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19
Apr

Spotify’s half-price student discount plan goes live in 33 more countries


Spotify’s half-price student discount plan is now available in 36 countries.

Spotify allows students to subscribe to its premium plan for 50% off in the U.S., UK, and Germany, and today the streaming service has vastly expanded the program to 33 more countries around the world.

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These are the new countries where the half-price student discount plan is available:

  • Austria
  • Australia
  • Belgium
  • Brazil
  • Canada
  • Chile
  • Colombia
  • Czech Republic
  • Denmark
  • Ecuador
  • Estonia
  • Finland
  • France
  • Greece
  • Hong Kong
  • Hungary
  • Indonesia
  • Ireland
  • Italy
  • Japan
  • Lithuania
  • Latvia
  • Mexico
  • Netherlands
  • New Zealand
  • Philippines
  • Portugal
  • Singapore
  • Spain
  • Switzerland
  • Turkey

The offer is valid to students “for every year of their student life,” meaning you can get a 50% discount for four years if you’re just getting started with an undergrad degree. To sign up, you’ll need to head to spotify.com/student and authenticate your eligibility with SheerID.

See at Spotify

19
Apr

PlayStation 4 Slim now comes with a 1TB hard drive for the same price


PlayStation 4 Slim now offers a 1TB hard drive at the same $299 price point.

Back when the PlayStation 4 Slim made its debut in September, it came with a 500GB hard drive. Sony is now upgrading the storage to 1TB while retaining the $299 price point.

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Aside from the increased storage, there isn’t a whole lot new. You still get a Jet Black DualShock 4 controller, an HDMI cable, wired headset, power cable, and a USB charging cable in the box. The console will go up for sale starting tomorrow, April 20, at Amazon, Best Buy, and GameStop.

While more storage is always welcome, the hard drive on the PS4 is easily replaceable, so if you’re looking to extend the storage on your console beyond 1TB, a better move would be to pick up a 500GB PS4 Slim for $254 and swap out the internal storage. If you’re interested in 4K gaming, then you should take a look at the PS4 Pro.

See at Amazon

19
Apr

Android Central Photo Contest: Transportation!


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Drive with us.

Humans are always moving around from place to place for one reason or another, and with summer looming, we’re soon more likely to be traveling than not. “Transportation” is the prompt for this week’s photo contest, but that doesn’t have to mean a big hunk of metal moving at high speeds. We all get around more modestly sometimes. If you think about it, there are plenty of ways to express the concept of “transportation.”

This week we’ll have a single winner for the contest, and for their efforts they’ll receive a Samsung Gear 360 camera!

Entering is easy. Just drop your entry in the forums at the link below. Tell us what Android you used to get the picture, and any back story you want to add to it. We’ll leave this contest open for 3 weeks and announce the winner on the blog with the next contest. Full guidelines for entering are included in the forums, so be sure to check that out when you enter. Good luck, everyone!

Enter this week’s photo contest!

Previous Photo Contest Winner: Events!

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Please join me in congratulating Android Central member dohcstunr for his winning photo!

I live in Washington DC, only a few blocks from the Capitol. I decided to take my cameras out to document the Women’s March as a casual neutral observer. All politics aside I just wanted to witness a political movement as it descended on my neighborhood. Some of my best shots came from my Pixel XL. I picked this as my favorite shot, taken from my Pixel XL in HDR with light editing in Snapseed. In a sea of political signs that day, my Pixel XL captured a moment of innocence and hope.

Check out the rest of the Event entries here

Enter this week’s photo contest!

19
Apr

You can spill a cup of water on Lenovo’s new $279 Flex 11 Chromebook


Lenovo’s new Flex 11 Chromebook is cheap, rugged and versatile.

It’s becoming increasingly difficult for manufacturers to differentiate their Chromebooks in the highly competitive laptop space. Lenovo’s $279 Flex 11 Chromebook, which goes on sale this week, has a trick up its sleeve — or its keyboard port.

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The Flex 11 has sealed ports and a keyboard that can withstand up to a cup of water spilled on it, with draining channels to ensure that the liquid has something to go. This is a feature Lenovo has been putting to good use in its more expensive Yoga and Thinkpad laptops for some time, but it’s good to see it integrated into something a bit cheaper.

