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Xiaomi MI4 First Impressions

2014-08-22
it's no secret that we at android authority or pretty big fans of what we see out of the Chinese market especially in the last year or so and you guys have been requesting this particular phone and I finally got on my doorstep so it's joshua guard from android authority what's going on everybody and it's time to give a quick unboxing but also give my first impressions on these yummy me for getting your hands on the actual box where the me for really shows its kind of utilitarian I mean the box itself is not very flashy at all you just have the me logo on the top right and then you have the box itself which once you open it up you get the phone in all its glory of course you're going to see that 5-inch screen right up front but get that out of the way and you can get under the next flap which will give you just the plug adapter for the micro USB charging cable which is right next to it some documentation and of course the tool to be able to put in your sim card now one thing that we should mention about this phone is that it will not work on all LTE networks if any adult here in the United States I certainly can't get it to work with my AT&T 4G LTE so that's something you have to keep in mind when using this phone but once you get the phone out and get past the plastic on the front you'll see a phone that well take some inspiration from another particular ecosystem but it's not really something we're going to fault it too much for because it does rock that metal chassis that metal frame pretty well from the front to the back with that full white background and it has the camera up top with the me logo on the bottom but the screen up front is pretty nice with a nice bezel that's really not all that big that at all on the sides and a little bit of girth on the top and bottom but of course that is to make room for the front-facing camera and the button layout on the bottom handling the actual device itself is really kind of a breeze because it has the flat sides and it's really easy to just sort of grip in one hand after all this is a 5-inch phone not quite 5.5 inches compared to a lot of the bigger phones out there and thus it is really easy to keep a grip on this phone the buttons on the right side take on a sort of a mirrored look because you have the volume rockers at the top with the power button right underneath it which is a little bit different from other phones out there but it does make the power button very easy to trigger as you can see right there now like I already mentioned I threw in my sim card from AT&T and I've only been able to get hsdpa connectivity on here but that should work for most tasks that I'm going to be using this phone for but getting it to the actual you I itself we're going to see the miui or the me UI which some of you may be familiar with out there as you may have that rom installed on some of your phones but it is the official operating system for these yummy line of phones and from there anyone out there who knows about the me you I will know that this doesn't come with an app drawer it's something that might kind of put a few of you users off but to be honest even if it doesn't have that app drawer it does have a very clean look to it you have sort of a boxy feel to all of the icons and the outcome on a very clean grid and even the fonts all the way down to even though wallpaper that's in the background really make this look like an attractive inter interface that allows everything to sort of just sort of pie a lot because you're going to get just rows and rows and pages and pages of icons if you install a lot of applications onto the Xiaomi me for but like I said it is pretty nice it's quite utilitarian in the sense that you get everything that you need in front of you you're looking at the notification drop down right here that has all of the talk was that you need and it's easy to get to the notifications on the side the interface does look a little bubbly but not overly so like I said the me you I uses more of a boxy look to it with rounded corners on all of the icons and in all of the corners and edges of the actual interface and in the end it is a good looking interface that otherwise has the same type of functionality that you would expect quite honestly I don't really have any problems with the way that this phone is constructed to be honest it feels really nice especially with a 5-inch screen it makes it pretty easy to use with one hand especially compared to some of the other larger Chinese phones that we've already had our hands on but even if it does look like apples phone in a way because of that metal frame for the most part that's okay because this is giving us a look into what a larger iPhone might look like and that's the reason why if you look on the internet all over the place you'll see this one being compared to the 5s already but also being compared to the upcoming iPhone 6 but underneath the surface we have a lot of power that you would expect from a flagship Android device the Snapdragon 801 the audrina 330 a 1080p display with 441 pixels-per-inch and just a lot of power underneath that will allow you to really get a lot out of what is available in the Xiaomi me for so keep it tuned to Android or new for all of the best coverage including my full review of this and a comparison between it and a couple of the other flagships if you so happen to want the me for over some of the ones that are available right now of course we do have Eva coming up in a couple weeks and i am going to be there so you can stay tuned for all of that coverage as well and stay tuned for all of the upcoming flagships from Eva the announcements of let's say some other smartwatches and also don't forget to check out the content from my colleagues in Android to job with some likes and to subscribe to our channel if you haven't already and once you're done with all of that don't forget to head on over to android authority calm because we are your source 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