Xiaomi smartphones have established themselves firmly in the budget phone market. In India, the company has flourished with its well-priced feature-heavy smartphones and accessories. The company recently welcomed the Redmi Note 2 and consumers are now eagerly waiting for the Mi 5 smartphone, which was expected to be released on Monday, 19 October, until the company's co-founder brushed off the rumours. But the hype surrounding the Mi 5 smartphone has not ended.
A new source, aware of what happens inside Xiaomi's headquarters, revealed on China's Weibo that the next flagship will bring on board several upgrades associated with high-priced phones. According to @MochaRQ on Weibo, the Xiaomi Mi 5 will run on Qualcomm's upcoming Snapdragon 820 chipset, Xiaomi Today reports. This was previously confirmed in earlier leaks, where Xiaomi Mi 5 is said to be the first handset to debut the new and advanced chipset.
Qualcomm is expected to release by the end of this year or early in 2016, pushing the Xiaomi Mi 5 launch to sometime next year. Some of the key features of the new Snapadragon 820 chipset include 14nm FinFet manufacturing process, all-new Kyro architecture, 35% improved performance compared to Snapdragon 810, Adreno 430 GPU for 40% more graphics and 30% better power efficiency.
The chipset will also support dual-channel LPDDR4 RAM and cameras up to 28 megapixels.
The mobile tipster did not stop there as he also confirmed that the Mi 5 smartphone will feature a fingerprint scanner. Xiaomi is said to improve the fingerprint scanning technology using 3D imprints instead of 2D modules used by Samsung and Apple. This can be a revolutionary upgrade in the smartphone industry, especially if Xiaomi is the first to do it.
Other features in the Xiaomi Mi 5 include 5.3-inch display, 16MP rear-facing camera with dual-LED flash, 8MP front snapper, 4GB RAM, 16GB/64GB storage variants, USB Type-C port and a 3,030mAh battery.
