Xiaomi Mi A1, In-House Surge S1 SoC, and Other Major Announcements from Xiaomi in 2017

Chinese electronics company Xiaomi enjoyed a dream run in 2017- in both smartphones and IoT segment. Xiaomi is now the leading smartphone brand in India with a market share of 23.5% market share as per IDC. And more recently, Xiaomi became the world’s largest IoT platform for smart hardware, thanks to some innovative products it released in the past few years.

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These both achievements are for Xiaomi’s hard work in the recent years, but in 2017 especially, Xiaomi made some great announcements. Here’s a recap of what Xiaomi announced in the entire 2017.

Xiaomi Mi A1 Android One Smartphone Launch

Xiaomi, in September 2017 made an unexpected move by launching a smartphone with stock Android on board. Xiaomi’s propitiatory MIUI is a feature-rich skin, but ditching MIUI for stock Android is a brave move from the company, and it paid off very well with the Mi A1.

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The Mi A1 Global launch was held in India, thanks to the demand for stock Android from Indian consumers. Initially priced at Rs 14,999, the Mi A1 is a great value for money option, and it also has the best camera in any smartphone under Rs 15,000.

In-House Xiaomi Surge S1 SoC Announcement

Earlier this year in February, Xiaomi launched its own Surge S1 chipset, built on the 28nm manufacturing process. The Surge S1 is an octa-core processor with four Cortex A53 cores clocked at 2.2GHz and four Cortex A53 cores clocked at 1.4GHz. It uses Mali-T860 MP4 GPU for taking care of graphics performance. The Xiaomi Mi 5c is the first smartphone powered by Surge S1 SoC, which never launched in India.