The Xiaomi Mi 4 doesn’t look anything like the Mi 3 did. It has a far more traditional shape, and borrows heavily from bothApple and Samsung’s design languages. The screen dominates the front, with very little space wasted around it. The area above the screen is rather crowded, with a shiny silver Mi logo and sensor window on one side of the earpiece, with the front-facing camera on the other. The capacitive navigation buttons on the bottom have white backlighting, and a tiny status LED is hidden beneath them - so much so that you’d miss it if you weren’t specifically looking for it.
The sides of the Mi 4 are flat, and a shiny stainless steel rim runs around the entire phone. It looks a lot like Apple’s iPhone 5design, but also incorporates Samsung’s current antenna cutout style. The rim protrudes a little and you can feel it scratching your ear when you hold up this phone to talk.
?
The rear is not removable and so the battery isn’t accessible. There’s a slot on the left for a Micro-SIM card, but the microSD slot has been sacrificed for the sake of design. The power button on the right is below the volume rocker, making it a bit too low to be reached comfortably. The 3.5mm headset socket is on top, with an Infrared LED next to it. On the bottom, there’s a speaker grille and the Micro-USB port, which, like on all other Xiaomi phones, is confusingly rectangular in shape.
The camera and flash on the rear are shaped and placed much like Samsung does on its current models. The white plastic has a subtle pattern, which is again a familiar Samsung touch. There’s another shiny Mi logo lower down.
The combination of milky white plastic and shiny metal isn’t especially appealing, and this is Xiaomi’s first phone in India that doesn’t look a lot more expensive than it is. Notably, the specifications do not mention Gorilla Glass or any other structural reinforcement. That said, this is a rather hefty phone and its build quality does seem solid.
?
Specifications and software
Xiaomi’s entire identity is based around stuffing high-end specifications into phones with low-end prices, and the Mi 4 is no exception. There’s a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 with four CPU cores running at 2.5GHz and an Adreno 330 GPU. There is also a very generous 3GB of RAM. The model currently available in India has 16GB of storage space and no microSD slot - a 64GB model might come in later, though the price difference is unknown.
The screen is a 5-inch full-HD 1080x1920-pixel IPS panel - thankfully not too large. The battery comes in at 3, 080mAh, and the front and rear cameras have 13-megapixel and 8-megapixel Sony sensors respectively. You can capture 4K videos at up to 30fps with the rear camera. Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/ac and Bluetooth 4.0 are complemented by Infrared and A-GPS.
?
Our review unit came running Xiaomi’s MIUI 6 interface on top of Android 4.4.4. It looks great on the high-resolution screen but definitely has its quirks. Most importantly, it doesn’t have a separate homescreen and app drawer - while some prefer the simplicity, others would much rather be able to organise their widgets and app icons. The icons are all custom, and text is crisp, but on the smaller side.
Several things have been customised, which are not necessarily improvements. Options in the Settings app have been somewhat reorganised, and it takes an extra step to get to common things such as the display and battery sections. The battery indicator doesn’t clearly show when the phone is or isn’t charging. The camera shortcut on the lockscreen disappears off the right edge but to launch it you need to swipe left. The quick shortcuts panel in the notifications shade isn’t too well designed or easy to get to. There are also iOS-inspired flourishes all around, such as red notification badges on icons, the appearance of folders, and the task switcher.