Xiaomi will launch the world’s first Snapdragon 888 phone on 28 December, the company has confirmed via its Weibo account. Mi 11 will be here today.
The new Xiaomi flagship is usually revealed shortly before Mobile World Congress, typically held in February or March, but in 2021 delayed until June. There had been rumours that the phone would therefore launch earlier than anticipated (though we had been secretly hoping they were just hot air, with most of the Tech Advisor team having now finished for Christmas), and now these are confirmed to be true.
This is a Chinese launch, so we are still expecting Mi 11 to be revealed to the rest of the world later in 2021. Of course, the internet isn’t so great at keeping secrets, so the cat will be out the bag long before then.
How to watch the Mi 11 live stream
Xiaomi has confirmed that there will be a live stream of the launch event on 28 December at 7.30pm. That is Chinese time, GMT+8, so in the UK it should kick off at 11.30am.
You can watch the live stream via the Tencent Video app or iQiyi, and Xiaomi says you should search for ‘Xiaomi 11 New Product Launch’ to locate the stream.
We’ve also found the stream on the Mi China website at this link. It’s also available on Weibo here.
Some videos on these platforms are geo-restricted, so if you have problems accessing the stream you will need to use a VPN to make it appear that you are browsing from China. Our current top recommendation is NordVPN, but you’ll find several alternative options in our group test of VPN services.
Do note, however, that since this is a Chinese launch, the video will almost certainly be in Chinese, and there may not be any English subtitles.
What to expect from Mi 11
Over the next few days we would expect to see Xiaomi reveal various tidbits about the upcoming phone via its social media channels – Weibo, Twitter and Facebook.
For now, it has been confirmed that Mi 11 is the world’s first Snapdragon 888 phone. This 5nm chip presents a leap forward in AI, gaming and camera performance.
Specifically, the new Hexagon 780 AI processor boasts peak performance of 26 TOPS (tera operations per second), up from 15 TOPS in the previous-gen Snapdragon 865. The Spectra 580 image signal processor delivers 35% more computational photography power, too, at up to 2.7 gigapixels per second.
Meanwhile, Qualcomm says the Adreno 660 represents its most significant GPU upgrade yet, with support for QHD+ displays at 144Hz. The chip can also accommodate up to 16GB LPDDR5 RAM and Quick Charge 5.
The processor is 5G-enabled, and will integrate the Snapdragon X60 5G modem, which should mean it is able to support both mmWave and Sub-6 across all major bands worldwide, along with 5G multi-SIM and back-end network tech like carrier aggregation and dynamic spectrum sharing.
We’ve outlined more rumours over what to expect in Mi 11 in this separate guide.
