In the last year and a half Xiaomi Inc. has emerged as one of the hottest startups in the world and deservedly so. The Chinese company has made inroads into multiple key international markets such as India and Brazil and has made its presence felt worldwide. And it has done so largely on the back of its flagship smartphones. The Xiaomi Mi 3 and the Xiaomi Mi 4 were at the time of their respective launches, arguably the best smartphones money could buy.
Enter Xiaomi Mi 5.
Xiaomi’s senior leadership, including Global VP Hugo Barra, has confirmed that the company’s latest flagship will launch on February 24. The aftermath? An otherworldly hullabaloo has inundated the Indian smartphone space.
More from iSpyPrice: Check out the expected India price of the Xiaomi Mi 5 mobile
I ask my fellow techies, do we really need to be this excited about the launch of a new smartphone? I mean irrespective of how good the Mi5 maybe surely it will be trumped by another device in a few months. Then why get all hyped up about another flagship from another Chinese tech giant? All of these adjectives are now so mainstream that nobody should really be too hyped up about another smartphone launch.
The answers I get are quite amazing and on many levels amusing. Before we delve into those answers let’s just take a quick glance at the specifications on the upcoming Xiaomi Mi 5.
Specifications – Xiaomi Mi 5
The Xiaomi Mi 5 will likely have a 5.5 inch IPS LCD display with an impressive pixel density of 515 ppi. The phone will also boast of a 2.5 GHz Octa Core processor and an Adreno 430 GPU. Mi 5 will come with a 4 GB RAM and likely two internal storage variants of 16 GB and 64 GB respectively. The flagship device will have a better camera configuration than its predecessor Mi 4. It will reportedly have a 16 megapixel rear camera and an 8 megapixel front facing camera to boot.
The battery capacity on the Mi 5 will be another improvement over the Mi 4. It will be a 3600 mAh battery unit, which is certainly good improvement over the previous flagship.
More from iSpyPrice: We did a benchmarking and performance review of the Xiaomi Mi 4 last year and this is how it fared
Comprehending the hype around the Xiaomi Mi 5
Back to the answers then.
All the answers I am given for the hype surrounding the Mi 5 revolve around the groundbreaking success of its predecessors. When the Mi 3 launched in India it pretty much revolutionized the direct-to-consumer online-only model. Yes, Motorola had already adopted the model with the Moto G and was the first in India to show how effective this approach could be but the first company to truly master this model in India was Xiaomi and the first device to create a real fuss through this approach was the Mi 3.
It helped that the Mi 3 was a spectacular product in its own right and had all of us gadget geeks going gaga over its overall brilliance for what, at the time, seemed like an extremely reasonable price for such a feature rich phone. For those of us who follow the smartphone space closely the Mi 3 truly emerged as the catalyst for the flurry of other quality products from other quality Chinese smartphone brands adopting the same model.
This enabled the average consumer to experience what the so called high-end specifications felt like. From the technological perspective this was always on the cards and was an event waiting to unfold but it was always going to be that one product that would push things forward. This product was the Mi 3.
More from iSpyPrice: For the latest Xiaomi mobile check out our Xiaomi mobile price list
By the time the Xiaomi Mi 4 made its way to the market the rate of imitation in the tech industry had pretty much ensured that the Mi 3 became one of the many good options and not the one standout product that it truly was at the time of its launch.
Sometimes I feel that technology has a predominantly self deprecating side to it that takes more pride in the proliferation of its clones than it does in the singularity of the original breakthrough. Just as the miracle of Physics is that there are no miracles, perhaps the rate of progress of technology can only be matched by itself.
Despite the Mi 3 having become one of many, the Mi 4 at the time of its launch became a standout product, only to be imitated, and rarely bettered, by its competitors. This is what makes the upcoming launch of the Mi 5 such a hyped event. It is not another smartphone that will be launched but history suggests that another breakthrough awaits us. As humans, with our limited time on earth, we may not be well acquainted with history but we are always in awe of history.
I am hyped up for February 24 and I hope so are you.