After conquering the budget smartphone segment with Redmi Note series and covering the high-end flagship segment with the Mi 5, Xiaomi has now launched a new smartphone to dominate the phablet market as well. Yes, you heard it right!!
Xiaomi has today unveiled the Mi Max — ‘its largest smartphone offering ever’ — for the Indian masses. The smartphone hosts a super-large 6.44-inch full-HD curved display, with Corning Glass 4 protection. The display is embedded into a metal unibody design, very much alike the Redmi Note 3.
The ‘Mi Max’ launched today, comes in two variants that can only be differentiated on the basis of their internal specs. On the inside, the smartphone is powered by an octa-core 64-bit Qualcomm Snapdragon 650 coupled with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of internal memory. While, the second variant packs even more punch as it comes with the latest Snapdragon 652 processor coupled with even more RAM(4 GB) and 128 gigs of internal storage.(that’s a lot!!)
The unibody metal designs are available in three color variants, including Dark Grey, Gold, and Silver.
On the camera front, the ‘Mi Max’ bears a 16-megapixel rear shooter with phase-detection autofocus(PDAF) and dual-tone LED flash. And if you’re big on selfies, then it also bears a promising 5-megapixel front shooter with an 85-degree wide angle lens. And since the smartphone has such a humongous display with so many pixels(342 ppi, to be exact) to illuminate, the ‘Mi Max’ packs a 4850 mAh battery.
Talking about more details, the smartphone sports a Fingerprint sensor underneath the camera piece and an infrared sensor up-top that converts the phone into an universal remote(again very much alike the Redmi Note 3). The phablet also offers some sweet connectivity features, like dual-SIM 4G LTE support with VoLTE, Bluetooth 4.1, and Wi-Fi 802.11ac with MIMO.
The smartphone runs the latest version of Xiaomi’s custom OS ‘MIUI 8’, which is built upon Android Marshmallow 6.0. The MIUI8 has introduced some pretty neat features including dual-app support(run more than one account on an app, like WhatsApp, Hike, etc.), photo and video editing capabilities, secondary space, among many others.
Also with this release, Xiaomi is planning to push MIUI8 to all Global users at the same time. The public beta will be available in the form of an OTA starting July 11th, while the stable version of the OS will start rolling out on August 16th.
And now the main point that you’ve all been waiting for. What’s the smartphone priced at?
The 3GB+32GB ‘Mi Max’ variant will retail at Rs. 14,999/- while the higher-end variant with more RAM and storage will cost you Rs. 19,999/-. Xiaomi even though has introduced a phablet, but the prices could’ve been a little more competitive as compared to its competitors(ahem! LeEco) who’re offering 6 GB RAM in a similar price bracket.
Also even though believes that people will be able to fit the smartphone in one hand and use it comfortably, but I highly doubt it! A phablet is built with a very specific audience in mind, so a smartphone like ‘Mi Max’ is sure to hog some attention from only those users, who are big on reading or browsing the web on a smartphone.
