Xiaomi unveils Redmi K20 Pro and it has everything you need in a premium smartphone. It is the latest and the first smartphone that cost less than $400 and still powered by the Snapdragon 855. Xiaomi has focused exclusively on the budget category with Redmi series but with Redmi K20 Pro it is going to change the whole Redmi branding for good. It has a similar design to K20 but has high-end hardware specification that makes it even better.

It is the first most affordable smartphone with Snapdragon 855 chipset which will really improve the performance of the phone. The device has a huge 6.39-inch FHD display without any cutout at the front due to a retractable front camera. It features a 20MP sensor for the front camera. The camera pop up under a second, and you can also customize the activation sound. But the most spectacular feature of the device is its evocative gradient background which will make you fall in love with its look and feel.

It has a 48MP primary sensor for the rear camera, an 8MP telephoto lens with 2x optical zoom and a 13MP wide-angle shooter. The Redmi K20 Pro is powered by a 4000mAh battery with 27W wired charging, which takes around an hour to charge from zero to 100 percent. For connectivity, it has a Wi-Fi, a USB-C charging and Bluetooth 5.0. The Redmi K20 Pro will go on sale from tomorrow in China and will be available in red, blue, and carbon fiber color options. The Redmi K20 will go on sale from June 6 in China and will start from $290.

Xiaomi Black Shark 2 is the latest entry in the gaming smartphone category for anyone who loves to play video games on their smartphone. It made its debut in Chine on 18th March, and now the device has reached Indian market. The phone is a gaming-oriented smartphone, and it packs a tons of features to enhance the experience of video game players. Let us have a look at some of the hardware and software specifications.

Xiaomi had released the Black Shark 2 in Indian market in two models. The first model has 8GB memory with 128GB storage and it will cost less than 40,000INR. The second variant has 12GB memory and has 256GB storage. It is slightly pricier and will cost you around 50,000 INR. It has 6.39-inch AMOLED display with full HD+ resolution. There is no notch or ugly cut-out on the screen destroying a full-view gaming experience. It also features 240Hz touch refresh rate for faster touch response in gaming. The device comes with Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 processor, which has an octa-core CPU (4 big cores + 4 small cores), and Adreno 640 GPU.

Usually smartphones with powerful processor heats up when you use these for long time for playing video games or watch movies, due to which the performance get effect, and results in choppy frame rate in the gaming experience. To deal with this issue, Xiaomi has placed the Black Shark 2 with larger and thicker copper plats compared to ones in the most other high-end smartphones. It helps in dissipating the heat faster which keeps the device cool down and due to which you get a higher frame rate. This ensures a smoother gaming experience Xiaomi is calling this liquid cool 3.0. The device also comes with a performance tuning of the device, such as, adjusting CPU and GPU performance. This is also Ludicros mode bult-in that is going to free the unused resources to allocate to the game for smoother experience, such as Gamepad, Gamepad stand, and cooling fan.

Xiaomi is new to smartphone paradigm but its making progress really fast and has definitely damaged the sales of major smartphones worldwide. Redmi is Xiaomi's budget smartphone but the company is ready to bring the flagship smartphone as well. The premium Redmi will be called as Redmi K20. The company has launched multiple teasers already ahead of its official launch in China on May 28th. The smartphone is powered by the Snapdragon 855 chipset, clearly indicating that it will be a part of Xiaomi's premium smartphone series. K20 has codename Raphael. Redmi hasn't said anything about the memory size of the device but we can assume that it is perhaps around 6GB and 8GB variants, if not higher.

Weilbing has recently shown its latest render, and based on which, we can say that the Redmi K20 will feature a triple camera on its rear side. In other Weibo post, it was suggested that the primary sensor among these will be a Sony IMX586 with 48MP resolution. This is the same sensor on the Mi 9, the Redmi Note 7 Pro and also the OnePlus 7 duo. Rumors suggest that one of these will be a wide-angle module while the other a telephoto setup. This is because the Mi9 features a similar specification including a 12MP telephoto sensor with 2X zoom and a 16MP super-wide-angle sensor with 117 degree field of view.

The device is going to use the pop-up cameras - which hinted at the use of a pop-up selfie camera on the smartphone. Weibing noted in a Weibo post that the slider can open and close for up to 300,000 times without any issue. Along with this, the device will have an in-display seventh generation fingerprint scanner from Synaptics which is going to improve the unlock success rate, compared to previous generation scanners. The device will be powered by 4000mAh battery. It will be available to India perhaps till next month.

There was a time when the Chinese OEMs were called out for copying Apple and sometimes Samsung, but how the times have changed! Instead of being followers, Chinese OEMs such as Vivo, Oppo, Huawei and Xiaomi have now established themselves as trendsetters. They have in-display fingerprint scanners, true bezel-less displays, best camera tech and mechanized cameras modules! The latest phone to join this list of elite and innovative smartphones is the Mi Mix 3 which has pretty much everything that a phone in 2018 is expected to have and then some.

Key specs include a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 SoC, 6GB/8GB/10GB of RAM,128GB/256GB storage, a 6.39-inch truly bezel-less AMOLED display (2,340x1,080), 24mp + 2mp front cameras, 12mp + 12mp rear cameras and a 3,850mAh battery. If you thought the 10GB of RAM was crazy, wait till you see how the two front cameras actually slide out of the display! Although the Vivo Nex and the Oppo Find X already did the same with motorized camera modules, Xiaomi believes that the manual slider which it has incorporated to hide the front cameras will actually be more durable than motorized modules. So, do you think that these specs are impressive enough for you to be interested in the Mi Mix 3 from Xiaomi? Personally, I think that it's where smartphones in general are headed towards in 2019 -2020, but there's no need to upgrade right now, if you have any SD 845 or similarly powered phone. Just wait till they perfect the technology next year. But just in case you are planning to upgrade in the near future, there's really no reason you shouldn't be interested in the Mi Mix 3 either!

Saikat Kar  

While it is true that Chinese manufacturers like Xiaomi and OnePlus had already closed the gap between their flagship products and that of their big-name competitors like Samsung and Sony by a lot, the cameras were still better on the higher priced devices till last year, albeit by a somewhat small margin in some cases. However, it looks like the Mi 8 has just managed close off that gap as well.

DxOMark Image Labs is the standard for camera benchmarks that is accepted by experts and consumers alike and it has just given the Xiaomi Mi 8 the same score as the Galaxy S9 Plus. At 99, both smartphones are tied for the fourth spot, with the Pixel 2 and the iPhone X following close behind with 98 and 97 respectively. In case you are wondering which smartphones are filling the positions of 1,2 and 3, they are the Huawei P20 Pro (109), HTC U12+ (103) and the Huawei P20 (102). We guess the excuse for buying similar hardware with double the price is starting to look weaker and weaker with every passing year.

Saikat Kar