If you’ve been waiting for the Mi 7, then you’re most likely going to wait forever or skip it as Xiaomi announced the launch date of their flagship Mi 8 smartphone today (22 May). And this means that the company may skip a digit and come up with the Mi 8 as the successor to the Mi 6.
The Mi 8 is company’s 8th year anniversary edition smartphone, which has now been confirmed by Xiaomi’s global spokesperson Donovan Sung in a Facebook post.
“Mi Fans, amazing news! To celebrate our 8th year anniversary, we’ll be launching Mi 8 at our annual flagship product launch in Shenzhen on May 31. Stay tuned for more details!” reads Sung’s post.
The post comes with a official poster attached with number ‘8’ on it. Notably, this is not the first revelation from Sung, he has already announced a big May-end event where Xiaomi will unveil new range of products.
Most recently, company CEO Lei Jun also made an announcement about the Mi Max 3 landing sometime in July, so that’s not one of the products launching alongside the Mi 8 for sure. What we can expect is the Mi Band 3.
Is the Xiaomi Mi 7 a skip for sure?
The invite does signal towards a Mi 8 launch, but there’s no concrete evidence of Mi 7’s extinction. In fact, there have been lots of leaks in the past around the Mi 7, which makes us think of its possible existence.
Moreover, if Xiaomi opts to go the Apple way, then we might see an ultra-premium anniversary edition alongside the Mi 7. More or less what happened with the new iPhone X and the iPhone 8 models.
What could make the Xiaomi Mi 8 anniversary edition ‘big’?
The biggest and most interesting speculation about the Mi 8 is the support for 3D face recognition and under-the-display fingerprint sensor. The information comes from a leaked picture of what seems like a presentation slide in Chinese.
The slide further reveals a Snapdragon 845 processor under the hood with two RAM variants. The price for the 6GB RAM and 64GB storage is reported to retail at CNY 2,799 (Approx Rs 29,870), the 8GB RAM and 128GB storage variant would retail for CNY 3,199 (Approx Rs 34,130).
Also, it is speculated to offer 2X optical zoom and it will borrow some camera features from the Mi Mix 2S. Battery is listed as 4000mAh with fast charging.
