Xiaomi Mi 8 is officially debuting as the new Mi
series flagship next week. Xiaomi has scheduled the Mi 8 launch event for May
31. With the confirmation on the upcoming launch, it is also presumed that the
Chinese company has no plans to bring the Mi 7 as the successor to its last
year's Mi 6 - instead, it appears to be skipping an iteration by launching the
Mi 8 to celebrate its eighth anniversary. A box package and a screen protector
tipping the launch of the handset had already surfaced on the Web. The
Beijing-headquartered company is also rumoured to be building its proprietary
3D facial sensing technology to take on Apple's Face ID.
As confirmed by a teaser image posted on Weibo, the
Xiaomi Mi 8 launch is taking place in Shenzhen, China. Xiaomi Global
spokesperson Donovan Sung, in a separate tweet on Tuesday, highlighted that the
new launch is aimed to mark the company's eighth anniversary. "To
celebrate our 8th year anniversary, we'll be launching Mi 8 at our annual
flagship product launch in Shenzhen on May 31," Sung tweeted.
As per a previous report, Xiaomi already sold tickets
of the annual launch event that is also likely to be the place for devices
other than the Mi 8, including the Mi Band 3 fitness tracker. Further, it is
expected to have around 5,000 attendees.
Considering the past rumours, the Xiaomi Mi 8 is
speculated to come with a notch design and have a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 SoC
along with 8GB of RAM and up to 256GB of onboard storage. The handset is also
expected to run Android Oreo on top of a new MIUI version and might have an
under display fingerprint sensor. An image leaked recently suggested that
Xiaomi is also set to include a dedicated camera unit on the front to enable
advanced facial recognition that will be in line with Apple's Face ID that
debuted on the iPhone X last year. Moreover, the Mi 8 is expected to counter
the OnePlus 6 with its all-new build and a bunch of custom features.
The base variant will retail at CNY 2,799/€ 370/US$ 440,
while the variant with 128GB will go for CNY 3,199/ € 420/US$ 500.
