Xiaomi Mi 4 goes head-to-head with OnePlus One

Today is a red letter day in India for Chinese smartphone-makers: Xiaomi has flash sales for both 16GB and 64GB variants of its flagship killer Mi 4 at 5pm India time. And OnePlushas a 24-hours open sale, where you don’t need an invite to buy 16 GB and 64 GB variants of OnePlus One, temptingly priced lesser than their Mi 4 counterparts.



Mi 4 16GB is priced at INR 19,999 (US$321), while the OnePlus One 16GB, launched yesterday in India, costs INR 18,999 (US$305). Mi 4 64GB is priced at INR 23,999 (US$385), while 64GB One is at INR 21,999 (US$353).



It’s for the first time today in India that Xiaomi is selling its 64GB version of Mi4; earlier it only had a 16GB Mi4 in India. For OnePlus, it’s the opposite. It had launched its 64GB One in December, and now the Silk White OnePlus One has a 16GB version.

The fight between the Chinese phone-makers is also a proxy battle between the two leading ecommerce sites in India: Mi 4 is sold on Flipkart and One on Amazon.

Both the phone-makers have also got tangled in legal disputes with rivals in India.

Xiaomi faced a ban on sales in India after Ericsson took it to court two months ago for alleged patent infringements. The court later allowed Qualcomm-powered devices to be sold, while the injunction still stands for devices with MediaTek chipsets. Xiaomi is currently trying to avoid further trouble as “unauthorized retailers” continue to sell its banned devices.

OnePlus One too ran into a legal tangle soon after arriving in India in December. Its Indian rival Micromax had sealed a deal just two months earlier to be the exclusive partner in India for Cyanogen, whose Android-based operating system powered both the OnePlus One and the Micromax YU. After initially facing a ban, this Chinese phonemaker too was allowed to resume sales. OnePlus has developed its own Android Lollipop fork called OxygenOS, which is expected to be out in March.

Carl Pei, co-founder of OnePlus, tweeted to a OnePlus fan today: “We released an L alpha a while ago, but a more stable build (OxygenOS & CM12S) will need to wait until March. Sorry for delay!”



So, while the latest OnePlus One launched in India still uses CyanogenMod OS 11, the update will be OnePlus’ own version.

OnePlus says that having its own Android build will have several advantages. Carl Pei writes in a blog post:

By doing so, we can offer better localization and faster updates. We can directly implement user feedback and make it easy for the OnePlus community to shape our ROM and create the OS that they want to use. Integration between hardware, software, and the cloud will become more seamless and unified for everyone using a OnePlus device. By creating our own software, we’re better able to work directly with our users to improve our OS.
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Meanwhile, the Mi4 going on sale in India today uses Xiaomi’s newest MIUI 6 version built on Android 4.4. Xiaomi is integrating MIUI 6 with Android Lollipop, and its Android 5.0-based OS is expected arrive in the second quarter of the year.

Both Mi 4 and Silk White One are powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor and feature a 13 megapixel rear camera. While Mi 4 has a 3080 mAh battery, Silk White One has a 3100 mAh battery. Neither device has a microSD card slot for storage expansion.

The OnePlus One is larger than the Xiaomi Mi 4, at 152.9×75.9mm compared to 139.2×68.5mm. The Silk White OnePlus One has a soft and smooth textured back cover, which the company claims was “made possible from extracting the best resources out of materials as unique as cashew nuts.” Mi 4, meanwhile, is shiny and has a slippery rear. But it feels like quality plastic as there’s not an atom of flex or shifting.

Both Xiaomi and OnePlus are new-gen phone-makers from China who have captured the imagination of India’s smartphone-hungry, tech-savvy youngsters. With everything else being almost the same, it is the cool factor that may count the most.

See: Xiaomi Mi4 is a bombshell in the $300 smartphone war (REVIEW)

This post Smartphone shootout in India today: Xiaomi Mi 4 goes head-to-head with OnePlus One appeared first on Tech in Asia.