Xiaomi has been working on a new version of MIUI for the past year. Today the company has officially rolled out MIUI 9 along with the Mi 5X. The updated software version will be arriving on RedMi and Mi smartphones in several stages, the first devices to see the upgrade will be Redmi Note 4 and Redmi Note 4X.
Xiaomi promised to introduce a variety of new features and change the MIUI looks a little bit. A few days before the public release we already knew that MIUI 9 would have a split-screen mode, three themes, and a different lock screen design. The juiciest details were about to be unveiled at the press conference.
Faster application launch is the improvement that should be addressed first. Due to a technology called a dynamic resource allocation MIUI 9 is able to analyze all the apps running at the moment and spread the load among all the cores more accurately in order to keep the system smooth.
For the sake of high-speed performance, smartphone data protection and ease of use in general, MIUI 9 has put on a few other interesting features:
Then there is a Smart Assistant, as a matter of fact — an enhanced search algorithm that enables you to find any information or file in the smartphone. If everything will actually work the way Xiaomi describes it, then you will be able to find, say, a particular image on your device, by telling the search what is shown in the image. That is pretty amazing!
The one exclusive feature in MIUI 9 is the Smart App Launcher. What it does is it analyzes what kind of information is being displayed on the screen and suggests to launch the thematically related application. For example, you are chatting with a friend about the upcoming trip. MIUI 9 will recognize the topic, apparently based on the nouns and verbs you use, and will offer to check Google Maps or some hotel booking app. Hot! Nailed it! Never seen such a feature before. The only thing is how similar it feels to an annoying popup ad because we would not want the app recommendations to push every other second. Anyways, our fingers itch to try that out.
The presentation left a good aftertaste. The center stage was taken by Mi 5X, the only smartphone for now packing MIUI 9. You can read about its characteristics here.
