Xiaomi Mi 9 specs official including super fast charging

February 19, 2019 3oliver

Xiaomi released their forgotten budget flagship Mi 8 to a modest response early last year, not due to being bad per se, just for not being particularly interesting. Over the last few days, however, the Chinese giant has outed all the external specifications of their new budget flagship, the Mi 9, including that the phone will charge super quickly wirelessly and wired.

Starting with the display, since you’ll be staring at it a lot if you buy one, Xiaomi has confirmed the Mi 9 sports a 90.7% screen:body, 1080×2340, Samsung AMOLED reaching 600 nits of brightness and protected by Corning’s 6th iteration on their Gorilla Glass. This news is very good to see as switching to AMOLED on last year’s Mi 8 was one of the best decisions Xiaomi has made with the brand yet, in my opinion, and so it’s good to see them continuing with the superior technology famous for its infinite blacks and vibrant colors.

Under that apparently beautiful display lies an optical fingerprint scanner, just like the OnePlus 6T and Mate 20 Pro. Unfortunately, this particular technology has faced its fair share of issues; it’s slower than the usual scanners we’re accustomed to, it’s slower than external readers, and it requires the pixels above it to be blasted to full brightness to function – which can ‘blind’ you at night. Nevertheless, it is cool, and perhaps Xiaomi will have been able to improve the tech since it was last featured; one can hope.

Onto the most competitive area of the phone market at the moment, the camera, and the Mi 9 is primarily toting Sony’s new 48-megapixel IMX586 sensor which has previously been seen in the likes of the Honor V20. With 0.8 micron-sized pixels on a larger-than-usual 1/2″ sensor, and at an F/1.75 aperture with laser autofocus, this sensor doesn’t generally output 48MP images, though it can, instead it generally utilises quad-bayer ‘pixel binning’ to output more detailed 12MP images. Backing up this mighty main sensor, Xiaomi has equipped the Mi 9 with two extra sensors – for three total. One is 16MP 117degree ultrawide F/2.2, whilst the other is a 12MP 1.0 micron-pixel ‘telephoto’ sensor for zoom in daylight. Overall this is an incredibly solid camera hardware package which would feel at home on any other flagship and I especially like the addition of the wide-angle lens as it allows for dramatic and/or functional photos you could never have achieved otherwise.

All of this hardware must be housed within a chassis of some make of course, and in the Mi 9’s case I must say it looks rather pretty, in a fairly common way these days though.
Combining an optional gradient back with the Apple-inspired vertical camera array, from the rear the phone resembles a Huawei P20/Pro but with a contiguous camera bump. From the front the phone is a step up from the aforementioned device in my opinion though as it gets damn close to eliminating the bezel with a small chin and tiny pimple notch; it is a very ‘aesthetic’ device analogies aside.

Related is connectivity, and unfortunately the Mi 9 lacks a headphone jack as previously discovered, and the device has a USB-C port as you’d expect. Impressively, however, the Mi 9 will support 20W wireless charging and 27W wired charging. That means the phone will be able to charge more quickly without cable clutter than most phones can charge at all, with the exception of a few Huawei, Oppo, and OnePlus flagships. For reference the Galaxy S9-series, and all other wirelessly charging phones to my knowledge, cap out at 15W, so 20W is a sizeable jump if not a revolutionary one.

On top of this we already know the Mi 9 will of course feature Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 855 SoC, 6-12GB of RAM, and 64-256GB of ROM.

Overall Xiaomi’s Mi 9 looks to be coming in hot with some killer hardware at a rumoured killer price of about $450-500 for the base variant, though if it can compete with the new crop of OnePlus, Honor, and other budget flagships – including from within Xiaomi’s own Pocofone and Redmi divisions – will be interesting to see.

Source: Twitter