Many companies and start-ups are unveiling smartphones and other gadgets at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, but Xiaomi Mobile has decided to go against the flow and had its own event in Beijing. Xiaomi had two major announcements, first is the in-house chipset named Surge S1 and other is a Xiaomi Mi 5C smartphone, powered by the new processor.
The Xiaomi Mi 5C enjoys a 5.15 inches display, a 12 MP back camera and a 8 MP one on the front, if you want it for the selfies on Weibo. On the front you will also find a fingerprint scanner, while the specs include 3 GB RAM and 64 GB internal memory. The battery is a 2860 mAh one, and the device will run Android 7.1 Nougat and an out-of-the-box MIUI. Everything runs on an octa-core Surge S1 CPU.
As for the Surge S1, we're looking at Xiaomi's own octa-core 64-bit processor, that has a 2.2GHz quad core A53 and 1.4GHz quad-core A53 combo. Xiaomi touts its new SoC as having better image processing capability, claiming its Surge ISP improves camera light sensitivity by up to 150 per cent. The accompanying Mali-T60 GPU is also said to have 40 per cent improved power efficiency.
People were in fact expecting a better SoC to be released together with the Surge S1. However, most likely Xiaomi wants to hold it on until it can present to the world a great device - Xiaomi Mi6, just like they did in Beijing at their own event. Rumor has it that the company is going to discontinue the Xiaomi Mi5 instead, but it remains to be seen whether they are indeed planning to do so.
