China’s Xiaomi Mi2 Phone: Quad-Core Power Behind Cutesy Android Customization [PICS]

It’s the second incarnation of China’s hottest homegrown smartphone, and here it is in the hands of the Chinese tech blog Leiphone. The Xiaomi Mi2 was unveiled back in August and is due to ship later this month. But Xiaomi has already sold a bunch of engineering samples to its keen fans, and that’s what we can take a look at in these photos.

To refresh your memory, the Xiaomi Mi2 promises the punch of a Samsung Galaxy SIII but without taking such a big bite out of your wallet. It has a quad-core Snapdragon S4 (APQ8064) processor to power the MIUI-skinned Android 4.1 (Jellybean) phone, and a a 4.3-inch screen at 1280 by 720 pixels giving it a pixel density of 342PPI (higher than that of an iPhone 5). The Android buttons are part of the hardware, not the screen, so you still get useful things like haptic feedback – and more screen real estate. The price? 1,999 RMB (US$316) unlocked and contract-free.

Customization is, I reckon, a large part of Xiaomi’s success. Chinese phone users – despite their love of Apple products – generally don’t like to be locked down, and the freedom and ease of homescreen customization is integral to MIUI (the ROM familiar to Android tinkerers, and which was created by Xiaomi back in 2010). As customizable as Android is, MIUI makes it a lot easier to theme your phone in a thorough and fairly consistent way, like with the nifty Angry Birds number below:

How is it so easy? Why, there’s a theme store:

Plus there are quite a few things in there to serve as a separate ecosystem for Chinese users away from the Google way of doing things – there’s a separate Xiaomi app store and the company’s own MiDrive cloud storage service.