Elsewhere, the Flex 11 is powered by a 2.1Ghz unnamed ARM processor — likely from Rockchip — with an 11.6-inch 1366×768 pixel IPS display, 4GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage. Like many of Lenovo’s other laptops, the Flex 11 has a strong hinge that allows the unit to be contorted into one of four positions, including laptop, tablet, “tent”, and “watch”.

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Compatible with the Google Play Store (in an update coming after launch, natch), the Flex 11 lasts 10 hours on a charge, and comes with a plethora of ports, including HDMI, USB 3.0, headphone port, and SD card slot. It is powered by a USB-C port, which is handy, and weighs just under three pounds.

See at Lenovo

19
Apr

Watch our Galaxy S8 and S8+ video review!


Who has time to read a 6,000 word review? I wrote the damn thing and didn’t have time to read it (kidding! maybe!). That’s why I also made this handy 14-minute video for you about the new Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+, Samsung’s latest flagships.

These are two of the best phones on the market right now, and potentially trounce the Google Pixel as the best Android phone, period. Beautiful, big screens, excellent build quality, awesome cameras, superb battery life, and some really neat unlocking tricks — well, just watch the video.

  • Android Central on YouTube
  • Samsung Galaxy S8 review
  • Which Galaxy S8 size should you buy?
  • Everything you need to know about these phones

19
Apr

Fujifilm Instax Square SQ10 combines instant photo printing with a digital image sensor


Fujifilm has revisited its Instax series of instant stills cameras and has announced the Square SQ10, which represents the biggest evolution of the Instax range for some time.

The SQ10 is classed as a hybrid instant camera and is the world’s first. To achieve hybrid status, Fujifilm has combined a digital image sensor and digital image processing technology, with the built-in printing capabilities the Instax series of cameras is known for.

By fitting a digital image sensor, which is a 0.25-inch CMOS sensor with f/2.4 aperture, the Instax Square SQ10 is able to fare much better in low-light conditions compared to previous Instax cameras. It has a 28.5mm equivalent fixed focal length, can take close-up shots from a distance of up to 10cm and has built-in autofocus with facial recognition and automatic exposure control.

The Square SQ10 is aimed at the arty, blogger types, and has ten preset filters that can be applied to photos before or after shooting, vignette control and brightness adjustment. There are three buttons on top of the camera to control each individually. If applied before a photo is taken, you can see what effect it will have in real-time on the 3-inch LCD display.

Fujifilm

Up to 50 edited and processed images can be stored on the SQ10’s internal memory, but you can insert your own microSD card to increase the storage. The battery claims to be good for up to 160 images on a single charge.

Of course, being an Instax camera means you can instantly print any photos you’ve taken. The SQ10 is no different, but this time prints in a 1:1 aspect ratio, to produce square photos like the ones you see on Instagram. The Instax Square film is 86mm x 72mm, but photos only take up 62mm x 62mm of spac. Each photo takes around 12 seconds to print.

The Fujifilm Instax Square SQ10 will be available from mid-May for £249 while a 10-pack of Instax Square film will cost £8.99.

19
Apr

Garmin Vivoactive HR review: Multi-sports master, just not much of a looker


If you’re a general fitness fan rather than someone with a specialist hobby, deciding which wearable is right for you is tough. What sport do you prioritise? Are your morning runs more important to you than your weekend round of golf, or would you rather track your commute-based cycles or your evening swims?

Most fitness-focussed wearables make you pick a speciality. The Garmin Vivoactive HR, however, has you covered on all basis. It’s a fleet of specialist devices, all wrapped up into a single body. A Garmin Forerunner, Approach, Swim and Fenix all combined into one individual device, if you will.

That might explain the premium asking price. No, the Vivoactive HR isn’t cheap, but it’s a well-rounded multi-purpose tracker, and one that’s designed to appease your ever changing fitness kicks.

Is this do-it-all device a master of all or none though? We put it to the test to find out.

Garmin Vivoactive HR review: Design

  • Plastic and rubber design
  • 30.2 x 57.0 x 11.4mm; 47.6g
  • 5ATM rated water-resistance
  • 205 x 148 pixel display

The Garmin Vivoactive HR might have you covered when it comes to tracking all your fitness activity, from your standard runs to more obscure exercise sessions such as skiing or rowing, but it’s not exactly a looker.

Pocket-lint

For all its sports tracking skills, leave the gym and you’ll be pulling your sleeve down to try hide its boxy, plastic form. If you want something better looking then something like the Fenix 5 watch might tick the box, but that’s a lot more expensive because of its material form.

