Xiaomi launched the Mi 4i smartphone in India last month. Being marketed as an affordable flagship smartphone, the Mi 4i does pack in a range of impressive hardware modules and cost only Rs.12,999 ($205). It’s a good smartphone for the price. My colleague Nimish Dubey also seemed content with the phone in his initial impressions piece. But as good as the Mi 4i is, many retail versions of the phone are seemingly shipping riddled with a couple of glitches. In my brief testing, I couldn’t help but notice a tad bit of stuttering and lagging issues carpeted everywhere in the phone. I reached out to a couple of other people who have the smartphone, and they confirmed similar issues to me. “The phone does get hot a little,” fellow technology reporter and reviewer Yash Garg told me. “Unfortunately the phone isn’t that ‘cool’,” he smirked. The issue seems to be affecting a large set of people. Over on Flipkart, the e-commerce portal which is selling the Mi 4i handset, an alarming number of people are sharing similar ordeal (you will want to scroll down a little). But the new update dubbed “V6.5.4.0 LXIMICD” is squashing those bugs and offering optimization to improve performance and tweaks to the thermal control algorithms to resolve the overheating issues. My editor Raju PP decided to test the graphics intensive Asphalt 8 title on the Mi 4i smartphone for over half an hour. The phone showed a substantial improvement, dropping from 57C we had seen earlier this month to 45.6C under performance mode over the same time period. This is a huge improvement. “We’ve heard from some Mi 4i users that their devices can get warm under strenuous conditions such as complex 3D gaming and benchmarking apps.” said Jai Mani, Lead Product Manager at Mi India in a statement to Technology Personalized. “To address these concerns, we’ve optimized our thermal control algorithms to better regulate the temperature. The new thermal controls adjust frequency, voltage and the number of cores in use depending on the chipset temperature.” One obvious thing which comes to our mind when patches like this are released, is whether the company is throttling the cores to keep temperature under control (thereby affecting the performance)? Well, in our limited testing over the past few hours, we didn’t observe any noticeable lags or stutters during our usage. We would advise you to snag the latest update on your phone. You can check for the latest software update from ‘Updater’ app. Alternatively, you can also download the update file manually from here (ZIP), and go to Updater > Choose Update Package > navigate to OTA Zip. Let us know your findings in the comments section below.
