Xiaomi introduces MIUI 7 OS: Here's a look at what's new

Xiaomi has finally pulled the wraps off the latest iteration of its mobile OS – MIUI 7. The beta update will start rolling out on Monday. Alongside, the company has also announced limited edition of its Mi4i in special colours – pink, yellow, sky and black colours – that will start selling from August 25.

Let’s quickly take a look at what’s new in the Xiaomi MIUI 7. The MIUI 7 is based on Android 5.1 Lollipop and comes with several improvements such as new themes and performance enhancements.  One of the highlight is the ability to record a short video loop that can replace your contact photo using the feature called Showtime. The new UI introduces several new themes that will show live scores, match scores, etc. directly from the lock screen. In fact, users can now unlock the screen using musical patterns. Basically, you can program a tune as your lockscreen password and you can only unlock the phone if you can play that tune. The Lock screen also incorporates games. For instance, Howzat is a full cricket game in the lock screen. “We’ve already made two cricket themes in India and they both did so well that we decided to do it again but step it up a notch,” says the company. It comes with several other themes such as Badshah rocks that lets you change Shah Rukh Khan’s outfit on the lockscreen and you unlock special characters when you find the right combinations of clothes. There’s Hugo-tastic!, a theme based on Hugo Barra. https://twitter.com/tech2eets/status/633950380821385216 Besides, it also comes with the weather theme. The Daily lockscreen, as the name suggests, will add a new image to the lockscreen daily. Xiaomi’s MIUI 7 comes with over 1500 themes and a web tool called Muse is also announced which is basically a theme creator tool. The new MIUI 7 promises to be faster and takes very less boot time, coupled with better performance. Xiaomi also claims that the new UI consumes less battery. It has cut down the app loading time and one will find an overall increase in system app response time by 30 percent. In terms of battery, one can expect restricted GPS and background data usage. It also reduces power usage of the cellular modem and offers 10 percent improvement in battery life. XXL Text feature allows larger fonts and also supports Hindi. https://twitter.com/tech2eets/status/633942483815129088 The baby Album feature is capable of identifying pictures of babies and sort them in a single folder. The aforementioned Daily Lockscreen can also take pictures from the Baby album. Next time your child gets his/her hands on your device, you can simply set Child mode that will whitelist apps and also limit SMS. Then there’s Auto DND that automatically activates DND as soon as the Mi Band detects you are sleeping.  You will also find features such as Mute notifications and Opera Max data Saver. The MIUI 7 also gets the Smart SMS filter that groups service messages under the notifications tab. A quick OTP comes with a Copy OPT button, a very handy feature, we must say. There is a data saver that compresses images and video and MIUI 7 will support 10 Indian languages. The beta rollout begins on Monday and the image below shows the supported devices.