Chinese technology conglomerate Xiaomi recently announced MIUI 10 at the company’s eighth-anniversary event and revealed its global availability during the launch of the Redmi Y2 smartphone (First Impressions). One of the great features of MIUI 10 is the Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered portrait mode and the company has listed 15 phones that will get ability to click bokeh photos with a single-lens.
The company said that the beta version of MIUI 10 will be rolled out from mid-June onwards and stable versions will start rolling out in September to: Xiaomi Mi Mix 2, Mi 5s, Mi 5s Plus, Mi 5, Mi Note 2, Mi Max, Mi Max 2, Redmi Note 4 (India), Redmi Note 4X, Redmi Note 3, Redmi 5, Redmi 4 and Redmi 4X smartphones.
The company also announced that two phones — Xiaomi Mi 6 that already supports portrait mode on the rear camera and Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 (India) — will receive Portrait mode on the front camera only. Since some older Xiaomi models have low processing speeds, MIUI 10 update will not be rolled out to them. The company has not yet enlisted which phones will skip the update.
Explaining some key features at the Redmi Y2's launch event, company Product Manager Sudeep Sahu said that with MIUI 10, Xiaomi’s focus has been on speed, design, sound and AI Portrait image capturing. In terms of performance, MIUI 10 comes with two new features called “lock free critical path” and “co-dependent prioritising”, which are said to improve speed times of their devices by up to 10 percent.
When it comes to design, the company included gestures, which perform the role of navigation keys on a smartphone. The “recent” screen has been refreshed and users will now be able to scroll down to get a stacked card view of their recently used apps. Users will be able to swipe to remove apps or long press on an app for accessing shortcuts like split view.
The overall ROM has been reworked for rounded icons. Xiaomi has also reworked some audio aspects in MIUI 10 and the notification tone is said to vary with every message you receive. The timer app now plays ambient nature sounds.
Xiaomi has also tweaked some features for Indian users. A highlight of this is the web browser, which now has a dedicated page for local services with support for Progressive Web Apps (PWA). The camera app will be able to recognise Paytm QR codes as well.