Xiaomi Mi TV 4 review: The Virat Kohli of smart TVs

Slim, intelligent, toys with competition and their weak points — Xiaomi's first smart TV for India is Kohli inside a box!

The only difference is that Virat Kohli comes with a heavy price tag whereas Xiaomi's Mi LED Smart TV 4 will be available at an 'under 19' price point! Xiaomi's the brand that toppled the top order of the country's budget and mid-range smartphone market with its Mi and Redmi range of offerings.

Back in China, their TVs have been popular, but it is only now that Xiaomi decided to bring it to India. We can vouch for the fact that India's wait for the Mi TV is worth it for two simple reasons. One, India-specific enhancement to TV content and two, a price point that might go on to redefine smart TV pricing. Let's break this down:

Will the real slim TV please stand up?

The Mi TV 4 is arguably the slimmest LED TV in the world and a 4K ultra HD TV at that. With a thickness of 4.9 mm and a frameless display, the TV comes in a single 55-inch variant, powered by a 64-bit quad-core processor, 2GB RAM + 8GB storage configuration and features Dolby and DTS sound capabilities. Xiaomi has truly brought the concept of the bezel-less display of smartphones to the Mi TV 4. Fine attention to detail, such as a smooth but rugged back panel coating, a cute pair of table top hold clips, and well-hidden speakers make it a TV that takes design seriously.

A drone inside your TV!

Imagine a drone circling around your neighbourhood, shooting live footage of everything that's happening within a radius of a square kilometre? Now imagine a system that's intelligent enough to identify each of your content subscriptions and display it on a dynamic, never-ending home screen, alongside content from your set top box.

It's pretty much like having a surveillance drone inside of your TV, hovering, looking for new stuff. Xiaomi's new PatchWall TV UI comes with a range of features that make finding content a smooth experience. It has a search button that lets you search for a movie, a sport, an actor, pretty much anything you want, and PatchWall pulls up every piece of content, from your set top box to your Hotstar subscription, to your saved videos, and lets you choose the one you want.

Mi TV 4 is the only device in the country that lets you throw away your bulky set top box remote and use the Mi Remote as a single interface for all content on your TV. This effectively means that you do not need to remember channel numbers. You just need to search for your content and the TV will automatically identify and switch to the relevant channel. The integration of a TV with your set top box makes the Mi TV quite smart in the true sense of the world. And the Mi Remote itself is an aesthetic piece of plastic and is hilariously simple to use. The Mi TV comes with three HDMI ports and two USB ports, along with an Ethernet port and Bluetooth 4.0. Currently, the device comes with around 500,000 hours of content across 15 content providers, where 80 per cent of the content is free.

With a good mix of hardware and in-built software, Xiaomi's India entry into the Indian market is quite an impressive one. The Mi TV 4 is aggressively priced at Rs 39,999 and is available at mi.com and Flipkart.

—IndiaTechOnline

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