Specs at a glance: Xiaomi Mi 4i Screen 1920×1080 5.0"(441 PPI) IPS LCD OS Android Lollipop 5.0.2 with MIUI 6 CPU Eight-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 (Four 1.7 GHz Cortex-A53 cores and four 1.0 GHz Cortex-A53 cores) RAM 2GB GPU Adreno 405 Storage 16GB Networking Dual Band 802.11b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.0, GPS Ports Micro-USB 2.0 A/B, headphones Camera 13MP rear camera, 5MP front camera, Size 138.1 mm x 69.6 mm x 7.8 mm Weight 130 g Battery 3120 mAh, not removable Starting price $200 unlocked Other perks RBG notification LED, dual SIM slots, LTE, Quick Charge 2.0

Xiaomi is one of the more interesting OEMs out there. While some smartphone OEMs seem to be in autopilot mode, Xiaomi looks like it's built for disruption. It combines great build quality and specs for prices that are often half that of the competition. We've mostly paid attention to the company's flagship lineup—the Mi 4 and the Mi Note—but when even the high end stuff is only $480, what do the company's lower-end offerings look like?

Today we're looking at the recently launched Mi 4i, a Xiaomi phone that costs just $200. The price puts it in the same ballpark as the $180 Moto G, but compare the specs and you'll see that Xiaomi blows away Motorola's nearly year-old phone. The 2014 Moto G has a 5-inch 720p display, a 1.2GHz Snapdragon 400, 1GB of RAM, 8GB of storage, and an 8MP camera. The Mi 4i takes those specs and bumps just about everything up a tier. You get a 5-inch 1080p screen, a 1.7GHz (64-bit) Snapdragon 615, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, and a 13MP camera. Neither device has NFC, but the Mi 4i trades the microSD slot for a second SIM slot, and—oh yeah—the Mi 4i has LTE. The best part is the battery: the Moto G has a 2070 mAh battery, but the Mi 4i has a much larger 3120 mAh battery.

That's a huge difference between the two devices. You might think it's because the Moto G is from 2014, but the rumored 2015 Moto G specs are pretty similar. The difference, (besides the extra $20) is something we've seen over and over from Xiaomi: it has lower prices than anyone else.

The 3120 mAh battery certainly seems impressive, but it didn't score as well as we were expecting in our battery tests. The battery life is comparable to the Moto G, but despite packing an extra 1050 mAh, the Mi 4i doesn't blow it away. Still, it's nice to see a battery this big in such a compact device. Almost all the smartphones we try out have great screens, fast processors, and speedy connectivity. In the battery department, we're always looking for more.

Design and Materials

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

When it comes to building a phone, Xiaomi seems to have something figured out that the rest of the industry hasn't. The Mi 4i is solid, compact 5-inch device that feels like it's worth a lot more than $200. It's plastic—perfectly acceptable at this price range—but there isn't an ounce of give to the body. It's not a unibody milled plastic construction or anything, but it feels about as good as the plastic version of the $650 LG G4 we recently reviewed.

The Mi 4i feels a lot like a sturdier Nexus 5. The two devices are about the same size—138.1 x 69.6 x 7.8 mm for the Mi 4i and 137.9 x 69.2 x 8.6 mm for the Nexus 5. They both have a flat, matte plastic back that curves up around the mostly flat sides of the device. The Mi 4i's compactness is very impressive. It manages to be thinner than that Nexus 5 and way thinner than the 11 mm Moto G.

The only minor build quality items we'll complain about are the buttons. To start, the volume and power buttons have a cheap-looking glossy silver paint. They don't jiggle much and the action is just fine, but it's easy to scratch the paint.

For some reason, the Mi 4i also still has a hardware menu button. There aren't really any menus in the software anymore, and pressing the "menu" button here actually opens recent apps. Yet Xiaomi never changed the icon from a menu symbol. Years of training—including with Xiaomi's past products—have taught me that this symbol means "menu," so when you press it and it isn't menu, it's a little weird. It creates an unnecessary cognitive load; you have to stop for half a second and think about what the button will really do. Even if you ignore the history of that symbol, the actual recent apps interface is either a horizontal list of app icons or a horizontal list of thumbnails, making three vertically stacked lines completely unrepresentative of what will happen on the screen.

Like every other Xiaomi device we've used, this has one of those odd micro-USB "A/B" ports. What we consider to be a normal, trapezoidal micro-USB plug is actually called "micro-USB B." There also exists a rectangular micro-USB plug and port combo called "micro-USB A," which you can see a picture of on the right.

The Mi 4i can accept either cable, which means the port on the bottom of the phone is just a big rectangle. If you have a micro-USB B cable, like nearly everyone on the planet, the rectangular port makes it even harder than usual to figure out which way the micro-USB plug goes. The only real indication is to look inside the port to find the little black tongue and line it up with the hole in the USB cable. You could definitely jam a "normal" micro-USB cable in the port incorrectly without much effort. This would probably break the port and ruin the phone, but we aren't going to try. (When will those USB type-C ports be ready again?)

The back isn't technically removable, but the Mi 4i is pretty easy to disassemble with the right tools. When we went to pick one up, Xiaomi's VP of International Hugo Barra stripped a Mi 4i down to the motherboard with nothing other than a plastic pry tool and a Phillips screwdriver.

