Xiaomi is less known to many smartphone buyers in the west, but the opposite is true when it comes to Asia, especially China and India. These regions have Xiaomi handsets all over, with the latest flagship addition being the Xiaomi Mi5.
The Xiaomi Mi5 was announced and released during the MWC 2016 event in Barcelona, marking the Chinese company’s first appearance at this major tech event. With the release of the Mi5, the company started gaining some recognition across the smartphone world thanks to the great design, hardware specs, features as well as affordable price of the handset, especially when compared to other similar flagships with the same hardware specs and features.
As far as software is concerned, the Xiaomi Mi5 came preinstalled with Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow. This has also been the case for quite a number of handsets that the company has unveiled this year, but the company has also been updating its older models with the new OS. As for now, you’ll find Android Marshmallow on Xiaomi Mi5, Xiaomi Mi4, Xiaomi Mi Max and a bunch of other Xiaomi handsets. Interestingly, there are reports that the company will be rolling out the Marshmallow update to a huge number of its handsets, be it low-end or high-end, starting this August.
To add to this, a new report has also come in with even more ambitious speculations suggesting that Android 7.0 Nougat will soon be hitting more than a dozen Xiaomi smartphones. In addition to the Xiaomi Mi5, the report claims that the likes of Xiaomi Redmi Note 3, Redmi 3/3s/3A, Redmi 2 Prime, Xiaomi Mi 4s/4c/4i, Xiaomi Mi Max, Mi Note Pro as well as the Mi Note will also be receiving the new Android 7.0 Nougat update.
This might be possible, especially when you consider that most of these handsets are less than two years old in the market, which is seen as the typical life cycle followed by many Android OEMs when it comes to rolling out major software updates. But a quick look at Xiaomi’s pace of rolling out the Marshmallow software update should tell you that these handsets might see the new Android Nougat in 2017, but the story is not the same for the likes of Google’s Nexus 6P and Nexus 5X. These, alongside other compatible Nexus devices, will be updated as soon as Google avails the public version of the OS.
As for Xiaomi Mi5 and its counterparts, the fact that the company must, first of all, add some of its own tweaks to the OS means that the devices will have to wait a little longer, something that brings us back to a 2017 release.
That would be nice, the mi5 just dropped to $309 at Geekbuyng.