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We'll start with the phone. For RMB1499 ($230/£159) you get a crazy-big 6.44-inch, 1920×1080 (342ppi) display, a Snapdragon 650 SoC, 3GB of RAM, 32GB of storage (plus a MicroSD slot), a 16MP rear camera, a 5MP front camera, and a 4850 mAh battery. The Snapdragon 650 is a six-core SoC with the usual big.LITTLE architecture, which gives you a set of power-hungry "big" cores for the heavy lifting and a set of "little" cores for low power and idle operations. On the Snapdragon 650, you usually get two 1.8GHz Cortex-A72 cores for the heavy lifting and four 1.2GHz Cortex-A53 cores for the "little" cores, but Xiaomi doesn't have the CPU clock speeds listed.

Things get complicated with the more expensive models, which don't just offer more storage but also upgrade the SoC and RAM. For RMB1699 (~$260/£180) you can upgrade to the 64GB version, which changes the SoC to a Snapdragon 652. The 652 adds an extra two "big" cores over the Snapdragon 650 for an even, eight-core chip with four big cores and four little ones. For RMB1999 (~$307/£212) you can have the 128GB version, which keeps the Snapdragon 652 SoC and adds an extra GB of RAM for 4GB total.

All versions have a metal body and a fingerprint reader on the back. It's going to take a lot of metal to make one of these: the device is 173.1mm×88.3mm×7.5mm (6.81in×3.47in×0.3in). Xiaomi doesn't mention it, but going by the pictures it looks like there's a MicroUSB 2.0 port on the bottom. Nearly every high-end phone is shipping with a USB Type C port, but it looks like the lower-end stuff isn't there yet.

The device launches on May 17 in China. Xiaomi still doesn't sell smartphones in the US, so we wouldn't expect to see an official release here. Importing it is always an option, though.

MIUI 8













Xiaomi also took the wraps off of MIUI 8, the newest version of its Android skin that ships on all Xiaomi phones.

Our biggest complaint about MIUI when we last saw it on the Xiaomi Mi 5 was that it just felt old. MIUI is independent from the Android version, and MIUI 7 worked on phones back to Android 4.4 KitKat. Working on such old devices meant the interface was pretty much a skinned version of Android 4.4, so when it was used on top of an Android 6.0 Marshmallow device, you lost a lot of features.

For version 8 it looks like MIUI will spruce up some of the oldest areas of MIUI 7. The notification panel was hit pretty hard with MIUI 7, and now it has been upgraded to a more Marshmallow-style design with power controls and a brightness slider. The Recent Apps list has been upgraded, too, and, judging from the photos, it now seems to support Marshmallow's "document centric" format, which lets apps spawn multiple entries in the list. Now Chrome should be able to show multiple tabs, and Google Docs should be able to show multiple documents.

There are a ton of other features, too. The calculator and gallery have been revamped, and the system is more aggressive about stopping unneeded apps from launching background processes at startup. There's a new "Notes" app that offers fingerprint sensor integration and lots of background themes. The camera can supposedly identify items in a picture and link you to an online shopping portal, and there's even a feature that claims to solve "high school Chinese math" problems with just a picture. That's right kids; your Xiaomi phone will do your homework for you!

Beta testing for MIUI 8 starts June 1, and the final ROM is due out June 17 for advanced users to flash. Xiaomi will upgrade nearly every device it makes to MIUI 8. The MI 2, 2S, 3, 4, 4C, 4S, 5, Note, and Max will all be supported, along with all the lower-end "Redmi" phones. Some of these devices launched back in 2012! Remember: the MIUI version is separate from the Android version, so some of these devices will still be stuck on older versions of Android. That said, any kind of update for a phone from 2012 is welcome, as most OEMs wouldn't bother.