Everything We Know About Apple’s New iPhone Software

Get ready for split-screen views, transit routes and lowkey shade delivered via iMessage

The next version of Apple’s mobile operating system is almost here.

The company is expected to unveil iOS 9 at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference in June. A new iOS update isn’t quite a big deal as a new iPhone, but the announcements can often be substantial–iOS 7 brought us a completely revamped mobile interface, while iOS 8 featured a health activity tracker and improved predictive keyboard.

Here’s what’s rumored to be in the works for Apple’s iOS 9:

A New Font

Apple is reportedly planning to dump the Helvetica font it’s been using since iOS 8 in favor of a San Francisco font that’s currently in use on the Apple Watch. The font was chosen for Apple Watch specifically because it’s readable on small screens.

A “Home” app for connected devices

In iOS 8 Apple added HomeKit, a framework that helps users control connected devices in their home. Now the company is working on a user-friendly app called “Home” that will let users more easily control disparate devices from a single interface. Among the features rumored to be part of the Home app are virtual rooms that let users easily detect which parts of their house have which connected devices. However, 9to5Mac warns that the featureset so far is fairly limited so the app may not be ready for a public debut in June.

Improved Apple Maps

Apple is finally planning to add subway and bus routes to its Maps app, a feature that’s been available in Google Maps for years. The initial rollout may be limited to just a handful of cities globally, including New York and San Francisco. The company is also using Roomba-sized robots to develop indoor maps of buildings and landmarks, though that feature won’t necessarily be ready for iOS 9.

Dual-app viewing for iPad

Apple wants to give iPads the ability to run two apps side-by-side. The split-screen functionality is already available in tablets by Samsung and Microsoft, so it would be a welcome addition to Apple’s device. The new mode could allow users to resize an app to take up one-third, one-half or two-thirds of the screen.

The iPhone 4S may still be supported

The iPhone 4S is close to four years old, which is an eternity in the world of mobile tech. However, Apple is expected to continue supporting the still-popular device with iOS 9. In fact, according to9to5Mac, Apple is changing its software development process to ensure that iOS 9 runs better on old iPhones and iPads than iOS 8 did.

Contact-specific read receipts

Passive-aggressive texters, rejoice! Apple is apparently tweaking iMessage to let you choose which of your contacts you share read receipts with. Drake is probably really excited.

A Google Now Competitor

Apple may be planning to expand its digital assistant capabilities beyond Siri with a new personalized interface code-named Proactive. The menu, which would likely be located left of the main home screen, would integrate information from a user’s calendar, Passbook and other apps to provide daily itineraries. Proactive could remind you to call your mother each week for instance, or automatically pull up directions to your office each morning. The similarity is similar to Google Now, which is available for Android phones

Unified Search in Google Calendar and Google Drive

Back in 2012, Gmail enhanced the search feature by showing relevant emails, Google Calendar events, Google Drive files as you type your query. A similar feature is now available in Google Calendar and Google Drive.

For example, you can type a query in Google Calendar and find emails and Google Drive files, in addition to Google Calendar events. Click one of the results and it opens in a new tab.

Google Drive shows Google Calendar events and results from Gmail. If there are no Google Drive results, you'll see this message: "there are no recent records that match your search".

Google introduce Google Pholes

Today during their I/O 2015 Keynote Google announced Google Photos, a new service that will allow users to easily upload, edit, and share photographs from all of their devices. Google Photos seems like a reboot of Google's previous efforts for making a photo sharing service through Google+, and is instead a standalone product with its own dedicated apps and website.

Google's goal is that Google Photos will become a place where users can permanently store a continually growing collection of photos from their cameras and mobile devices. They also hope to improve upon the organization and sharing of photos, which has become a difficult problem to tackle with people taking and sharing more photos than ever.

The big promise of Google Photos is that the storage for your photos will be unlimited. This is a huge step above the measly 5GB of iCloud storage you can use with Apple's Photos offerings, and still an improvement over services like Flickr which offer users 1TB of storage. However, there is a caveat to the unlimited storage. While you aren't limited by the amount of photos or videos you can store, you are somewhat limited by their quality. Users who opt for unlimited storage can only store images at up to 16MP, and videos at 1080p. This shouldn't really affect any users who intend to use the service for storing photos from their smartphone, as most smartphone cameras have lower resolutions than 16MP.

