Xiaomi just announced its latest flagship, the Mi MIX 4, continuing a line of smartphones known for eye-catching design and top-of-the-line innards sold at extremely competitive price points. The first Mi MIX created ripples in the smartphone industry with its unique bezel-less design that left almost no black bars at the top and alongside the left and right edges. The bezels were so slim that Xiaomi had to move the selfie camera and a few other sensors to the chin. 

The Mi MIX 2 was more of an iterative update, shrinking the form factor and upgrading the innards. Its successor, the Xiaomi Mi MIX 3 made a drastic design change by going for a sliding design, achieving the full-screen design that the company had been trying to achieve for years. The Chinese company — which recently surpassed Apple on the global shipment charts and also beat Samsung to the No.1 spot in June — then tried its hands at the foldable form factor with the Mi MIX Fold, taking on the like of Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 2 and HUAWEI Mate X2.

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Now, Xiaomi is back to the vanilla MIX formula with the Mi MIX 4. The front is again an all-glass affair with extremely slim bezels. However, the main attraction here is the under-display camera that Xiaomi calls CUP (Camera Under Panel) solution. From the press renders, it looks really impressive and much better than what ZTE did with its Axon series phones. Xiaomi has used what it calls micro-diamond pixel technology and has also redesigned the circuitry to reduce the pixel size and boost the brightness output, without compromising with pixel density. The end result is an under-display camera that won’t be visible to the naked eyes. The AMOLED panel hides a 20MP selfie snapper with 1.6-micron pixel size and performs 4-in-1 pixel binning to deliver brighter photos.

Xiaomi Mi MIX 4 handsomely Undercuts Mainstream Flagships

Xiaomi Mi MIX 4 Front Panel

Coming to the internal hardware, the phone is specced to the gills. Xiaomi has armed the phone with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 888+ SoC — a slightly upgraded version of the vanilla Snapdragon 888 SoC — ticking alongside up to 12GB of fast LPDDR5 RAM and 512GB of UFS 3.1 storage. The phone is made out of premium ceramic material and will be up for grabs in black and white trims. In the imaging department, Xiaomi has equipped the phone with a 108MP primary camera that employs the Samsung ISOCELL HMX sensor. It sits alongside a 13MP wide-angle camera with a free-form lens that reduces edge distortion, and an 8MP telephoto camera with a periscope lens that can deliver 5X optical zoom and 50x hybrid zoom.

There’s a 6.67-inch 3D curved AMOLED display up front with a 120Hz refresh rate and an impressive 480Hz touch-sampling rate. The lights are kept on by a 4,500mAh battery, and it supports a blazing-fast 120W wired charging. Xiaomi says the Mi MIX 4’s battery can go from empty to full in just 15 minutes, which is simply unbeatable on any mainstream phone out there. However, the wireless charging specs are no slouch either, thanks to a peak output of 50W, but still slower than the 80W wireless charging tech it showed off last year. The base model of Mi MIX 4 will set buyers back by CNY 4,999 (roughly $770), and goes all the way up t0 CNY 6,299 (approximately $970) for the model with 12 gigs of RAM and 512GB of onboard storage. The Xiaomi flagship will go on sale in China starting August 16, but there’s no word on its availability in overseas markets.

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Source: Xiaomi