Xiaomi Phone hands-on redux: dual partition system explained (video)

Not some time past Xiaomi, a Beijing-based company with around 250 staff, shocked the industry with the announcement of its conveniently named Xiaomi Phone. We’re taking a look at a well-built device packing a 1.5GHz dual-core SoC, 1GB RAM and 4GB ROM, 4-inch LCD, GPS plus GLONASS , and a generous 1,900mAh battery. Set at a very competitive price point of around $310 for October, this has unquestionably made other local manufacturers — Meizu exceptionally — consider carefully about their current strategy.

But let’s ignore the competitors for now and concentrate on Xiaomi. Many Android enthusiasts might already recognize this small startup because the star behind the well-liked MIUI , an Android ROM that provides a limiteless range of user customization inclusive of the promise of serious performance. Alas, we only had a glimpse of this on the Xiaomi Phone launch. Worse yet, it turned out that as a result of some miscommunication, the prototype unit we handled with actually had an incredibly old firmware, which failed to do justice for the developers. Luckily, we were offered a second chance to take a better study a far more up-to-date device. Read on to see what we discovered.

We’ll save you the details for the video above, but it’s worth pointing out that the MIUI build for the Xiaomi Phone has a rather unique feature that no other phone currently support: a dual partition system. What this means is that you can have two MIUI builds simultaneously installed on the phone (and strictly MIUI only; also, major OS jumps like from 2.x to 3.x are not supported), while the two also share the same database for apps, contacts, calendar, etc. For instance, you can keep a stable firmware on one side while dipping your toes into a beta build on the other; and if something goes wrong, you can simply go back to the stable build. Also, you can still use the phone as usual while it performs an upgrade in the background — the new build is installed onto the other partition, and then the phone reboots from there without having to enter recovery mode.

We asked a Xiaomi engineer whether this dual partition feature can be implemented on other MIUI-compatible devices, but the answer was this is as much as the manufacturer, as Xiaomi itself isn’t able to tampering with this sort of low level structure. Perhaps someone from xda-developers may give this a go?

Our personal Xiaomi Phone must be arriving this week, so you should definitely keep an eye fixed out for our review soon. For now, enjoy our photo tour of Xiaomi’s Beijing headquarters.

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This post is tagged: Customization, miscommunication, partition system, prototype unit, what this means