Xiaomi is now just hours away from the official announcement event on September 27 for a new Civi series of smartphones. We’ve already seen a few renderings and teasers for at least one device from the new family, and quite a few specs have been rumored.
Now, Xiaomi has taken to Weibo once again with additional teasers that provide a little extra info and confirm some of the things we already knew. Let’s start with hardware first – the Snapdragon 778G chipset is now officially confirmed, and it’s the 4,500 mAh battery capacity that the posters apparently claim will offer “the longest battery life on a Xiaomi phone this year”. Then again, our translation may not be perfect.
Xiaomi Civi banner
The same goes for the second official banner, which appears to suggest three major software updates and three years of support for the Xiaomi Civi. Rounding off the officially confirmed information, we already knew some basic dimensions for the first Civi- it will be 71.5 mm wide, 6.98 mm thin and weighs 166 grams. Now we know that the middle presumably metal frame apparently becomes extremely thin, only 1.5 mm, and the chin under the screen measures only 2.25 mm. Again, we hope our rough translations are correct here.
Xiaomi Civi banner
Last but not least, Xiaomi also officially shared a rather long and comprehensive infographic that explained how the “beautification” filtering of its face will work on the Civi. This term does not do it justice, as far as we managed to understand, Xiaomi used machine learning to train a sophisticated neural network to “re-image” or rebuild facial features at a pixel level. The goal is to preserve the actual skin texture, instead of just ruining it.
Xiaomi Civi banner
Apparently, the whole system actually has more than one moving part. The main model was trained using the professional retouching work, performed by photographers on photos of tens of thousands of women from different angles. The goal is for the neural network to try to mimic the actual retouching process, rather than a more conventional approach to “plastering” over imperfections in isolation. During training, the first neural network was also kept in check by another network, specially trained to distinguish between the original images and the computer-generated images, during training.
Xiaomi Civi banner
It sounds like the feature will clearly be specifically targeted at more feminine facial features, which also makes us wonder how specifically targeted the neural network is in its current state. We just have to ultimately test for ourselves how well it handles Caucasian features or darker skin tones. Still quite interesting stuff.
By the way, we also already know that the Xiaomi Civi will have a 32MP selfie camera with autofocus. The attention to selfies and beautification does not come as a surprise.
Xiaomi Civi banner
To round things off, some other unofficially confirmed but expected specs on the Civi include a 6.55 “FullHD + 120Hz display, 55W charging, 256GB of storage and MIUI 12.5.1. Also Dolby Atmos enhancement, probably on top of a set of stereo speakers .
Source 1 (in Chinese) | Source 2 (in Chinese) | Source 3 (in Chinese) | Via
