Exclusive: the Xiaomi Mi Mix 2S is real and is coming with Android Oreo and a 3400 mAh Battery

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Xiaomi smartphones rarely make their way outside of China and India, and that’s a shame because of their great value. The Xiaomi Mi A1 is perhaps the best Android One device to date, and the newly announced Redmi Note 5 & Note 5 Pro are already contenders for the best mid-rangers on the market. Xiaomi also releases several flagship devices in its Mi series of devices, but the one brand that has caught the world’s attention is the Mi Mix series—the phones that started the bezel-less craze. The second generation Mi Mix 2 was announced late last year, and for the first time we now have confirmation that a long-rumored successor, the Xiaomi Mi Mix 2S, is indeed real.

For the past few weeks, we’ve seen rumors of such a device’s existence, mostly coming from various users on Chinese blogging website Weibo. Some Weibo users have even posted what may be possible renders of the device, though unfortunately it is difficult to verify the authenticity of such leaks. That’s why you haven’t seen us cover any rumors of this device so far as we don’t know how credible they are. The renders could be entirely fake, which happens all too often.

At the very least, I can confirm that the purported Mi Mix 2S does in fact exist, and I can corroborate some (but not all) of the rumored specifications. This is possible thanks to firmware files obtained by XDA Senior Member duraaraa (@FunkyHuawei), the man behind the FunkyHuawei.club service, which allows users to update, unbrick, or rebrand Huawei and Honor phones for a fee. He has begun offering links to OTA update files for some Xiaomi devices, and has shared the Mi Mix 2S firmware files exclusively with XDA-Developers. In our own digging, we confirmed the authenticity of these files as well as the fact that they are from the unreleased Xiaomi Mi Mix 2S.

Thanks to these firmware files, we can confirm that the Mi Mix 2S, code-named “polaris,” will be powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 SoC and will have a 3,400 mAh battery. We can also confirm that the device is running Android 8.0 Oreo out of the box, which is great news as it means the device is Project Treble compatible. Finally, we can also confirm that the display will have an 18:9 aspect ratio with a FHD+(2160×1080) resolution, since that matches the “polaris” exclusive wallpaper we obtained.

There are also rumors that the device may support AI camera features, and we did find evidence for that. We decompiled the stock MIUI camera app on the Mi Mix 2S and found that the device will have scene recognition support, which sounds similar to what its competitor, the Huawei Mate 10, offers. According to our teardown, the following scenes will be recognized by the Mi Mix 2S camera app:

Xiaomi Mi Mix 2S AI Camera Scenes doc (document)

flower

food

sky

sunrise/sunset

cat

dog

green plants

night

snow

sea

autumn

candlelight

car

grass

maple leaves

succulent (?)

building

city

cloud

overcast

backlight

One rumor that has been circulating is whether or not the device will feature Sony’s IMX363 camera sensor. While we can’t 100% confirm it, we did find binaries for the sensor embedded in the vendor partition, so it’s a pretty safe assumption that the rumor is true.

A few other features mentioned in Xiaomi’s configuration files are that the device will be dual SIM (though that was never really in doubt), support an IR blaster, and will have an LED light—most likely for notifications. For the camera, the usual MIUI features will be there however the properties for “object tracking,” “automatic HDR,” and “chroma flash” are set to false so I assume those won’t be available.

The firmware is massive, so there’s a lot to dig through. If I find anything else interesting, you’ll be sure to know on the XDA Portal. For now, enjoy knowing that the rumored Mi Mix 2S is real, and it will be one beast of a phone when it is announced.