Xiaomi’s Mi Note 2 was designed and conceptualised before the Mi 5S

   

Even though the Mi Note 2 released a month after the Mi 5s was announced and launched in China, Hugo Barra, Xiaomi's Global VP of operations in an exclusive interaction with Gizmodo India stated that theMi Note 2 was in fact designed and conceptualised much before the Mi 5s. 

The reason Xiaomi decided to launch the Mi Note 2 later than the Mi 5s was because it intended to use the curved OLED displays on the Mi Note 2 which are currently produced and implemented at a large scale only by Samsung. But OLED displays, especially the curved ones have a complicated manufacturing process and Barra admitted that the Mi Note 2 was manufactured and shipped after the Mi 5s because the curved OLED screens weren't available in the numbers Xiaomi wanted to procure.

This makes sense as the predecessor to the Mi Note 2 was the Mi Note which was launched way back in January 2015. And as a result, even though the Mi 5s preceded the launch of the Mi Note 2 by a month, the Mi 5s came out sporting a newer Sony IMX 378 camera module than the Sony IMX 318 on the Mi Note 2.

"It has to do with when this phone was designed. The fact that we are launching it (Mi Note 2) now doesn't mean it was designed after (the Mi 5s), it may have been designed first, in fact it was, before the newer sensor was available," Barra told Gizmodo India. "And also because we can only get so many IMX378 sensors into our manufacturing supply chain," he added.

The Mi 5s comes with a Sony IMX378 image sensor which is also used inGoogle's Pixel phones. And the Pixel's camera received the highest DxO rating ever, even more than the iPhone 7 Plus and the Galaxy S7. The Mi Note 2 on the other hand uses an older IMX318 image sensor, which has been used on older phones like the Sony Xperia Z5.

The IMX378 sensor comes with a larger 1.55um pixel size that gives the sensor the ability to capture larger volumes of light at a high shutter speed and low light sensitivity. This leads to noise-free low light photos without much blur or distortion. This is despite the fact that the IMX378 sensor has an effective pixel count of 12-megapixels.

Mi Note 2 which uses the IMX318 image sensor has a much higher pixel count of 22.5-megapixels, but to accommodate the large pixel count, the per unit pixel size is 1.0um which requires a higher ISO and a lower shutter speed to capture the same amount of light that larger sensors can. Xiaomi has also not implemented optical image stabilisation in the phone, instead it uses electronic image stabilisation which is something even Google is using in the Pixel smartphones partially augmented by the new generation of electronic stabilisation supported by the new Snapdragon 821 processor.

Other than this, earlier in the day the Mi Note 2 was sold out in China in just 50 seconds. Unfortunately, the phone isn’t coming to India. Alongside, the Mi Note 2, the company also launched the Mi Mix concept smartphone which is also not coming to India.

With inputs from Sahil Mohan Gupta 

Disclosure: Xiaomi paid for Sahil Mohan Gupta’s travel and stay in Beijing for the launch of the Mi Note 2 on October 25.