There is another option for users who want to use Google Photos for their high resolution pictures from their DSLR or mirrorless camera, or who just have a very high resolution smartphone. Users can opt to have Google Photos use their Google Account's 15GB of storage, and with this option there are no limits to file size or resolution. Since many devices give away 1TB of free Google Drive storage, I suspect that this option will be popular among users who want to keep their photos in the highest possible resolution while staying within Google's ecosystem instead of going with another photo offering like Flickr.

The second half of Google Photos is how it will intelligently organize your photos. Google can analyze the content of photos and group them into categories based on their subject. While I haven't seen this in action, if it does actually work as well as Google claims then it would remove much of the hassle involved with organizing your photo collection.

Google Photos also allows for groups of photos to be shared. You can share a link to one of Google's automatically created groups, or you can make a collection of photos and get a single link to share them all at once. There's no need for the person you're sharing them with to have a Google+ account or to have the app installed.

In addition to grouping and sharing, Google Photos has all the other features that one would expect from a photos app such as simple color adjustments, cropping, and other editing controls. Google Photos will be available today across essentially all major platforms, with apps available for iOS, Windows, OS X, and an update to the existing Photos app coming on Android.

Source: Official Google Blog

Office Lens Android now available at Google Play Store

Thanks to the participation of more than 130,000 Google+ community previewers, we’re pleased to release Office Lens Android today. Called a “great app” by one tester, Office Lens turns your Android, iPhone or Windows Phone into a pocket scanner that works “flawlessly,” delivers “crystal clear images” and does an “excellent job of transcribing a printed page, despite edge distortion (page from a hardcover book),” according to other users.

First introduced for Windows Phone in March 2014, followed by the iPhone app early last month, Office Lens Android was the only version to have a public preview, which ran from April 2 to today’s formal release. Both iOS and Google+ communities quickly embraced the Microsoft capture app, with first-month downloads totaling more than 1.3 million for iPhone and 70,000 for the Android preview. To date, Windows Phone users have totaled 3.5 million Office Lens downloads.

A before-and-after look at how Office Lens Android does an, “excellent job of transcribing a printed page,” according to one previewer.

The handy scanner app recognizes the corners of a document, whiteboard, electronic screen or any rectangular media and automatically crops, straightens, enhances and cleans up the image, then enables saving to OneNote or OneDrive for easy retrieval from any device.

With Android beta testers representing 270 makes of phones and just under 2,600 models, the Office Lens team worked hard to ensure a seamless user experience across all Android phones. As a result of a user experience refinements, Android phone owners share a feature with Windows Phone users: saving Office Lens images to multiple sources at the same time—for example, OneDrive and Word—which involves separate steps on the iPhone.

From receipts to whiteboards, books to legal documents, the Office Lens Android pocket scanner recognizes the corners of any rectangular media and automatically crops, straightens and enhances the image, which can be saved to multiple sources at the same time.

Now available free in the Google Play Store, Office Lens was praised by an Android user for its “clean design.” It offers the following capabilities and features across all three phone platforms:

• Converts images of paper documents, electronic screens and whiteboard notes into Word documents, PowerPoint presentations and searchable PDF files for easy storage, editing and reformatting.
• Enables images to be sent via email, making it easy to share whiteboard notes with work colleagues, submit scanned business expense receipts or ensure family and friends have copies of important paper documents.
• Captures business cards and generates contacts, which can be sent to OneNote and added to your phone.
• Recognizes the corners of a document and automatically crops, enhances and cleans up the image.
• Identifies printed text with optical character recognition (OCR) so that you can search by keyword for the image in OneNote or OneDrive.
• Inserts images to OneNote or as DOCX, PPTX or PDF files in OneDrive, providing options to save, export and share the image.

Office Lens Android users will see the new OneNote location picker in the general release version, making it easy to decide where to save images and keep them organized.

We’re excited to introduce the final version of Office Lens, ensuring that Android users in 123 countries or areas, communicating in 30 languages have access to what’s quickly becoming the preferred scanner app. Please download your version of Office Lens today—Android, iPhone orWindows Phone—and keep sending comments our way, either below, at the respective app store or our UserVoice site. Your feedback helps us understand what users like best and determine which features to deploy to other platforms.

Microsoft's age detection shows up in your Bing image searches

Microsoft's face-based age detection is still a little wonky (I'm thankfully younger than what you see above), but the company is clearly enamored with it -- you'll now find it inBing image searches. All you have to do is look for a person and, in most cases, roll over the picture to find a #HowOldRobot that will guess how many birthdays the subject has seen. The feature is available in at least North America, so give it a shot... if for no other reason than to giggle at its occasionally harsh appraisals of your looks.

