Xiaomi unveils the Mi 6 in China

Xiaomi has revealed the Mi 6 today at an event in Beijing. The Mi 6 will be Xiaomi’s flagship for 2017 and has been designed to showcase the company’s prowess in the field of smartphone technology. The Mi 6 starts from CNY 2,499 for the variant with 6GB RAM and 64GB storage, which is roughly Rs 23,436.

As expected, the Mi 6 has employed a 2.45GHz Snapdragon 835 chipset for handling the smartphone’s day-to-day processes. The SD835 is 10nm thick that should help manage the heating of the phone efficiently while handling resource intensive tasks. The Adreno 540 GPU has better video rendering capabilities as compared to Adreno 530 on SD820 and is efficient in managing power with performance. The Mi 6 also supports 2x2 dual-WiFi system.

The Mi 6 has 6GB DDR4X 64-bit memory across all the variants, thus making it the second phone after the OnePlus 3T to feature 6 GB RAM as standard. All of that powerful internals mean that the Mi 6 has been able to achieve an AnTuTu score of 184,292, thus making it second to the iPhone 7 in terms of performance benchmarking.

As for storage, there’s no micro-SD card slot. But Xiaomi is packing the Mi 6 with 64GB and 128 GB storage options.

The Mi 6 has a 3,350 mAh battery that Xiaomi claims to provide power to the phone for a day with MIUI optimisations enabled.

Xiaomi has given the Mi 6 a dual-lens camera setup for the rear camera duties. Like the iPhone 7 Plus, it has one wide-angle 12MP camera lens and a 12MP telephoto lens. With this camera module, Xiaomi claims that the Mi 6 will be able to achieve 2x optical zoom without sacrificing image quality. The dual lens camera can take portraits with greater depth-of-field effects. The 4 axis Optical Image Stabilisation (OIS) has been carried over from last year’s Mi 5 for image stabilisation. The front camera is rated as an 8MP shooter that can record 1080p videos as well.

Moving away from the specifications, the phone adorns a 4-sided curved 3D glass body. Note that the curve is only present at the rear, like the previous Mi 5. The body is splash-proof, which means that it will survive occasional dips and splashes. However, Xiaomi hasn’t confirmed about the water-resistant property adhering to IP68 certification.

The Mi 6 sports a 5.15-inch 428 ppi IPS LCD screen with an ultra low 1-nit bright “reading mode” that promises to emit harmful radiations while reading in dark surroundings. Under the screen, there’s an ultrasonic fingerprint scanner along with two capacitive touch buttons that work as the back key and the muti-task key.

Xiaomi will make the Mi 6 in 3 material variants – glass, ceramic and a stainless steel variant. For the ceramic body, the dual-lens rear camera will gain 18-carat gold rings for the lens. There is an all aluminium frame round the sides of the smartphone. You will find the speaker grille and the microphone grille at the bottom along with the USB Type-C port. There are the usual power and volume buttons to the side of the phone.

However, when you look at the top of the phone, you only notice the IR blaster and the noise cancelling microphone. There’s no 3.5mm headphone jack like the iPhone 7, which means you will have to use a specific headphone for the Mi 6 or go for wireless earphones.

Apart from that, the Mi 6 can accommodate two 4G nano-SIM cards at the same time. There’s Bluetooth 5.0 and NFC for all the wireless connections you are ever going to need. Xiaomi didn’t reveal the Android version running on the Mi 6. But we think that it will come with Android 7.0 running MIUI 8.2 on top.

Xiaomi has put competitive prices on the Mi 6. The 6GB+64GB glass variant will cost CNY 2,499 (Rs 23,436), the 6GB+128GB glass variant will cost CNY 2,899 (Rs 27,187 and the 6GB+128GB ceramic edition with 18-carat gold accents will cost CNY 2,999 (Rs 28,000).

If the Mi 6 is launched later in India with the price that has been mentioned by Xiaomi, then it will provide a major competition to the like of the OnePlus 3T and Asus Zenfone 3. It also provides a viable alternative to the pricier flagships of Samsung and Apple as well.