14 DAY TRIAL // Xiaomi’s CEO Lei Jun took to one of China’s biggest social networks, Weibo, to reveal details about a successor to last year’s Mi MIX, according to recent reports. The new smartphone will be called Xiaomi Mi MIX II and is expected to be announced this year.
Xiaomi’s CEO has said that designer Philippe Starck, who worked on the previous Mi Mix, will be returning to design the new phone. It seems that the two have already met and gone over the design of the Mi MIX II and intend to bring an innovative design to life with the new phone.
The company is rumored to aim for a phone with a screen that covers the entire front of the device and that doesn’t have any physical buttons, similar to what Apple is rumored to work on. An analyst has recently said that the iPhone 8 prototype doesn’t have physical buttons, while the screen covers the front panel almost entirely.
Screen-to-body ratio up to 93% on the Mi MIX II
The phone’s designer is reportedly aiming to increase the screen-to-body ratio to up to 93%, from 91.3% on its successor. Reportedly, Xiaomi is aiming to bring an original and groundbreaking design to its Mi MIX phone, as more and more smartphone makers are pushing towards screens that cover the entire front panel of their devices.
Another example is Samsung with its Galaxy S8, which won't feature a physical home button and will have tiny bezels on the side.
The original Xiaomi Mi MIX was made out of a ceramic body and lacked an actual gap for a speaker in the front, while the speaker was hidden below the glass and emitted vibrations so that users could listen to calls.
The smartphone ran Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 SoC, clocked at 2.35GHz, and had 4GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage. The Pro variant had 6GB of RAM and 256GB of internal storage.