that charges the battery up to 40 percent in 1 hour, and 100 percent in 3 hours.

Xiaomi is also boasting of a new Visual IVR feature, which is aimed at simplifying how to interact with IVR menus in a visual style - similar to what Apple did with Visual Voicemail on the original iPhone.