Xiaomi introduces much hyped Mi smartphone series in India at a starting price of Rs 6,999

Chinese tech major Xiaomi toughens the competition by launching its Mi smartphone series in India on Tuesday July 15. The series includes three phones- Mi3, RedMi 1S and Redmi Note. The flagship model Mi3 boasts a 5-inch 1080p IPS display by Sharp and JDI. The back of the phone is home to a 13 MP camera with Sony's sensors and front is equipped with a 2.1 MP camera. The phone is powered by a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor clocked at 2.2GHz and 2GB of RAM. All of this is backed up by a 3,050mAh battery.

The unibody polycarbonate phone runs on Android 4.2.2 jelly Bean with Xiaomi's MiUI v5 over it and has a 16 GB internal memory. Even with these high-end specs that matches flagships of biggies like Samsung's Galaxy S5 and Sony's Experia Z2, the phone is priced as low as Rs 13,999. The phone can be pre-registered on Flipkart from today and will be available from July 22. 

Xiaomi has also announced a low-budget phone RedMi 1S at a price of Rs 6,999 which will compete with Asus Zenfone 4 launched last week at the same price, MotoE, Lava Iris X1 and Micromax Unite 2. The phone has a 4.7 inch HD display, a 8 MP rear shooter and a 1.6 MP front camera. It comes with Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 SoC clocked at 1.5GHz with 1GB RAM. It packs a 2000 mAh battery and comes with 16GB of storage on-board.  It also runs on Android 4.3 Jelly Bean underneath the MiUI user interface.

The third phone in the series, RedMi Note is a phablet with a 5.5 inch 720P IPS display and is shipped with a MediaTek octa-core CPU unlike RedMi 1S and Mi3 which have Qualcomm chipsets. A 2GB RAM is provided in the phablet for multi-tasking. In terms of storage, a 8GB internal memory is provided with an option of microSD card slot. RedMi Note offers a 13-megapixel rear camera and a 5-megapixel front camera. To All of this is powered by a 3,100mAh battery. 

RedMi 1S and RedMi Note will be sold by Flipkart from August. The company has also introduced several accessories- Power banks, back panels (price not announced) exclusively with the Mi series that will also be sold on Flipkart. Surprisingly Xiaomi also talked about a tablet-MiPad powered by Nvidia Tegra K1 chipset and MiTV, a 47 inch 4k 3D smart TV, however these two products has no particular launch date in India.