After just eight months from the launch of the Mi 8, Xiaomi is rolling out a new version with upgraded hardware and a new design aesthetic. The Mi 9 is Xiaomi's first flagship of 2019, and it's easy to see that the manufacturer has redoubled its efforts to stay competitive in the affordable flagship space. What hasn't changed, however, is Xiaomi's aggressive pricing, with the Mi 9 starting off at just $445.

That's incredible when you consider that the Mi 9 is one of the first devices to be powered by Qualcomm's latest chipset, the Snapdragon 855. The Snapdragon 855 offers significant performance improvements over the outgoing Snapdragon 845 — which was no slouch to begin with — and the node shift to 7nm makes the platform much more energy-efficient.

Doing the heavy lifting are two Kryo 485 cores clocked at 2.84GHz, with an additional two Kryo 485 cores at 2.42GHz. Then there are four Kryo 485 cores clocked at 1.8GHz that kick in during energy-efficient tasks. The Adreno 640 GPU offers a noticeable uptick in performance as well, and generally the Mi 9 is one of the fastest phones in the market today.

For $445, you're not going to find a phone that comes close to the Mi 9.

Xiaomi has switched to a gradient pattern at the back, with the Mi 9 shifting between several hues of blue based on light reflecting off its surface. The effect is not dissimilar to what we've seen from the likes of Honor and Huawei in the past, but it does serve to make the Mi 9 stand out from its predecessors.

The Mi 9 will also feature a Game Turbo feature that will kick in automatically when launching a game. As we've seen from the likes of Huawei, Game Turbo allows the device to sustain peak performance for longer amounts of time, resulting in higher framerates.