After being on sale in China, France, Spain and Italy, the UK is finally getting the Xiaomi Mi 9. Here’s why we want one so badly.
The Mi 9 (reviewed) has been something of an infuriating phone launch, having gone on sale in France, Spain and Italy at the end of February following a global launch at MWC. In the UK, the phone will finally arrive tomorrow on 30 April.
As we’ll outline below the Mi 9 is an incredible phone for the money (at MWC 2019 that we gave it one of our ‘Best in Show’ awards). From GearBest the global variant of Mi 9 is available from £389 (click here to buy), and is £499 in the UK. In Europe it costs from €449.
This follows the Mi 8 being discounted to £399 at the official Mi UK store.
The official UK release date for the Mi 9 is 30 April and will be available from Mi.com, Ebuyer and the Mi Store in Westfield White City. The starting price of £499 gets you 64GB of storage and the 128GB model will be £549.
You’ll also be able to get it from Vodafone on various contracts starting at £38 per month. Xiaomi promises other sales channels in the coming weeks.
The Mi 9 comes with 6GB of RAM and 64- or 128GB of storage, and is available in three colours — Piano Black, and gorgeous iridescent (Xiaomi calls it ‘holographic’) Ocean Blue or Lavender Violet.
In China there is also the Mi 9 Explorer and Mi 9 SE, neither of which got a mention during the Global launch event, leading us to think we may once again see these special editions replaced with Pro and Lite versions in the UK and Europe.
However, new evidence suggests the Mi 9 SE at least could go global after it appeared on Xiaomi’s global compliance page. It was also spotted running the Global edition of MIUI 10 at MWC.
We’ve detailed the Mi 9 Explorer and Mi 9 SE below anyhow, since you can still import these from China. After the launch we have also learned that Xiaomi will soon be announcing an additional 8GB RAM, 256GB storage version of the Explorer, which will be a bit cheaper than the 12GB RAM Mi 9 Explorer announced in February.
Also see: Mi 9 vs Mi 8
The standard Mi 9, which starts at €449, has a 6.39in Samsung AMOLED screen with a waterdrop notch housing a 20Mp selfie camera. The display covers 90.7% of the front surface of the phone, with a reduced chin (now just 4.6mm) and tall 19:9 aspect ratio.
