Xiaomi outs new flagship and its cutting-edge big brother

1/15/15. Xiaomi, the rising star in the Chinese smartphone market, has been hellbent on promoting its flagship product launch worldwide. Fans were given access to a live feed of the launch with live chat discussions happening at the same time. If, by any chance, you couldn’t speak Mandarin or unable to access the English discussion in the feed, we got you covered.

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Much speculation brought about the rumors that this new flagship was the aptly-named Mi 5, the supposed successor to the Mi 4, Xiaomi’s incumbent flagship smartphone. But the smartphone company was quick to dispel any speculation that they would be launching the Mi 5, including the hashtag #NOT5 to all promos after rumors started appearing. It was anyone’s guess as to what was going to be launched on January 15.

The whole world tuned in to the live feed on Thursday. To start with, Xiaomi founder and CEO Lei Jun talked about how Xiaomi is committed to developing an open ecosystem of smart home devices that can be completely controlled through your Mi phone. Xiaomi wants to spearhead the future Internet of Things. The company has already developed an intelligent module, which is available to partner appliance manufacturers. Along with this, Xiaomi has also released the Mi Band, the Mi Air Purifier, and the Xiaomi Smart Camera.

As for the main event, there were two devices unveiled and announced at the launch: the Mi Note and the Mi Note Pro. Yes, one is just a Pro version of the other, but its specs might make you look again as it’s on its own level. The Mi Note will release first and its bigger brother will release some time after.

The Xiaomi Note is a huge 5.7 inches in full HD (1920 x 1080 resolution in 386 ppi). It’s armed with a 2.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 801, Adreno 330 graphics, 3GB worth of RAM, and a 16GB or 64GB storage option. It offers dual 4G SIM options (one for micro- and nano-SIM) The Note is slimmer and sexier at only 6.95mm in thickness and a curved aluminum frame. Unlike its predecessors with a plastic rear, both the front and the rear have Corning Gorilla Glass 3, providing scratch resistance in the front and rear.

It has a Sony 13MP shooter with a 6-element lens and f/2.0 aperture, with Optical Image Stabilization (OIS). The camera also has a two-tone flash (mixing both a cold white flash and a warm yellow flash) to deliver rich, natural colors. And despite the cutting-edge shooter, the rear has no protrusions to fit in the camera. It’s completely flat. The 4MP front shooter has a larger 2-micron pixels sensor as compared to the 1.2-micron pixels average.

The phone also has Hi-Fi audio quality, compatible with 24-bit/192KHz lossless playback support for APE, FLAC, DSD, and WAV files. The battery is a good 3000mAh lithium-ion with Quick Charge 2.0.

The bigger brother, Mi Note Pro, will offer the same camera, Hi-Fi, and battery options, but with a gigantic twist in performance. Instead of the common Snapdragon 801, the Pro switches two numbers around and is armed with the next-gen Snapdragon 810 8-core, making it the first phone to use the cutting-edge processor. To put it into perspective, not even Samsung uses this chip yet.

The Pro’s resolution is a bigger 2K (2560 x 1440 resolution in 551ppi). It will be using the advanced Adreno 430 GPU. It will have a 4GB LPDDR4 RAM (again, one of the first to have this, since most use just 3GB). It only has 64GB eMMC 5.0 ROM storage, but that’s one option we don’t mind being limited on. It will support LTE CAT 9 with will have download speeds for up to 450Mbps.

These devices are expected to arrive in Q2 2015 for international markets. Local prices and availability will be announced when the release date is near.