Microsoft's new iPhone app could make Siri jealous

Cortana is coming to iPhone and Android

Microsoft’s “personal digital assistant” for Windows devices, Cortana, will soon take spoken commands on Apple and Android devices as well.

Microsoft announced Tuesday that a version of its Cortana app is coming to iOS and Android. Cortana will enter a crowded field of personal digital assistants on those platforms, dominated by Apple’s Siri and Google Now.

Microsoft has attempted to distinguish Cortana as a careful listener, responding not only to spoken commands but seizing on context to answer follow-up questions. Chattiness aside, Cortana will first have to break users of the habit of using convenient shortcuts to Apple and Google’s personal digital assistants, which have been tightly integrated into their respective operating systems.

Here’s more on Cortana for iOS and Android, via Microsoft:


The Cortana app can do most of the things Cortana does on your PC or on a Windows phone. You can have Cortana remind you to pick up milk the next time you’re at the grocery store, and then your phone will wake up and buzz with the reminder. You’ll be able to track a flight using Cortana on both your phone and your PC, and get the updates on the device that you’re on so you don’t miss anything. Everything in Cortana’s Notebook will show up across all your devices and any changes you make on one device will be reflected when you use Cortana on any of your other devices.

The new app comes as Microsoft unleashes a suite of mobile services across rival operating systems, beginning with Microsoft’s surprise roll out of free Microsoft Office apps last November.

Microsoft Office Lens, An App For Scanning Documents With Your Camera, Is Now Available As A Stable Release

Office Lens, which was released in a semi-private beta in April, is now widely available through the Play Store. The app had been on Windows Phone for quite a while and, continuing their pattern, Microsoft decided they wanted it on Android as well. Office Lens uses your phone or tablet's built-in camera to scan documents or whiteboards and convert them to PDF or office document formats. Here's an example of how it's supposed to work from the app info:

 

Of course, lots of things will affect how well it works in your experience. The lighting, the quality of the camera, steadiness of your hands, and untold other factors may result in far less success than Microsoft's example images.

The app enjoys tight integration with OneNote, which if you weren't aware is pretty great on its own. Office Lens says it will OCR your scanned documents, though it is unclear if this requires sharing it to OneNote or OneDrive. If you like to jot down notes on real paper but also like to store things digitally, an app like this can be critical to your workflow.

Unlike most of their recent releases, Microsoft says in their beta group that Office Lens works on devices running software as old as Jelly Bean 4.1. If you're interested, head to the Play Store and give it a spin.

Google rumored to launch two new Nexus phones this year

Google may roll out two Nexus phones this year -- but no Nexus tablet.

Made by LG, one new Nexus phone codenamed the LG Angler would offer a 5.2-inch screen, according to Android Police. The other phone, manufactured by Chinese vendor Huawei and given a code name of Bullhead, would reportedly sport a 5.7-inch display.

Basing the scuttlebut on a "reliable" source, Android Police gave the rumor a confidence rating of 7 out of 10, which means the odds are pretty good assuming the source is indeed reliable.

If true, this would mark the first time Google has released two Nexus phones in one year. By giving each phone a different screen size, Google may be trying to pull off the same feat as Apple -- offer one phone with a "relatively" smaller screen and another with a larger more phablet-sized display to capture as wide an audience as possible. The current Nexus 6 also is a beast of a phablet with a 6-inch screen. So Google may be looking to shrink the screen size to make this year's devices more accessible to the average consumer.

Details on the phone's specs are "tenative" for now, according to Android Police, and may have changed since the blog site received the information. But based on the source, the LG Angler would be powered by Qualcomm's 64-bit, hexa-coreSnapdragon 808 processor, the same high-end chip used in the LG G4 smartphone. The battery capacity would be around 2700mAh. The Huawei Bullhead would be equipped with aQualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor and offer a battery capacity of 3500mAh.

Both phones are likely to be released in October, the usual time frame for new Google Nexus devices. Google may announce the new phones this Thursday at its2015 I/O conference, but that's not a sure bet. Last year, the company didn't reveal the Nexus 6 at its2014 I/O event and instead waited until later in the year for the phone's debut.

And what of a new Nexus tablet? Nothing is in the works for this year, according to the source. No reason was revealed. But if true, that means last year's Nexus 9 would remain Google's current Nexus tablet.

Heads up: Google Glass may be coming back

According to reports last week in the Financial Times, Google really is working on a new version of Glass, the now-cancelled wearable device that became the poster child for clueless tech products creeping out normal people.

