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At yesterday’s launch of the Mi4, Lei Jun boasted the phone’s design. Was he telling the truth?
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Lei Jun explained that making a round rear cover can allow the Mi4 to use a more powerful battery and have a camera that barely points out.
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The rear cover was manufactured in a 9-step process using IMD technology。 As a result, it is 0.06mm thin. A lot of cell phones follow this kind of design such as the Honor 6.
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The Mi4 sports a steel frame but the SIM card holder is made of plastic. The colors are still the same regardless of the material.
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The plastic rear board is fastened tightly. We can also see a signal overflow outlet which is connected to the gap between the steel frame and the plastic case to maintain a strong signal.
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There is a sticker on the bolted cover that implys that warranty does not apply after the phone is disassembled. But replacing the rear cover with a wooden won’t won’t influence the warranty.
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Right now, we are looking at the China Unicom Edition. The 4G edition should go online in September. If the China Mobile 4G edition supports 5 modes, then Xiaomi should make some changes on the 4G Mi4’s antenna design.
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The camera’s flash bulb is screwed into the phone’s plastic outer shell. A common industry trick is to put the flash bulb on the mother board or on the rear cover. This is the first time I have seen a flash bulb this big.
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The battery was produced very neatly. It uses a SONY chip customized by Feimaotui. It’s glued to the mid frame too strongly.
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The power and volume buttons. The texture of the Mi4’s buttons are just as good as the Mi3’s.
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The Mi4 sports a 13mp rear-facing camera with a 1.8 aperture. It uses the Sony IMX 214 sensor.
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Xiaomi put the antenna, vibrator, microUSB port, microphone, and LED light in a single soft printed circuit board.
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The microUSB was made using the 6-pin design. The standard microUSB port uses a 5-pin design while the Find7, which supports a flash charger, uses the 7-pin design. The Mi4 supports a Qualcomm 9V/1.2A charger.
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Lei Jun said that the Mi4 features a glove mode thanks to the ATMEL MXT641T chip, which can prevent any interference caused by wet hands.
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Most of the chips on the mother board are covered by protective cases.
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The Dongqi 16GB eMMC flash memory card which was manufactured last fourth quarter. It uses 19nm technology and decreases the area by 22%. Along with the Snapdragon 801, it can read and write at the eMMC5.0 level.
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The Qualcomm WCD9320 audio chip. It has all the codecs necessary for music and phone calls.
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The Qualcomm WCN3680 WiFi, Blu Ray, FM radio chip. It supports 802.11ac 5GHz WiFi and Blu Ray 4.0 which uses less power.
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The Qualcomm WTR1625 chip does not support LTE interent but supports GPS.
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Samsung 3GB RAM chip + Qualcomm MSM8X74AC 2.5GHz quad-core processor chipset package. We have previously said that the Mi4 China Unicom Edition does not support LTE internet.
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AVAGO ACPM-7600 amplifier.
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The Qualcomm PM8941 power management IC which supports QuickCharge2.0. According to Qualcomm, this chip can charge 60% of a 3300mAh battery in just 30 minutes.
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The Qualcomm PM8841 power management chip which can be used together with the PM8941.
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Infrared transmitter and receiver. Actually infrared was popular in Windows Mobile for a while but became obsolete with the arrival of Blu Ray.
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The steel was cut using a 1.35mm CNC cutting process.
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The most important part about how the Mi4’s frame was built is that its made of 304 stainless steel. It was made in a 193 step process.
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Overall, compared to the iPhone 4s which Lei Jun mentioned as an example, the Mi4’s steel frame is much better.
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The injected antenna overflow outlets on the bottom and top of the Mi4 are designed much better than the iPhone 4. In addition, the speakers and micr-USB port are placed in a neat arrangement.