My Xiaomi Mi4 Adventure

It’s been a bit more than a year since I have been using the Mi4 by Xiaomi. I am going to write about my experience with the product since people are reluctant to trust the brand which might be helpful for someone confused about reaching an opinion. This isn’t a review of the phone.

A Hot Phone.

After a few weeks of usage and losing the excitement of the new device I realised that this phone with impressive specs and a beautiful frontside tends to be a bit hot  so hot that one should just switch it off to cool down. This did ensure that I was more careful with my phone usage and reduce the amount of time I used my phone resulting in greater battery life. If you are planning to flash any custom ROMs then you can have a good experience of the heating issue, maybe this would be a good thing if you are staying in a cold place. A case is required for this phone in order to use it and somehow adjust with the heating issue. As of now this issue has not been solved since customers like me are still whining about it.

MIUI Forum. Best Forum.

I root my phone as soon as I can, and it is a  slightly different procedure than the other phones because Mi phones have MIUI. I was quite surprised to see that there wasn’t much talk on XDA regarding the device in the forum section because most of the users are on the official MIUI forums. It took me quite some time to recollect myself after seeing the cluster fuc  mess.   

 

Turns out that things did get even worse thanks to the feature that requires one to reply to a thread to see the most important links provided by the OP. I still couldn’t come up with a logical reasoning to this but I do know that the percentage of useful posts in almost every thread would be a single digit. “Thanks”, ” thnx” and “Awesome” seems to be only content in any ROM thread.

Dead….Pixels.

I have an uneven white small tiny patch on the screen. This occurred around 6 months of usage. Since I am not sure if it is actually dead pixels or due to some physical damage, I shall not go into many details. It’s slightly annoying nonetheless.

GPS

GPS on this phone is quite strange. It seems to be sentient and works at times. While most of the times for me, it hasn’t been that functional. I didn’t take it up to the service centre as this seems to be a common issue with the phone. Although the fact that I couldn’t use Navigation wasn’t much of a hassle for me, this did get on my nerves as this was a hindrance for me to jump into the Pokemon Go hype train. My location was always shown in the wrong spot.

Don’t buy this phone to play Pokemon Go. Or any games which require constant location tracking.

 

Service Center

I had the unpleasant experience of going to the service centre a few days back because my phone was restarting constantly every 3-4 seconds. I was not able to use fastboot to install some ROM again or even go to recovery. I had gone to Mi Service Center in Rajajinagar which is actually HCL Services. They had taken my phone to “diagnose” my problem for which the cost would be Rs 170 and had told me that they would call that day itself with the relevant information. As you can guess, I didn’t receive any call. After two days I tried calling them on multiple occasions and they refused to pick up the phone call which forced me to go there in person.

I was told that my phone was not ready at first but it magically was after I shouted at them. And it was fixed too. Great? Technically I was not made aware of the issue and I hadn’t given the phone for repair. Neither was I told about the charges before they proceeded to do so and at that point they wanted me to pay Rs 290. Even at this point, no one was able to tell me what was wrong with the phone or what they actually did. “Refilled Battery”, ” Changed charging pin” etc were some of the things I could make out. They also seemed hesitant to give me the bill and made me wait for around half an hour to give me the bill which was done after asking over and over again and raising my voice. And the bill states the method they used as “General Software Maintenance” and nowhere does it speak of the Rs 170 I was bound to pay for the “diagnosis”. It was acknowledged by them that they don’t pick up any calls to the place because they are too “busy”; this was done after most of the other furious customers complained about the service centre employees not attending any calls and demanded to see the phone.

 

This would be my last phone from Xiaomi.