Hey, this looks familiar...

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Xiaomi

Apple

While Xiaomi offers great specs and build quality for a killer price, the company has a well-deserved reputation for unoriginal designs. Xiaomi's earlier flagship, the Mi 4, looked like a mashup of an iPhone 5 and Galaxy S5. The Mi Box set-top box looks just like an Apple TV. The Mi Router Mini looks just like an Apple Magic Trackpad, and MIUI 6, the company's Android skin, takes some inspiration from iOS. It's not just Apple that the company has a thing for, either. Xiaomi's headphones look just like a pair of Grados. The company's "Xiaoyi" webcam looks just like a Dropcam. (Or a Nest Cam. Whatever.)

Xiaomi's new flagship phablet, though, the Mi Note Pro, is a fairly original design. The curved glass back and tapered edges are unique touches, something we hope signaled a move toward unique designs for the Chinese company. The Mi 4i design, well, looks like an iPhone 5C.

The single piece of rear plastic wraps up and around the sides to create a border around the glass, just like a 5C, and the Mi 4i comes in nearly the same pastel color selection. The front earpiece and rear camera arrangements are similar, and Xiaomi's home button is exactly the same icon as the 5C home button. It also runs the iOS-y MIUI 6. It's all a bit much, especially given Xiaomi's other "Apple-inspired" products.

While Xiaomi's main markets are currently India and its hometown of China, the company's international aspirations have been growing lately. Its US-focused store recently launched, and while it doesn't sell smartphones yet, the move seems inevitable. Unoriginal designs like this might not matter in the developing world, but in the US it hurts Xiaomi's brand. It makes it easy to dismiss the company as a yet another Chinese knockoff artist, but Xiaomi's specs, build quality, and low prices make it so much better than that. Everyone else in the industry goes out of their way to produce original designs, and we'd like to see Xiaomi do the same.

MIUI 6 can’t keep up with stock Lollipop

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

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Ron Amadeo

Xiaomi's Android skin is called "MIUI" (pronounced "Me you eye"), and it's up to version 6. Xiaomi takes its Android skinning very seriously; in fact, MIUI was the company's first product when it started out. Like CyanogenMod, the skin is available as a ROM for download and installation on hundreds of Android devices, even non-Xiaomi ones. The company has an insane weekly development cycle for MIUI betas—code Monday through Wednesday, ship Friday, get user feedback Saturday and Sunday, and repeat the next week. Switch over to the developer channel and you'll get weekly OTAs.

MIUI is kind of a hybrid of Android and iOS. The most jarring change is the lack of an app drawer—like iOS, there is only the home screen, so every icon must live on the home screen somewhere. MIUI 6, like iOS 7, took a flat approach to UI design. Other than the Google apps—which ship with the Mi 4i outside of China—everything is reskinned.

We've already seen MIUI 6 on the Mi Note, but that version was based on Android 4.4 KitKat. The Mi 4i is one of the company's first 5.0 Lollipop devices. As you can probably tell from having KitKat and Lollipop-based OSes that are both called "MIUI 6," Xiaomi considers MIUI to be a separate entity from the underlying Android version. While MIUI was a fine alternative to KitKat, when it came time for a Lollipop version, the company just completely paved over all of Google's Material Design improvements. Use MIUI and you'd never know the difference between KitKat and Lollipop, and that makes the OS feel dated—there are a lot of improvements in Lollipop that are gone in MIUI 6.

As far as we can tell, there is no multi-user support. The recent apps revamp, called "Overview," doesn't exist in MIUI. There's no way to display multiple Chrome tabs, Drive documents, or any of the other new "document centric" multitasking from Lollipop. There's no quick access to the priority notification modes the way there is in stock Android—they exist, but you have to dig through the settings app to change modes. There are no always-on-voice commands, no smart lock options, no battery saver mode, and no way to search the settings. Lollipop added the "Camera 2" API, which allows for manual ISO and exposure settings, but it's not supported on the Mi 4i even with a third-party app. Message and call notifications don't show contact pictures, and music notifications don't show album art.

Besides the features that are outright missing, a lot of things are just inferior to the normal Lollipop design. The thumbnail view for recent apps shows full screen thumbnails, and it scrolls horizontally. This mean you get just two recent apps on-screen at a time. Lollipop has the common sense to scroll the list vertically—the direction in which you actually have screen real estate—and overlap the thumbnails, so you get four to five items on-screen at once. MIUI also has a weird quick settings implementation. You pull the notification panel down and then swipe right. Lollipop's double-swipe-down to get to the quick settings panel feels a lot, well, quicker.

MIUI does have one or two advantages over stock Android. It already has a kind of selective permission system—you can set to have an allow/deny pop-up show up for access to your location, contacts, camera, and other device features. There are also lots of customization options, along with a theme system. Google will be catching up to MIUI with a selectable permissions system (along with lots more developer support) in Android M.

MIUI just hasn't kept up with Android 5.0, making Xiaomi's skin the biggest downside to using this device. Google revised the entire interface in Lollipop, and MIUI mostly ignores those improvements in favor of the same interface it had in KitKat. As a result, there are staggering amounts of missing features over stock Android.

Listing image by Ron Amadeo