At an event in New Delhi, Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi announced MIUI 7, the latest version of its operating system based on Android Lollipop. Hugo Barra, Xiaomi’s global VP, said that MIUI is now used by over 150 million users in 156 countries.
Barra didn’t actually announce a release date for the final version of MIUI 7 — that, we think, will show up in just a couple of months when Xiaomi launches its new flagship, the Mi 5 — but he did show off a number of new features in the new operating system.
Here are the highlights:
- MIUI 7 comes with 4 built-in themes: Rose, Pink Blush, Ocean Breeze and High Life. The Rose and the Pink blush themes are incorporate shades of pink and are inpsired by high-end luxury goods, according to Xiaomi’s Hugo Barra. The Ocean Breeze theme has blue pastles, while the High Life theme is the most elegant and sophisticated of the four with shades of brown and gold.Additionally, you can also download thousands of other themes from Xiaomi’s global theme store.
- To go with its colourful themes, Xiaomi will release limited colour editions of its Mi 4i smartphone in India on August 25.
- There is now a brand new version of a theme-designing tool called MUSE that’s available to theme desginers. It lets people easily build detailed, animated themes that customise everything from the icons to the lock screen. Xiaomi released a special Shah Rukh Khan-inspired theme called Badshah Rocks that lets you change SRK’s outfit right on the the lock screen.
- MIUI 7 has a new feature called Daily Lockscreen, which puts a brand new image on your lockscreen every single day.
- Thanks to major behind-the-scenes optimisations, Xiaomi claims that launch apps on MIUI 7 is 30% faster than launching them on MIUI 6.
- MIUI 7 gets about 10% better battery life compared to MIUI 6, said Barra.
- There’s a brand new font size called XXL font, which lets users bump up the size of fonts across the system and optimises the larger sizes to be usable in messaging apps. MIUI now supports a total of 5 font sizes. The new XXL size is also available for Hindi fonts.
- A brand new facial recognition feature identifies pictures of your children and puts them all in a single “Baby Album” tab in the MIUI 7 Gallery app. Additionally, MIUI 7 now has a Child Mode that lets parents whitelist specific apps that children can use anbd limit SMS.
- If you have a Mi Band, it will now automatically put your phone in the Do Not Disturb mode when it detects that you’ve fallen asleep.
- MIUI 7 now supports 10 Indian languaes, up from 6 that MIUI 6 supported. The new langauges are Marathi, Assamese, Gujarati and Punjabi.
- Thanks to some smart integration from browser-maker Opera, MIUI 7 supports systemwide data compression, which means that phones running MIUI 7 use considerably less data than other phones.
- Messaging is now smarter. MIUI 7 will put messages from real people up front and everything else — texts from banks, advertisements, One-Time Password Codes, and more — in a separate tab.
- You will now be able to set a 5-second video loop as your profile image, which will be displayed whenever you call another MIUI 7 user.
- MIUI 7 will be availble as a beta download from Monday, August 24, 2015. For the first time, you can install the beta on every Xiaomi phone available in India.