MIUI 7 – A completely biased take from a MIUI fanboy

Five years ago, I was meddling with my Motorola Milestone. I rooted it and flashed a custom ROM. Back then, I was a noob to rooting and flashing and since then I have lost count of the number of devices I have rooted and flashed a custom ROM. My search for the best ROM for Android has been like a quest for the pot of gold at the end of the Rainbow. I never found the treasure, but I found a ROM that I fell in love with. Its the MIUI ROM. Ever since I first flashed a MIUI ROM on my mobile, any other ROM I find on XDA is just another ROM. I have also passed on this addiction to my Dad. He owns my HTC One X and I gave him many ROMs in it. He tried the AOSP Android, HTC Sense UI, CM and few others. But when I gave him the MIUI v5, he was content and said that it is very easy to use. An year ago, when Xiaomi announced it plans for India, you could imagine my excitement.

The reason I love the MIUI Rom is that it offers a whole set of features out of the box. There are many ROM and custom UI which offers a plethora of features but most of them are bloatwares. MIUI has a set of features that satisfies the needs of a smartphone user and offers the best utility value. These features are way ahead of Android’s core features. They have always been futuristic and a few have been adopted to the core android later. MIUI also offers a whole lot of customization. The MIUI is by far the most stable and dependable UI I have ever flashed on my devices. I have seen the evolution of MIUI since v4 and now the MIUI 7 is out.

I have read about people complaining about MIUI 7 for not being based on the latest version of Android. It is still running on KitKat. MIUI ROM has it own design language. It is not based on material design or the design specifications drafted by Android. It is a heavily forked version of Android. Also it has features that are not dependent on the base version. The permission manager is a feature that was first seen in an ancient version of MIUI and now it has been adopted by Android for its Marshmallow release. MIUI is advanced and has a fast development cycle unlike Android. MIUI can release version updates every week. If MIUI waits for a stable bug free Android version, it can never be as nimble as it is right now.

The MIUI 7 was launched a few weeks ago with much fanfare. As usual, Hugo Barra mesmerized the audience with his effervescent personality. More than 50% of his stage time was spent on talking about the all new System UI. He talked in length about how the colors were chosen and finally how they came up with the 5 system UI. Frankly, I think it is a bit of stereotyping gender. Girls don’t like just pink, boy don’t like blue alone and men are not into black always. I am a father of 2 kids. I have a son and a daughter. Do you know how difficult it is to choose dress for my kids? I walk into a store to pick up a dress for my daughter and all I see is pink. If I pick up a pink shirt for my son, my wife shoots down and says, its for son and not for daughter. Its not fair. There are a million colors out there and human mind love colors. Liking a color does not determine gender or the vice versa.

At the end of the day, I wasn’t sure about the “System UI”. When I finally installed MIUI 7 on my Mi4, I found out that these were nothing but a few additional themes added to the galore. I love MIUI themes. But honestly, those 5 system UI themes were not worth the stage time.

My buddy Clinton also got a bit of stage time. He was adorable as Claude Justin. The feature in which he was featured is called “Show time”. It plays a video from the caller, when the caller calls you. Its a fun feature but not a great utility value.

Talking of Utility value, MIUI 7 introduces visual IVR. With the visual IVR, you don’t have to listen carefully to the automated voice menu in customer care calls. The menu will be presented as visual list to you and you can choose from the screen. Now that is what we are talking about. Also the MIUI 7 now supports 10 Indian languages.

My 80 year old grandfather uses a Redmi 1s and I chose it for him, just for the Lite mode. In addition to the lite mode, there is XXL font size newly introduced in MIUI 7. Probably he can use the regular mode with the XXL font enabled. Will have to try, but anything with my grandpa is a touchy experiment. I feel that having big font makes sense. With the condensing pixel density with every mobile, fonts are becoming thinner. But if large fonts are displayed elegantly, large screen display sizes makes sense for most of us. But again its a personal preference. I have a friend who likes to have tiny font and I need a microscope to use his mobile.

MIUI 7 has a couple of features for parents like me. My son is almost 4 and he can unlock any smartphone on earth and find games to play. The MIUI has a new Child mode. With the child mode, I can decide the apps that my son has access to. Also I click tonnes of pictures of my new born daughter. Organizing the albums is a huge mess for me. The Baby Album feature comes to the rescue. It recognizes the baby and automatically organizes the photos into albums.

There are a few other features like the Auto DND, but the core value proposition which I see in the MIUI 7 is is improvement in performance. With the MIUI 7, Xiaomi claims that the system is 30% faster and the battery lasts 10% more. I have used the MI4 with MIUI 7 in it for a week and I don’t see any significant change in battery life, but the performance has definitely improved. The UI is much faster and responsive.

On the whole, MIUI 7 must have actually been MIUI 6.x. It qualifies to be a minor upgrade and should not have gotten a major release. In other words, it is a marginal improvement over the MIUI 6 with some added features and nothing more. These features are not ground breaking, however interesting it may be. MIUI brings in a lot of features to the core OS out of the box and MIUI 7 is trying really hard to get creative and innovative to add these features. I understand that the market is getting saturated, but MIUI has to think out of the box. It is good to keep a tap on the community, but sometimes the core RnD must also come up with innovations to address the future. Users always don’t know what they want, until they see it. Being a hardcore fanboy, I am loving the flat UI and the iconography in MIUI 7 and I will definitely enjoy using it with my MI4. But then, I am already enjoying my MI devices, MIUI 7 or not. It does not make a big difference to me. I <3 MI.

Also check out my buddy Amarendra’s take on MIUI 7.

Disclaimer: Photos are screen-grabs from the event’s youtube recording.