The Xiaomi Mi Play Released in China With MediaTek SoC

Most smartphone companies are currently taking a break for the holidays at the moment but Xiaomi doesn’t look like it plans to rest any time soon: it just announced its latest smartphone actually, the Xiaomi Mi Play.

The phone has a waterdrop notch and a 5.84-inch Full HD+ (1080 x 2280 pixels) display with pretty thick bezels that comes accompanied by a 12MP camera and a 2MP depth sensor alongside a 3,000mAh battery and a fingerprint scanner.

You can choose between 4GB of RAM and 64GB worth of storage and under the hood you’ll find a MediaTek Helio P35 SoC. That comes as a surprise, doesn’t it?

We don’t actually have a lot of information about this chipset, and how it came to be but we do know some things, such as the fact that it uses a TSMC 12NM FinFET production process which, according to the company, can deliver performance without taking too much out of the battery.

The chipset has an eight ARM Cortex A53 CPU, clocks in at 2.3GHz and is said to be capable of offering improved low-light performance, zoom technology and multi-frame noise reduction while the Helio P35 semiconductor can offer connectivity options like dual-SIM 4G support, GPS, Bluetooth 5 and Wi-Fi 802.11 ac.

The chipset was introduced by MediaTek on its website without a lot of noise and it looks like the Mi Play might be the first phone to use it. All in all, it seems to be a processor built specifically for budget devices.

The Xiaomi Mi Play costs 1,099 Yuan, which roughly translates into only $160, after conversion, so it’s really not a bad offer at all, considering the specs.

For the time being, the phone is not available internationally.