The HR is finished with an also bulky silicone rubber strap. It might be big, but it’s reasonably comfortable and certainly secure thanks to a firm metal buckle. You won’t be losing it any time soon.

It’s also waterproof. So beyond running and cycling, you can go swimming too. That’s possible thanks to the device’s impressive 5ATM water-resistance that allows you to take it to depths of 50 metres without it meeting a watery demise.

Pocket-lint

Offsetting the basic form, the Garmin Vivoactive HR plays host to two physical buttons. Sat beneath the device’s touchscreen, these offer additional ways to navigate the menus. While the right button acts as a shortcut to all your sports tracking options, the left control is a back button.

During standard use, you’re likely to favour the screen, but these physical controls come into their own during exercise sessions, letting you more easily start, stop, pause and set lap markers and time splits. This is especially handy when your wrist’s shaking around while running or cycling.

The touchscreen is a solid addition for letting your move through the mass of menu options when static, however, with each swipe and press gesture promptly met with corresponding reactions. It’s not the sharpest or brightest to look at, however, feeling a little grainy and recessed from the watch’s body.

Pocket-lint

It’s not the only thing lacking quality either. In terms of customisation options, you’re pretty limited with the Vivoactive HR. You can switch out the watch face for something bland and basic and, well, that’s pretty much it. There’s no standard strap connection to let you switch out for something more stylish.

Fortunately, this is a watch that has taken its style shortcomings and focused those lesser efforts on substance instead. To great effect too.

Garmin Vivoactive HR review: Features & performance

  • Built-in heart rate sensor
  • Built-in GPS tracking
  • Plenty of pre-set sports modes

Key to the Vivoactive – as the “HR” in the name suggests – is a sizeable underside protrusion to host the watch’s built-in heart-rate sensor. This is what sets it apart from other Vivo-named models in Garmin’s series.

Pocket-lint

Whatever sport you’re buying this for, the Garmin Vivoactive HR’s tracking is bang on, with decent, relatable metrics available whether you’re running, cycling or doing a general gym session.

Kicking off a session is easy, too, thanks to the physical button that offers instant access to all the pre-set sports tracking modes. A press of this lets you select from a mass of exercise options that range from the traditional to more specialist activities like stand-up paddle boarding, cross country skiing and golf. The sport you select dictates the data you’re presented, and this is where the Vivoactive HR really sets itself out from the masses.

You’re not given meaningless information just because the sensors are there though. Each sport attunes itself to your needs. Runs and cycles will show your heart rate, distance and pace; golf uses the watch’s built-in GPS for a different purpose, giving you distances to the pin on the course you’re playing. It’s a great addition and one that helps the HR standout as wearable for the all-round sports enthusiast.

While selection is great, many will primarily use this watch for run and cycle tracking. Fortunately, the Vivoactive HR is great at monitoring both, offering all the usual metrics – calories burned, time active and distance covered – with pleasing accuracy and a few extras thrown in for good measure: elevation gain on cycles and average cadence on runs.

Pocket-lint

The GPS is great and didn’t drop out for us at all during use. This is key as it helps the Vivoactive HR more accurately track your exercise, with runs correctly monitored to the metre rather than using an accelerometer to take an educated guess at roughly how far you’ve run. So if you’re working towards a 10K personal best or training for your first marathon, this level of detailed tracking is invaluable.

It’s not just the watch’s GPS skills that impress either, the device’s heart-rate sensor is pleasingly on point too. Compared with a Wahoo heart-rate monitoring chest strap, we found it did tend to wobble slightly the harder we pushed and the higher our heart rate became, but for standard runs instead of sprint sessions, it’s pleasingly accurate.

While all the information is relayed instantly to the wrist, it’s not always laid out in the best way. Yes, being able to see multiple metrics on a single screen during a run is a great addition, but everything’s a little bit sanitised and clinic.

Pocket-lint

Similarly, you can set the watch up to push message and call alerts direct to your wrist, and although perfectly functional, they’re not the most elegant looking. You can read messages without fishing your phone from your pocket, but it’s a slow, clunky affair with messages leaking from line to line and requiring a lot of scrolling to digest.

