MIUI 7 for Malaysia review (with the Xiaomi Redmi 2)

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MIUI 7 has arrived!

The MIUI 7 Global Stable Build has finally arrived in Malaysia, and today I’ll be reviewing the changes with the Xiaomi Redmi 2. The MIUI 7 is based on Android Lollipop patch so expect some nice improvement from it, here-we-go. 

Note - It's been said that the over-the-air (OTA) download is not 100% ready yet, so for now head over to this site to download the MIUI 7 manually. 

Yours By Design

Xiaomi’s latest patch theme, “Yours By Design”, is literally what it means. With the latest patch you can customize your device to its full potential with the features given inside. There are five new themes which are default, high life, rose, pink blush and ocean breeze. Your Xiaomi phone will automatically be set to default (obviously), if you choose other themes you will notice each app icon design will be changed to sync with the theme accordingly. 

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(left to right) High Life, Ocean Breeze and Pink Flush

If you’re not saitsfied with that, you can try out the Muse, this is a tool for you to design your very own MIUI theme. Inside the tool, MIUI 7 provides you over a “berzillion” themes, and Muse can allow you to create themes to your heart’s content that can be used for your lockscreen (HOW COOL IS THAT?!) with notification icons, weather widgets and even games. Imagine the possibilities!

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^ Designers, this will be your new favourite toy ^

Child Mode and Baby Album..?

This seems the least interesting among the upgrades (because I'm not married yet), but it should be useful for parents who are using Xiaomi. Child Mode is a great tool for parents to restrict their children from messing up their phones too much. Kids are pretty smart when you’re not looking as they will learn by themselves on where-to and how-to, but with Child Mode you can now stop their innocent online purchases (especially from those “free” games that allows you to buy in-game items), email and messages limited access and app control through your setting menu.

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Nice

Aside from that, there’s also a new photo album called Baby Album. The Baby Album is pretty neat because the system inside does fantastic facial recognition of your baby (and even pets), hand picking your baby’s pictures without needing to dig through the many adorable pictures that you (the parent) have taken. A really convenient tool there.

The Highlight 

I think it’s safe to say that this is every Xiaomi user’s favourite part of MIUI 7. Once upgraded, improved speed and smoothness are noticeable. According to Xiaomi’s website, the system has become more responsive by 30% (see video comparison with MIUI 6 below) and a better battery life by 10%. 10% may not seem like much, but after upgrading the device it can now last 3 hours longer than usual before a charge is needed. 

You really have to give credit for Xiaomi because they have really put a lot of effort for that, as you may know your phone battery uses a lot of energy especially on GPS, background apps, WiFi scanning, network data and  even when navigation is on standby. 

To tackle the problem, Xiaomi worked together with Opera Max to optimize your phone’s battery usage. They created a system wide data compression technology that automatically saves power and data to any app (around 40-50%), this includes Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Line and many other popular apps. 

Other minor features 

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The XXL text enlargement

The XXL feature by MIUI 7 is alright, it’s like a zoom in-ish tool for people who have a hard time reading the text on their screens. On the other hand, the toggle menu has a small change too as it has a better highlight now in a circle form.

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Left - MIUI 6 toggle menu highlight, Right - MIUI 7's toggle menu highlight

Other Cool Things That Are Missing

Apparently there’s this thing called Showtime but this is only available in India. What Showtime does is to record a 5 second video to insert it in a designated caller ID. Hopefully this feature will be available in Malaysia because it looks really fun to play with, especially if you have crazy friends.

The Daily Lockscreen is pretty sweet too. The Daily Lockscreen will change the images on your lockscreen (to your setting) so you won’t get bored seeing the same thing everyday. This can be connected to any of your albums too, for example; if you select the Baby Album to be your Daily Lockscreen, then your lockscreen will display all or selected the baby pictures on it. However, only India has it for now.

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The Daily Lockscreen

Lastly, we don't have the Smart SMS Grouping and Smart One-Time Password (OTP) feature too (yes, India feature only again lol). I don't really fancy these though since we can do those already with other 3rd party apps, but that's just me.

Conclusion

Overall, I think Xiaomi has done a great job on this new patch and it’s worth an upgrade mainly because of the 30% faster response and 10% better battery life. The theme "Your By Design" is good strategy too because Xiaomi really want your phone to have style and its own personality. Have you updated yours yet? How do you like your MIUI 7 upgrade? Share this news to your friends and family who are using Xiaomi to know this good upgrade!

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