Google has claimed that it would continue working on the device since it stopped selling it in January, but until now there's been no word on what the company had in mind. Was it hoping to make a few tweaks and come up with a new marketing campaign and hope that would be enough for a successful re-launch? Or was the plan to completely scrap Google Glass as is and develop a new product based on what it learned from the first attempt?

FT.com reported on what Tony Fadell, the head of Google acquisition Nest who's now in charge of the Google Glass project, said earlier this month at a Google Zeitgeist conference in the UK. In his first public comments since taking charge of Glass, he indicated that the company has at least figured out that the device cannot re-enter the market as it was.

"We've decided to go and look at every detail, have no sacred cows and figure out the way forward," Fadell said.
Google Glass needs big changes

Frankly, that's the absolute minimum required to resurrect this product. As I've stated repeatedly, I see enormous potential in products like Google Glass, but the current implementations simply don't live up to the promise.

It seems that Fadell—and perhaps Google—finally see that. If so, here's what Fadell needs to do:

First, dump the Google Glass name, design, and market positioning. Glass was a marketing disaster of catastrophic proportions. Business schools should be using it as a case study in what not to do for decades to come. Whatever Google comes up with next, it should stay as far away from the Google Glass legacy as possible. No matter how good it is, if it reeks of the Glass "explorers," popularly dubbed "Glassholes" by the public, the project is doomed before it starts.

See also: How Google Glass set wearable computing back 10 years

Second, Google needs to fix the product's actual problems. Earlier this year, I listed the10 things the next version of Google Glass must have, and I still believe that all these changes are critical. But they all boil down to improving the experience for users and reducing the anxiety of people in the presence of the actual user.

For the user, that means vastly improving performance so using the device doesn't feel like test of the slow-motion video feature on your smartphone. For everyone else, it's about making it unmistakably obvious what the user is doing, what they may be recording, and whether they're invading anyone's privacy.

Oh, and Fadell may want to make the thing look less weird, too.

If he can do all that, he's an amazing genius. And he may actually succeed in reviving Google Glass. As long as he knows enough not to call it that.

Sony Xperia M4 Aqua first impressions: 5-inch HD waterproof smartphone, but comes at a steep price

Sony announced its latest phones from the Xperia series for the Indian market. The Xperia M4 Aqua comes with water-proof and dust-proof certifications. The other phone launched was the Sony Xperia C4 Dual, which is looking at the mid-range segment. First announced at the Mobile World Congress, the Xperia M4 Aqua will start selling in India from May 26. We got to spend some time with the phone post the event and here are our first impressions.

Build and Design

Sony has employed the same design elements that we have come to associate with its Xperia series of smartphones. The Xperia M4 Aqua has a more rounded edges and corners. The phone has a tempered glass display protecting the 5-inch IPS panel. The frame is metallic and the matte silver colour adds a bit of elegance to the phone. On the left hand side you have a microSD card slot and a cap-less microUSB port for data transfer and charging. On the right hand side there is the dual NanoSIM slot on the to covered by a cap, an aluminum power/standby button, a volume rocker and a dedicated camera shutter button down below.

A 3.5mm audio jack is placed on the top and there are dual front-facing speakers. Overall, the phone has a good build quality and Sony gets a brownie point for providing a capless microUSB port. Imagine the annoyance at having to constantly remove the cap when you want to charge the phone. The fact that it is just 7.3mm thick and comes with IP65 and IP58 certifications will appeal to many.

Display

The Sony Xperia M4 Aqua sports a 5-inch HD display. It is quite vibrant and thanks to the IPS panel the viewing angles are quite good. There is no Corning Gorilla Glass protection, but you get tempered glass in its place. The display has a propensity to attract smudges though, which becomes evident when the phone is in the sleep mode and that could be a let down for lot of potential buyers.

Chipset, RAM, Storage
The phone houses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 system on chip which has a 1.5GHz octa-core processor which is paired with 2GB of RAM. The phone comes with 16GB of storage on board and also has a provision to add in a microSD card slot. We got to use the phone for a brief time and in that time, there were no issues with the phone’s response, camera launching, app-switching and so on. But we will need to run benchmarks on a review device to give a proper verdict on the performance.

Connectivity, OS

The phone comes with a dual-SIM configuration. It has support for 4G LTE networks on one of these SIMs. Apart from this the phone supports Wi-fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.1, Wi-Fi Direct, DLNA and so on. It also supports GPS with A-GPS and GLONASS. The phone runs Android 5.0 Lollipop with the Xperia UI skin atop it. You will barely see any design language of Lollipop unless you get into the settings menu.

