Xiaomi Announces A New, 5-inch $200 Mi 4c Flagship With USB Type-C Connector, ‘Mi Mobile’ Plans

Xiaomi is further heating up the competition among Android smartphone manufacturers, as world’s second most valued venture capital-backed company has now announced the launch of a new 5″ flagship named Mi 4c.

Xiaomi, as most of us in India are well aware, has rapidly built a reputation of providing affordable smartphones which are seriously well built and which have a gone long way on changing ou mindste about “Chinese” handsets.

The company has had enormously successful stints in both its home market China, and its largest international market India, in terms of both sales, and popularity. All of Xiaomi’s devices have set up records on selling out at a pace never seen before by an OEM in India.

With the launch of Mi 4c, Xiaomi is now taking up those heat levels even further up. While the phone is obviously an improvement over Mi 4, its those other related announcements — like Mi Mobile Plans — which are putting Xiaomi in a league, different from even the biggest Android manufacturers out there.

Mi 4c, priced at close to just $200, has a 5-inch Full HD screen and will be available in a variety of — as Xiaomi puts it — “bubblegum” colors including white, grey, pink, yellow, and blue. The smartphone comes along with 2 GB of RAM with two storage options — a 16 GB variant for approx. $204 and a 32 GB variant for approx. $235.

Talking about the phone, Xiaomi said,

With two Cortex-A57 and four Cortex-A53 cores, paired with the Adreno 418 GPU, Mi 4c excels at all tasks including complex 3D games and high-quality video playback.

The smartphone runs on a Snapdragon 808 (1.8 GHz 6-core 64-bit) chip and is powered by Android Lollipop 5.1 — though in a completely made-over Xiaomi version named MIUI. While Mi 4c will initially ship with MIUI 6, Xiaomi says that a MIUI 7 upgrade is round the corner.

However, the most notable feature with this device, is the USB Type -C connector port — making it one of the very select, few Android devices to support that port. Other than Mi 4c, One Plus Two also has a UB Type C Port.

This device also comes equipped with Quick Charge 2.0, charging its rather large 3080mAh battery in no time. Quick Charge also ensures that the device does not run out of juice, even if used extensively throughout the day. Mi 4c measures a light 132 gms, which is lighter than the iPhone 6s by 11g, and is just 7.8 mm thick.

Xiaomi is also integrating what it calls “Edge Tap,”. This specific feature allows users to tap the edge of the phone once to take a photo, and twice to go back. Apart from that, users can also double tap the screen to wake the device.

While the flagship announcement was expected, a rather surprised announcement which came along with that, was the launch of Xiaomi’s customised, tailor-made “Mi Mobile plans” for its Chinese buyers.  These new plans are pay-as-you-go phone plans that support China Unicom’s 4G networks.

We launched our MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) services with Mi Mobile, unveiling two prepaid plans that do away with the complicated packages typically offered by mobile operators,

Xiaomi said.

Mi 4c comes with a 13 MP rear shooter with — what Xiaomi says — is “phase detection autofocus. The front camera too is a decent, 5 MP snapper.

Another interesting feature is the all new IR blaster embedded within the device. Mi 4c’s built-in IR blaster can control more than 2000 different appliances from 10 product categories — which includes controlling your dSLR cameras as well.

Apart from making all these device related announcements, the company also announced a $30 Bluetooth speaker,

The Mi Bluetooth Speaker with a compact all-metal body designed to fit easily in your pocket. Available in gold, blue and pink, Mi Bluetooth Speaker boasts impressive sound quality with volume up to 90dB(A) @0.5m, a built-in bass radiator, neodymium magnets and a Avnera AV3102 chip for a cleaner sound.

It supports music playback from a MicroSD card, among other modes, and can last eight hours on a single charge. It also acts as a handsfree speaker when a call comes in while streaming music over Bluetooth.

detailed Xiaomi

And while we know most of you would be eager to know Mi 4c’s India availability, Xiaomi sadly hasn’t let out on any word on that. We have mailed the company for a comment, and will update the story as and when we receive a response.