Garmin Vivoactive HR review: Software & app

  • Garmin Connect app works with iOS and Android
  • On-screen data or in-browser full metrics & graphs

Fortunately, the watch’s Garmin Connect companion app is prettier than the on-screen graphics. More detailed too, which is ideal as all of that data capture is great, but without a decent companion app to turn it into something tangible, it would otherwise be redundant.

Pocket-lint

Open the app while in close proximity to the Garmin Vivoactive HR and the watch will automatically sync its latest data. Now you’ll be presented with a series of graphs, charts and graphics that outline your activity in a friendly manner.

Like the watch itself, this is an app that offers something for everyone. For the general user, there is quick hit data that shows how far you’ve moved throughout the day, the amount of steps you’ve taken and the number of calories you’ve burned. Click on any of the metrics or listed exercise sessions, however, and you get a deeper dive of your daily actions.

For more knowledgeable fitness fans, being able to see a biggest metric breakdown, such as average heart rate, cadence on cycles and elevation change during runs is crucial. It transforms the device from yet another fitness tracker to one of note.

Graphing your heart rate over your steps is a great way of seeing your progressing fitness levels with your peak heart rate able to be tracked alongside the time taken to return to a resting heart rate after an activity session.

Pocket-lint

While this is great, unfortunately you’re largely on your own to discover all this. As well as making you jump through multiple menus and metrics to find the data useful to you, the Garmin Connect app doesn’t back it up with any coaching element. There’s no indicator on how to lower those kilometre split times on a run or maintain a better cadence during your cycles. It’s an omission that stops this great activity tracker being an instant must own.

Garmin Vivoactive HR review: Battery life

  • 8 days life with 24/7 heart-rate
  • More than 13-hours with GPS
  • Proprietary charger

While the Garmin Connect might leaving you wanting a bit more, the Vivoactive HR’s battery life won’t. Given the amount of battery-sapping tech squeezed into this watch, we half expected it to churn through its limited power supply and be begging for nightly trips to the mains.

Fortunately that’s not the case. Far from it. Garmin claims the watch is capable of 13-hours of GPS-equipped tracking between charges, and we found to achieve more than this. Unless you’re dropping in an ultra marathon then this will see you good for at least a few days.

Pocket-lint

We found that with daily runs or cycles plus some nightly gym tracking and a full day’s worth of message relaying and general step-tracking, the Vivoactive HR lasted us the better part of a week. That puts a number of its rivals to shame, with the likes of the TomTom Adventurer unable to match.

When you do need to make a trip to a power supply, recharges aren’t the fastest, however. Like most other smartwatches the Vivoactive HR requires a bespoke charger. This cradle-based addition is easy enough to use, and unlike the Fitbit Alta HR, isn’t hampered by a ridiculously short cable.

Verdict

The Garmin Vivoactive HR is a well-rounded sports watch companion – whether you’re a multi-sport fitness fanatic or a diehard runner who dabbles in the occasional extra. It’s mighty capable, has great tracking features that work well, heaps of metrics, and long-lasting battery life.

Shame it’s not much of a looker, then, which is the ultimate letdown of this watch. The design is, frankly, uninspired enough to see you dropping it into a bag as you leave the gym rather than wanting to wear it all the time. The screen is also on the soft side, lacking clear detail and definition.

Overall, the Vivoactive HR is a device for the sports fan who spreads their love of being active rather than obsessing on a single form of exercise. It’s a device that will charge through your full week of action and accurately keep tabs on whatever you ask of it, no matter how obscure you latest fitness hobby.

The alternatives to consider…

Pocket-lint

TomTom Adventurer

Slightly more expensive than the Garmin Vivoactive HR, the TomTom Adventurer is just as well-rounded when it comes to fitness tracking, with its mass of sports-centric capture modes enhanced by an integrated heart rate sensor and inbuilt GPS. There’s is a key difference, however, TomTom multipurpose wearable wraps everything up in a far more stylish package.

Read the full article: TomTom Adventurer review

Pocket-lint

Polar M200

Design is again an issue for the Polar M200, but at almost half the price of the Garmin Vivoactive HR, it poses great value for money without skimping on the features. Moving beyond simple runs and rides, it tracks all of your activity with heart rate and GPS thrown in to finish the package.

Read the full article: Polar M200 review

19
Apr

The Morning After: Wednesday, April 19th 2017


Hey, good morning!

This morning, we put Samsung’s Galaxy S8 through its paces, finally seeing why Facebook bought VR company Oculus, and started replaying a 20-year-old game. (Because it’s free.) Welcome to the Morning After.