Camera, Battery
Apart from the fact that it is water-proof and dust-proof, the other major USP of the phone is its camera. You get a 13MP rear camera with Sony ExmorRS sensor and a 5MP front-facing camera. Sony has included some features seen on flagship Xperia handsets such as the Z2/Z3/Z3 Compact into the M4 Aqua’s camera software as well. So you get AR Effects, Style Portraits, AR style and so on. Sony claims that the low light capabilities of the M4 Aqua are better than competition, but we will have to test that for ourself.

There is a 2,400 mAh non-removable battery powering the Xperia M4 Aqua which Sony claims can run for two days on single charge on regular use. We will be testing this claim. Apart from this the phone also comes with a Stamina mode setting, which further improves the battery life. This mode worked well with the Xperia Z3 that we had tested last year, so we will see how well it works with the M4 Aqua as well.

Conclusion

The Sony Xperia M4 Aqua has a decent specification set and the waterproofing and dustproofing certifications are appealing. For an outdoors person, the M4 Aqua seems like a good phone and the Snapdragon 615 SoC paired with 2GB of RAM should be quite capable of handling many work and multimedia related functions. But the Rs 24,990 price point may be a hindrance for many, specially now when you have so many flagship-level devices available for much less. The segment of users who are purely looking at a waterproof/dustproof phone is quite niche and majority of the buyers will be looking for a good phone which also comes with the IP certifications. But at Rs 25k price point, there is no reason why a regular user may not select the OnePlus One, a Xiaomi Mi 4 or put in Rs 1,500 more and go for a Samsung Galaxy S5, which is water resistant as well. A price point closer to Rs 20,000 would’ve made the Xperia M4 Aqua quite competitive.

Microsoft's Siri rival Cortana is coming to Android, iOS

Microsoft has just announced that Cortana will be spreading her fingers to more pies by jumping to Android and iOS devices.

Currently, Microsoft's Halo-based virtual assistant is exclusive to Windows Phone -- this marks the first time any of the key virtual assistant programmes have adapted onto other another OS.

Dedicated apps are launching in the Google Play Store and App Store giving you the same abilities as Windows Phone including reminders and flight tracking.

A few features don't make the jump to the platform as the app can't tap into the OS as easily, so you'll lose hands-free activation and options to launch apps directly.

Hello Cortana
The Cortana Notebook feature, which remembers all your preferences and history, will now sync up across all your devices though so if you use both a Windows Phone and an Android it'll remember everything.

It'll be coming to Android at some point toward the end of June whilst those with iPhones are only being told it's launching later this year.

Microsoft also shared a Phone Companion Windows 10 app to help sync your iOS, Android and Windows Phone to your PC.

Microsoft partners with LG, Sony, other OEMs to sell Android tablets featuring Office, OneDrive, Skype

Microsoft announced today that it’s signed up 20 more hardware partners to sell Android tablets with its Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, OneDrive, and Skype apps included out-of-the-box.

The news follows Microsoft’s announcement in March that it had gotten Samsung, Dell, and several regional hardware makers to sell Android devices packed with those same Microsoft apps.

“Today I’m excited to announce that 20 additional global and local OEM partners, including LG, Sony, Haier, Positivo and Wortman, will make Microsoft productivity applications and services available on their Android tablets. These 31 partners will offer Android tablets pre-installed with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, OneDrive and Skype in the near future,” Nick Parker, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s original equipment manufacturer division, wrote in a blog post today. “They will be available on a new LG tablet, and Sony will include them on their Xperia Z4 tablet in the next 90 days.”

The announcement shows how committed Microsoft is to getting its apps preinstalled on mobile devices that aren’t running Windows. That’s been a clear theme for the past several months — consider, for example, the company’s push to bring free Office apps to iPad, iPhone, and Android tablets and phones.

The timing is interesting — it’s coming just a few days before Google’s I/O developer conference.

In addition to LG and Sony, here are the other new OEM partners in the Microsoft Android tablet deal:

• Axdia International GMBH – Germany
• Cube – China
• DL – Brazil
• General Procurement – United States
• Grupo Nucleo – Argentina
• Haier – China
• Inco – Mexico
• Ionik GBMH – Germany
• Iview – United States and Latam
• Multilaser – Brazil
• Noblex – Argentina
• Pacific (Vulcan) – Mexico
• Philco – Argentina
• Positivo – Brazil
• Prestigio – Cyprus
• Teclast – China
• TMAX Digital – North America
• Wortmann – Germany

In total, Microsoft has now partnered with 31 global and local OEMs (11 in March and 20 today) to preinstall its apps onto Android devices throughout this year. Only time will tell if Microsoft’s apps end up actually being used more because of these deals.

