Earlier today, Chinese tech giant Xiaomi launched their much awaited 8th’s anniversary Xiaomi Mi 8 and the more premium Xiaomi Mi 8 Explorer Edition as well as the cheaper Mi 8 SE. Since we might have missed something in the heat of the moment, here’s a recap of everything you need to know about the freshly launched Mi flagship.

Xiaomi Mi 8 Explorer Edition

Design

The Xiaomi Mi 8 Explorer Edition comes with a design we’ve never seen before on a phone – a translucent back cover. Sure, the recently released HTC U12+ also features a similar design, but that’s limited to a small area, meanwhile on the Mi 8 EE, the whole back is translucent, along with the sexy Qualcomm logo shining through.

Smartphone’s dimensions are 154.9mm x 74.8mm x 7.6mm for a weight of 177 grams.

Display

Xiaomi’ flagship packs a 6.21-inch Samsung AMOLED screen with 2248 x 1080 resolution and a PPI of 402. The display is able to produce a brightness of 600nit, a 60000:1 contrast ratio and supports, AOD Extinguishing technology, Eye protection mode
and HDR.

Performance

The Xiaomi Mi 8 Explorer Edition comes with the beastly Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor clocked at 2.8GHz paired with an Adreno 630 GPU wth a frequency of 710MHz. The handset also gets 8GB of LPDDR4x RAM (exclusive to the EE) along with 128GB of fast UFS2.1 storage.

Cameras

On the Mi 8 we find a combo of a SONY IMX363 12MP wide-angle lens with 4-axis optical image stabilization and f/1.8 aperture paired with a 12MP telephoto f/2.4 lens mainly used for portraits. There are also 7 kinds of AI studio lighting effects
to easily shoot “studio-grade” portraits from the get-go. The smartphone is able to shoot 4K videos at 30fps, slow motion videos at 720p 240fps and 1080p 240fps, plus high frame rate videos at 1080p 120fps.

The front-facing 20MP selfie snapper features an F/2.0 aperture, 1.8um pixels, AI portrait mode and AI beautify.

Features

The Xiaomi Mi 8 Explorer Edition is the only 8th anniversary edition phone coming with a proper 3D Face ID technology, iPhone X style. This means it utilizes a dot projector and a flood illuminator to precisely register and recognize a face, making it much more accurate than other Face recognition technologies.

Another exclusive feature on the EE is the presence of an under-display fingerprint scanner, which according to Xiaomi is much faster than what we find on the VIVO phones, thus drastically  reducing the difference between “old” style fingerprint scanner and the new UD.

The Xiaomi Mi 8 and its EE variant are the first phones to ever pack a dual-frequency GPS system. This technology allows for much more accurate tracking with a precision of around 30 centimeters, thanks to the simultaneous reception of L1 / L5 GPS signals. Far better than the 5 meters range we have on current phones.

Battery

What’s probably the only gripe against the Mi 8 EE is its battery capacity. The smartphone does indeed lose 400mAh over the plain Mi 8, with a total capacity of 3000mAh.

You shouldn’t worry too much about running out of juice though, as the phone supports Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 4+ which will allow you to quickly refill the battery in little to no time. We – of course – find an USB Type-C port as well.

Connectivity

The Xiaomi Mi 8 Explorer Edition supports two nano-SIM cards and dual-card VoLTE HD voice 2.

Supported frequency bands are:

• GSM B2 / B3 / B5 / B8
• CDMA 1X / EVDO BC0
• WCDMA B1 / B2 / B4 / B5 / B8
• TD-SCDMA B34 / B39
• TD-LTE B34 / B38 / B39 / B40 / B41 (120MHz)
• FDD-LTE B1 / B2 / B3 / B4 / B5 / B7 / B8 / B12 / B17 / B20

Thanks to the LTE B41 4 antenna technology the phone also supports 4×4 MIMO

Other features include 802.11a/b/g/n/ac WiFi, WiFi Direct, 2×2 MIMO Technology, MU-MIMO, WiFi Display and Bluetooth 5.0.

Pricing & Availability

The Xiaomi Mi 8 Explorer Edition will cost 3699 Yuan, around $577.60, when it’ll finally be available in early June.

Click here to learn more about the plain Xiaomi Mi 8 and Mi 8 SE launched earlier today.