Xiaomi’s new phone takes a ton of inspiration from Apple, as usual

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  Clone the iPhone? Xiaomi? Never! [credit: Xiaomi ]

It's still only 2022, but that's not stopping Android manufacturers from launching their big flagship phones that will sell for the majority of next year. After Vivo's launch last month, the new OEM to launch a phone with Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC is Xiaomi, simply named Xiaomi 13 and Xiaomi 13 Pro. These two models represent big (6.73-inch) and small (6.36-inch) phones with different designs.

The smaller phone is more interesting because—hey look, it's an iPhone! Xiaomi is fond of copying Apple, and with the flat-sided perimeter band and square camera block, it's hard to see the Xiaomi 13 as anything other than an iPhone. It looks much better than the curved-sided Xiaomi 13 Pro, but that's just because the iPhone's flat sides also look good. (I remain shocked that no Android OEM has copied the dynamic island yet.) The bigger "Pro" model is more of a generic Samsung-style design with curved screen edges and a beveled ring around the phone. The one Pro-model design flourish is swapping out the glass back panel for ceramic.

Both phones get the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC. This is a 4 nm chip with an ARM Cortex X3, two Cortex A715 CPUs, two Cortex A710 CPUs, and three Cortex A510 CPUs. Like we talked about during the chip's launch, this mix of four different core designs is a weird, non-standard layout designed to extend 32-bit support for another year. ARM wants to kill 32-bit, but Qualcomm and Android aren't ready yet.

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