Xiaomi is talking up a big game for India these days. Its executives say that 2020 will be the year that the Mi brand will come to India in a big way with it pushing to launch more cutting edge products in the country. With that backdrop, the company showed off its Mi Mix Alpha smartphone which it will launch in China in the next couple of weeks. Xiaomi India’s Raghu Reddy and Sumit Sonal both admit that the phone will probably not launch in India as it needs to be imported from China and it will be very expensive upwards of Rs 2,00,000. That being said, this phone is the embodiment of wild imagination which is what makes it cool.
A gadget out of Minority Report
The Mix Alpha is in many ways Xiaomi’s take on the foldable screen phenomenon. But it does this in many different ways — firstly, you can’t open the phone and convert its form factor. The phone itself is all screen folding up 180 degrees with the core components sandwiched inside. This means the side edges of the phone is also a screen which touch-based volume buttons having pressure-sensitive haptics and a ceramic bar on the backside acting like a bridge between the two edges of the screen as it incorporates antennas for 5G connectivity and the audacious cameras. Xiaomi’s executives repeatedly said that this phone reminded them of the gadgetry that Tom Cruise used in the Spielberg sci-fi odyssey Minority Report, and I’d grudgingly admit, they aren’t too far off in their assessment.
The highest resolution camera sensor ever put on a smartphone, 108-megapixels. Yes, for a large part of my life writing about gadgets, I like most tech journalists have emphasised that the megapixels don’t matter, but when you have 108-megapixels to play with I’d eat my words. Xiaomi collaborated with Samsung to develop this special image sensor which is also amongst the largest to be installed on a smartphone which works in tandem with two more cameras for the sake of zoom and wide-angle shots. This 108-megapixel sensor uses some unique Xiaomi algorithms which make sure it can take some audacious shots and also double as the best possible selfie camera you’ll ever see on a phone.
Cutting edge specs
Apart from the wild crazy of science-fiction being realised in a real-world gadget, this phone has the best of what’s there currently. By that I mean is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855+ processor which has been seen in phones like the OnePlus 7T Pro, 5G connectivity thanks to Qualcomm’s X55 modem, a high capacity battery that supports 40-watt fast charging, UFS 3.0 storage and just insane amounts of RAM. You have the modern equivalent of a speed racer. Sure, it may get outdated in a couple of months thanks to Qualcomm’s new chip, but isn’t that the case for every second phone.
Why you still can’t get it?
The problem with this phone is that Xiaomi has had to reinvent the way manufacturing works. So in China, they have only one manufacturing line that can make this phone which means they have to import. Since this is a phone that’s already so expensive this would mean that it would cost more than Rs 2,00,000 which would make this phone dead on arrival in India since soon there will be phones coming in based on the new Snapdragon 865 processor. Its 5G capabilities also make this phone redundant for India as the 5G auctions haven’t only happened.