Internet.org helped 8 lakh Indian users online, says Facebook

Internet.org has helped over 800,000 Indians get online, says Facebook.The company shared numbers regarding Internet.org in India, where the app is currently supported in seven telecom circles.

Facebook’s numbers also show that 20 percent of Internet.org users were previously not active on mobile data and that their app has helped more new people come online.

Watch video (App users click here)

The company also says that Internet.org does not restrict or limit connectivity and that their platform ended up serving as a ramp to the more Internet usage. According to Facebook, the new internet users acquired by Internet.org, only 7 percent of data usage was Internet.org (including Free Facebook).

Get discount on Xiaomi Mi 4, Redmi 2 under exchange deal on Flipkart

Flipkart is holding a mega electronics sale, which started yesterday and will go on today. In addition to this Amazon India and Snapdeal had also offered some deals for customers on mobile phones which you can check out here.

For Xiaomi fans in India, who’ve not yet had a chance to buy these devices thanks to the flash sales, this is a good time to try their luck. We take a look at all the Xiaomioffers on Flipkart:

Mi 4i without registration

For starters, the Xiaomi Mi 4i is available without registration. As we noted in our review, this is a stunning mid-budget device, which has a great screen and camera. Read our full review here.

The Xiaomi Mi 4i is a 4G dual SIM phone and has a 2nd-gen Snapdragon 615 Processor. It has a 13 megapixel rear camera and 5 megapixel front camera and runs on Android L with MIUI6 . You can buy the phone for Rs 12,999.

There’s also an 8 GB version of the smartphone available for Rs 6999.

Up to Rs 3000 off on Redmi 2 

Redmi 2 is another popular budget device from Xiaomi which costs only Rs 6999. Flipkart is offering up to to Rs 3000 off on Redmi 2, if you exchange it with an older smartphone. Do note that a better model is likely to get you Rs 3000, although what the exchange list ensures that you will get a minimum of Rs 1000 off if you have brands likeLG, BlackBerry, Micromax and Samsung.

As we had noted in our review, the Redmi 2 is one of the best phones for Rs 6999. Specifications of the Redmi 2 include 4.7-inch 720p HD IPS fully laminated display, 64-bit 1.2 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 CPU, 1GB LPDDR3 RAM and 8GB ROM (32GB expandable).

It runs Android 4.4.4 KitKat with MIUI 6. Redmi has an 8MP BSI f/2.2 rear camera and a 2MP BSI front camera. It has a 2,200 mAh battery with Quick Charge technology with Dual 4G SIM card slots.

Mi 4 up to Rs 9000 off on exchange

The Xiaomi Mi 4 is the flagship device from the company that was launched in India last year and has a metal frame. It comes in 16GB and 64 GB versions and Flipkart is offering upto Rs 9000 off if you exchange an older smartphone for the Mi 4.

The 16 GB version costs Rs 17,999 while the 64 GB version costs Rs 21,999. Flipakrt is offering higher rates with better smartphones like iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus or Samsung Galaxy Note 4 or Note Edge which will get you Rs 9000 off on the Xiaomi Mi 4. Even with basic phones like Galaxy Star, etc users will get Rs 1000 off.

Mi 4 smartphone sports a 5-inch HD IPS display with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels at 441 ppi. It runs on a 2.5 GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 CPU with 3GB RAM. The 3G version of the device offers 16GB of inbuilt storage out of which around 12GB is available to users. The memory cannot be expanded further.

Redmi Note 4G

Customers should expect up to Rs 4000 off on the Redmi Note 4G if they exchange it with an older smartphone on Flipkart.

Redmi Note 4G has a 5.5-inch HD IPS display with Corning Gorilla Glass 3. It has a 1.6GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 MSM8928 processor with 2GB RAM, 8GB internal flash memory with external microSD slot that supports up to 64GB

This is Single SIM with 4G support (Dual band support on both TDD-2300 MHz & FDD-1800 MHz). It has a 13MP rear camera with ƒ/2.2 aperture that supports 1080p video recording, and a 5MP front camera and 3100 mAh lithium-polymer battery. Read more about Redmi Note 4G here.

Other Xiaomi offers on Flipkart include a free Airtel 4G ready SIM, a free Flip cover with Mi 4.