Xiaomi Mi 4i Review: This Is Not The Phone You Are Looking For

Xiaomi called the Mi 4i its flagship for India. With no micro-SD card slot expansion, non-removable battery and heating/performance issues, it certainly doesn't seem to be made for India. Yes, the Mi 4i is a great looking smartphone, has one of the best 1080p displays around and good cameras to boot, but that doesn't justify the lackluster performance after the new MIUI v6.5.5.0 update. Snapdragon 615 is known to overheat on every smartphone its been on, the Mi 4i is no exception. Although to Xiaomi's credit they have acknowledged the issue and rolled out a few fixes which basically just throttle the CPU/GPU under excessive load to prevent over-heating. But that is at the expense of performance, the Mi 4i after its latest update suffers from stutters in the UI, web browsing, opening apps or any general task. Moreover, it still heats-up if you push it too hard. It seems that the Snapdragon 615 really killed an otherwise promising smartphone. At present I wouldn't recommend anyone buying the Xiaomi Mi 4i.

Score Breakdown

• Build and Design
  8
• Display
  9.0
• Network Reception & Call Quality
  7.7
• Camera(s)
  8.9
• Music & Video Playback
  7.0
• Gaming
  4.5
• Performance
  4.0
• Battery-life
  8.0
• Software
  7
• Total Score
  6.2 10.0