BEIJING, June 3, 2018 (News Wires) - Unveiled at a press event echoing Apple's keynotes, the latest flagship smartphone from Xiaomi has nothing - or at least very little - to envy of the iPhone X, with top-end design and performance, 3D facial recognition and a dual camera. Unlike Apple's flagship, the Xiaomi Mi 8 runs Google's Android operating system and will sell for a considerably lower price. The Xiaomi Mi 8 has a 6.21-inch (2248 x 1080-pixel) AMOLED screen with a borderless design and a notch-style cutout. It is powered by a latest-generation Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor and 6GB RAM, and has a rear-facing dual camera (2x12MP) with integrated AI to recognise the kind of photo being taken and instantly optimize the results. Xiaomi claims that the handset blows competitors out of the water in the famous AnTutu performance index, jumping into the lead with a score surpassing 300,000. The phone also storms its way into the DxOMark photo and video quality benchmark with a score of 99, placing it just behind the Huawei P20 Pro and the HTC U12+, on par with the Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus, and ahead of Apple's iPhone X. In addition to the standard Mi8, the smartphone will land in an impressive Mi 8 Explorer Edition, which gets an in-display fingerprint scanner and a quirky clear casing on the back. And while the Mi 8 uses infrared facial recognition, the Mi 8 Explorer Edition has a 3D system comparable to that of the iPhone X. Xiaomi also presented the Mi 8 SE (with a name possibly inspired by the iPhone SE), a more affordable smartphone with a smaller form factor, featuring a 5.88-inch display and a Snapdragon 710 SoC complete with multi-core AI engine. The Chinese manufacturer plans to roll out its latest models to all its current markets worldwide. And if the Chinese pricing is anything to go by, the handset should prove an extremely competitive rival for the Apple flagship, with the Mi 8 starting at 2,699 CNY (RM1675.37). The Mi 8 Explorer Edition comes in at 3,699 CNY while the Mi 8 SE starts at 1,799 CNY.
