What you need to know about MIUI 10 Global Beta

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Xiaomi announced MIUI 10 in India yesterday. As they claim, the system’s new version is “faster than fast.” The four main focus points are speed, design, sound, and AI portraits. The first devices with MIUI 10 are the smartphones that are eligible for entry into the China Beta ROM (or can flash it manually). Xiaomi’s representatives talked about a lot of things, so I’ll do my best to break them down.

MIUI 10 Features

Speed

MIUI 10 is a completely re-designed version of Xiaomi’s skin. The company has really put a lot of optimizations in the latest version of the system. They optimized background activity management, launch speed, deep sleep recovery, cache management, Wi-Fi, and a lot of other stuff, as seen in the graphic below.

Design

MIUI 10 is designed for full-screen, bezel-less phones. So, of course, it has new gestures for going home, backing out, and checking out recent apps. Xiaomi was testing these gestures on some devices prior to the MIUI 10 announcement. User feedback showed that it is very reliable and snappy.

The recents screen got updated as well. It now shows running apps on the full screen without wasting any space. Xiaomi’s representative mentioned that while the current standard in Recents is a horizontal view, it is not optimized for 18:9 or 19:9 screen ratios. Therefore, they switched to a vertical list of recent apps.

Xiaomi also re-designed the notifications panel to take advantage of full-screen phones. Xiaomi’s Product Manager, Sudeep Sahu, claims that they’ve restructured UI elements and removed visual clutter to make space for more buttons and features. Weather and Calendar applications look completely new, too. They are “fresh and crisp.”

Sound

MIUI 10 comes with new and unique sounds. Notifications now have water sounds. Each one of them is unique, just like water droplets, so you’ll never get tired of them. Sudeep also mentioned that “no two notification sounds on MIUI 10 are the same.” So if you get multiple notifications in quick succession, each one will sound different. You’ll hear a sound of the sand when you delete things, like notes, contacts, or photos.

Ambient noises contain beach, forest, and drizzle sounds. They’re built into a timer app. So, if you ever feel the need to relax to the sound of nature, you can just set the timer and listen to the beautiful noises that will never get old.

AI portraits

Sudeep talked a bit about portrait photos as well. He said that Xiaomi has deep learning algorithms that are based on more than 100,000 photos. Using AI helps them take portrait photos with only one camera, though that’s not anything new anymore. It also works on low-light and indoor conditions. This new method is built into MIUI 10, so all devices that receive MIUI 10 (listed below) will have the ability to take beautiful bokeh photos.

For India

Xiaomi also showed us a couple of things designed specifically for India. The list contains Mi Music, Mi Video, and an updated browser app. It now contains a category for applications. Here you’ll see a bunch of Progressive Web Apps (PWA) for local services. The advantage of PWAs is they’re small in size, but they can still be dropped on your home screen and send you notifications.

MIUI 10 also contains a simplified paying method. Now you can just open up the camera application, scan a QR code, and pay for anything you want.

And the last one is an updated messaging app. Now, when you get a message from a certain service, say a bank, you can go to their official site or find nearest ATMs/offices with only one tap. Sudeep said that MIUI has 65% sender identification rate, so that fact makes the feature even better. The feature currently supports 100 services.

Availability

I’ve talked a lot about MIUI 10. So, when can you install it? Which phones will get it? MIUI 10 Global Beta ROM will be released in a week or so. Currently, more than 20 devices support the latest version of Xiaomi’s skin. Here is the full list of devices that will recieve MIUI 10.

Here’s a replay of the full event if you want to hear Xiaomi talk about all these features.