Two of the best phones available right now.
Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus review: Redemption is here

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Samsung’s Galaxy S8 is mostly a slam dunk. It’s brilliantly designed, brimming with horsepower and has a beautiful screen. That’s all most people will need, and our gripes are minor. It’s too bad virtual assistant Bixby is still incomplete — its voice interface doesn’t work yet, and the stuff we did get can be hit-or-miss. Fortunately, Bixby is strictly optional, and the rest of the phone is remarkably polished. Long story short, if you’re looking for a new phone, this should be at the top of your list.

The headphone maker enters a new product category with help from an architect.
Master and Dynamic developed its own concrete for its first speaker

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It’s important to make a statement when you branch into a new product family. Master & Dynamic has been designing some of the best-looking headphones you can buy for just under three years; today it’s introducing its first speaker, the MA770. It’s not just any wireless speaker, though. Rather than using wood, plastic or metal for the primary material on the MA770, Master & Dynamic chose concrete.

Power overwhelming.Download ‘StarCraft’ and ‘Brood Wars’ for free, right now

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Blizzard just made its hit game Starcraft available for free on PC and Mac. The company will release a proper Remastered edition later this year with upgraded online capabilities and graphics upgraded for 4K-quality resolution, but you can get the old-school feeling back right now. Yes, a Zerg rush is still just as satisfying 20 years later. See you on Battle.net.

Rumors.Apple is definitely working on new iPhones

The latest batch of iPhone rumors has arrived — rather conspicuously timed to match Galaxy S 8 reviews — as Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports the company is working on three new models to debut this fall. Those following along have probably heard much of this before, but this new report suggests that the anticipated “10th Anniversary” iPhone 8 or X will have a curved screen without upgrading from LCD tech to OLED. It’s also unclear whether screen based Touch ID fingerprint scanning will make it into the high-end model, or if it will launch at the same time as the two other new iPhones we’re expecting.

Still $299Sony squeezes a new 1TB hard drive into the PS4 slim

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The PS4 slim just got a little more room, packing a 1TB hard drive instead of the 500GB storage it featured originally. It’s just one more thing to consider when you’re choosing between this and a PS4 Pro, but the better news is that its price hasn’t changed at all.

Steve Ballmer’s new project is an open database of government spending
USA Facts will be your new favorite website for dinner table arguments about taxes.

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Our leaders may be determined to make their daily dealings less transparent, but they probably didn’t reckon on bored Steve Ballmer. The former Microsoft CEO has spent more than $10 million on a new project to open up the US government budget. USA Facts, as profiled in the New York Times, is an open, searchable database that tracks where almost all of your federal, state and local tax dollars are spent.

Five years left to train.eSports joins the 2022 Asian Games as a medal event

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Esports will form part of the 2022 Asian Games, set to be held in China, with medals and everything. The Olympic Council of Asia (OCA) said it wanted to reflect “the rapid development and popularity of this new form of sports participation.” It marks an evolution from next year’s 2018 Asian Games in Jakarta, where eSports will debut as a demonstration sport. Come 2022 however, it will be a medal event, given equal footing with long-established athletic events.

And you can get it right in your browser, too.
Google Earth feeds your wanderlust with ‘Voyager’ stories

Google Earth’s latest update ratchets up its time-killing potential several notches. The major changes center around the home page, a new ship’s wheel icon… and adventure. Well, it’s actually called “Voyager.” Google Earth has always been about finding and investigating, but Voyager is about enabling that encouraging that with curated content. Yes, even Google Earth isn’t immune to the current trend for “stories,” or in this case, curated tales from around the world (literally). These stories are essentially themed journeys around the planet peppered with rich media such as 360 videos, and Street View (including inside buildings and underwater). And for those not sold by Facebook’s Social VR, you can also put your Oculus Rift headset to use flying around Google Earth as well.

That Oculus buyout makes sense now.Facebook Spaces finally delivers on social VR

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Three years ago, when Facebook bought Oculus for $2 billion, many scratched their heads in befuddlement. Social networks and virtual reality seem like such strange bedfellows; one is about connecting you to the world, while the other appears to do the opposite. But CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisioned a world where VR is a place for communication, not isolation. And, many years later, we get Facebook Spaces. It’s the company’s answer to social VR and Senior Editor Nicole Lee found it surprisingly compelling.

