Comparison
Honor 7 Vs Xiaomi Mi 4i Smartphone Comparison

The mid-range smartphone market is a very crowded place in India and with competitiveness growing among the smartphone brands in the country, it would only result in having laden of options. Consumers have tons of choices to look out currently, the more choice means more confusion for which device to purchase. If you somehow ended up having a couple of options, the latest Honor 7 and Xiaomi Mi 4i is one of those contenders then our detailed comparison would make it easier for you as we are putting these devices together in a cage match.
Design
The design language has more importance than ever when it comes to a mid-range smartphone. The stress here is if the design isn’t intuitive and compact in size then there’s no point of owning the device. Both of the devices are sporting a unibody design, but one Honor 7 comes with metal build while the Mi 4i comes with a plastic body. It means both the devices have non-removable batteries.
I would say the placements of ports are fine on both the smartphones, moreover, it’s all similar. Except for the fact that the loudspeaker was placed on the back side on Xiaomi Mi 4i while the dual speakers are placed on the bottom edge on the Honor 7. We had addressed this in Mi 4i detailed review and saying it again, the loudspeaker placed on the rear side of the device isn’t a wise choice. As when you put the device on a desk, the sound gets muffled, this is a bad experience.
Display
The Full HD display is common among the mid-range smartphones these days, so you have to be sure that the display is good in real world problems. Like the viewing angles are great, sunlight legibility and moreover, there is a protection of glass to prevent the device from scratches and to shatter from small height falls.
Xiaomi Mi 4i is particularly more impressive regarding color reproduction and viewing angles because of the sunlight display technology it incorporates. You can learn about the technicals of it in our review. Now when we talk about the display of Honor 7, it is as impressive as any Full HD displays in the market. With LCD IPS technology, it offers good viewing angles and color balance, as well as the sunlight legibility.
On the protection part, only the Honor 7 stands up as the display is protected by the Corning Gorilla Glass 3, which is as strong as it gets for a mid-range device. But the Xiaomi Mi 4i has a One Glass Solution (OGS) setup, which doesn’t offer much protection for scratches, or a fact fall from small heights.
Software
The software experiences have changed a lot in times, as Android Stock UI itself has grown into something cleaner and resourceful, though, there is always a need for more intuitive experience. These two Chinese brands have done pretty well with their Android skins as they both offer interesting features that users would want.
While MIUI of Xiaomi has been ruling the ROM market in China and many regions in Asia, they still have a lot of catching up to do regarding smart gestures. Other than one-hand mode you can’t find many gestures on the MIUI. But the EMUI on Honor device is full of such kind of features; you can launch the camera app and various other apps using gesture letter on the screen. The incredible thing is some smart gesture operations can be launched when the screen is switched off.
Hardware & Performance
The Honor 7 is powered by a home-grown Kirin 935 Octa-core processor clocking highest at 2.2GHz while the Snapdragon 615 on the Xiaomi Mi 4i is also a 64-bit enabled chipset but clocks maximum at 1.7GHz. Moreover, the RAM on Honor 7 is 3GB while it’s 2GB on the Xiaomi Mi 4i.
The power is showcased when you play high-end games; the Honor device handles them pretty well with no lag at all while the Xiaomi device shows some frame drop. Of course, the animation and multitasking are pretty good on MIUI while the EMUI is not far when it comes to quickly loading the interface animations. In the end, it doesn’t matter how much benchmark scores the devices are getting, but what matters is the performance in the real world situations. I would say Honor 7 is a winner here because of the powerhouse it packs under that hood.
Full Specs Comparison : Honor 7 Vs Xiaomi Mi 4i
Camera
There might be a ton of difference in the mega-pixel counts of the cameras on both devices, but it’s only fair that we also compare the camera quality of these devices. The Honor 7 packs 20-megapixel sensor on the rear while Mi 4i has a 13-megapixel sensor on the rear, both of these sensors are made by Sony.
The Xiaomi Mi 4i camera is known for producing good color production, but there is a reason company recommends always to take captures with HDR ON. Because the some colors like green seemed little washed out when captured in normal mode. While the Sony IMX230 on Honor 7 offers some of the amazing natural captures, you can get from a smartphone camera.
Other capabilities that Honor 7 camera does better than Mi 4i are the low light and zoomed-in captures. With Super Night feature on Honor 7, you can get incredibly detailed captures even in the dark light. Whereas there is no such mode present on the Xiaomi Mi 4i that could help you taking better low light captures, although, you can increase the ISO and exposure in manual settings to take better camera results in low light. But the output would still lack the details as such we have shown in our Camera review of the Mi 4i because the captures come out grainy.
Battery
The battery capacity on the Xiaomi Mi 4i is slightly higher at 3120mAh while the Honor 7 sports a battery capacity of 3100mAh. We have used both of these devices as our daily driver and would happily recommend the later one. All because the battery management is quite efficient on the Honor 7. Whereas both the device can easily last over the day, but only the Honor device would give you around 5 hours of screen-on-time whereas Mi 4i offers around 3 hours.
Verdict
The conclusion of this comparison is that you should opt for Honor 7 if you have a budget of around 20K, because it checks almost everything on the list of a perfect mid-range smartphone. Whereas Xiaomi Mi 4i might have lost in many aspects when compared with Honor device, but for the price it comes with you couldn’t find a better product than this. It all comes down to one choice, whether you’re willing to spend 20K or your budget is around 10K. Because that will make your choice much easier.