The Mi TV 3 from Xiaomi seems to be all ready to disrupt the market with an elegantly designed exterior, promptly mated with the best hardware in the industry. Just like its predecessors, the Mi TV 3 comes draped in a full aluminium frame finished in diamond pattern and treated with double color anodization. The frame of the TV looks very sleek, thanks to the thinness of 11.6mm and the metal back plate. The Mi TV 3 is powered by a MStar 6A928 4K TV processor made up of Cortex-A17 and Mali T760 to handle the GPU part. The new TV comes with a built in H.265 10 bit hardware decoding and a 8GB eMMC 5.0 flash. On the Audio front the Mi TV 3 features Virtual surround, Deeper bass, dialogue enhancer and auto volume balance. The best part is the Mi Box which acts as a hub and runs a single IN cable to the TV thus eliminating the messy wires and retain the aesthetics of your living room.
The TV’s main board is built into the speaker bars and Xiaomi has thus achieved a 50% reduction in size. The ports are housed above the speakers thus avoiding the need to pull back the screen whenever you want to connect or disconnect the cables. The Mi TV 3 seems to be well endowed with connectivity features as it offers 3x HDMI ports, 2x USB Ports, VGA, Ethernet, AV in and a RF Modulator. The acoustics for the TV has been put together by Luca Bignardi- a Grammy award winning tuner and Wang Fuyu, former research head Philips acoustics. The speaker bar is made of four mid range 2.5-inch subwoofer and a dome tweeter on either sides. The display boasts of LG true 4K display, loseless quality, MEMC and Color gamut. MEMC is an algorithmic method to predict a frame in a video taking into account the future and the previous frames. This helps in achieving a better transition between the frames and at the same time improving the compression efficiency.
Xiaomi has done something drastically different with the Mi TV 3. What they have attempted to do is split the TV into two functionalities, a normal TV screen and a Smart TV. The Smart Tv function is brought to play by the Mi TV main board which costs RMB 999. The reason behind segregating the processor board from the screen seems to be the fact that display will cost a whopping 70% of the original cost to be replaced while the motherboard replacement will just cost around 20% of the original price of the TV, separating the board from the display seems to increase the screen life to 10 years while the motherboard can be replaced without fiddling with the screen. As always, Xiaomi has not clearly revealed the availability plans for the Mi TV 3 outside the Chinese market including India. Don’t hold your breath at all. Note: We intended to mention iPhone 6s Plus in the title, but mistakenly mentioned iPhone 6 Plus. Turns out that we are still right (although unknowingly). iPhone 6 Plus 16GB is priced at RMB 5288 in China!