But wait, there’s more…

  • AMD’s mid-range Radeon 500-series video cards are here
  • Facebook’s latest Messenger makeover is all about business
  • Murders, suicides and rapes: Facebook’s major video problem
  • Review: Samsung’s Gear VR controller
19
Apr

Early Galaxy S8 owners complain of red-tinted screens


Samsung started shipping the Galaxy S8 to customers in South Korea who pre-ordered the flagship phone almost a full week ago. They were probably thinking of how lucky they were to get the phone early until some of them noticed something off about their screen. According to multiple reports posted on Korean forums like PPOMPPU and social networks like Instagram, some S8 units’ displays have a very noticeable reddish tint. It’s unclear how widespread the issue is, but it seems to be serious enough for “Galaxy S8 Red Screen” to be a trending search term on Korean search engine Naver.

[Image credit: jiweon5368/Instagram]

Samsung didn’t deny the issue and told ZDNet that it can easily be fixed in the settings:

“All Samsung phones undergo thorough testing to meet our high level of quality standards. The Infinity Display on the Galaxy S8 and S8+ has applied Super AMOLED and provides rich and expressive colors, enabling users to enjoy a clearer and more vivid viewing experience.

The Galaxy S8 was built with an adaptive display that optimizes the color range, saturation, and sharpness depending on the environment. If needed, users can manually adjust the color range of the display to change the appearance of white tones, through ‘Settings > Display > Screen Mode > Color balance’.”

An unnamed mobile industry official told Business Korea that a few Note 7 launch units also had a reddish tint brought about by the Super AMOLED display. If fixing color balance doesn’t work, his advice is to go in for a replacement — indeed, some affected users said making color adjustments did nothing for them.

Another insider pointed out to The Korea Herald that it could be caused by the company’s new deep red AMOLED tech. The S8, which is the first phone to use the technology, has two types of joint pixels: red-green and blue-green. Those two greens could cause a color imbalance, so Samsung made the red pixels look stronger and deeper. Whatever the cause is, it seems buyers’ best bet to check their phone against other devices when it arrives and adjust the color balance before panicking and asking for a replacement.

Via: CNET

Source: ZDNet, BusinessKorea

19
Apr

Xiaomi Unveils $360 Mi 6 Phone With Dual-Lens Camera, ‘Four-Sided 3D Glass’ Casing, No Headphone Jack


Chinese mobile maker Xiaomi unveiled the Mi 6, its latest flagship smartphone, at a packed-out event in Beijing on Wednesday.

The Mi 5’s successor features curved “four-sided 3D glass” and a front that isn’t bezel-free like the company’s Mi MIX, but the phone does boast a lot of tech for a device that starts at 2499 RMB, or $360 – about half of what a base iPhone 7 goes for in China.

Like the iPhone 7 Plus, the new 5.15-inch Mi 6 includes a 12-megapixel rear dual lens camera combining a wide-angle lens and a telephoto lens. It also matches Apple’s latest smartphone with 10x digital zoom, 2x lossless zoom, image stabilization, and depth of field effects.

Similar to the Mi 5s, the Mi 6 features a Qualcomm-based ultrasonic fingerprint reader built under the glass at the bottom of the phone. The “button-less” technology is said to recognize a 3D map of each user’s fingerprint through ultrasonic waves, although it only works within the bezel’s concave indentation that marks out the home button.


The Mi 6 includes 2×2 Wi-Fi, which is meant to improve connectivity speed, and does away with the headphone jack, settling for a single USB-C port instead. Elsewhere the handset features the latest Snapdragon 835 processor (also found in the S8), 6GB of RAM, 64GB of storage memory on the entry model, dual stereo speakers, a 3,350mAh battery, a new “night display” screen mode, and water resistance.


The Mi 6 with 128 GB option costs 2899 RMB ($420) while a special Ceramic edition goes for 2999 RMB ($435). It’s unclear at this time whether the phone will become available in Europe or the U.S.


The announcement of a new flagship phone comes at a particularly important time for Xiaomi, which suffered its first sales slump last year. The company’s former VP of Global Efforts Hugo Barra left in February, while CEO Lei Jun recently admitted the firm had grown too fast and was now entering a transitional period, as it focuses on its main markets in China and India.

Related Roundup: iPhone 7
Tags: China, Xiaomi
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