If there’s one thing to know about Xiaomi, it’s that they love releasing regional variants of the same models, sometimes under different names. We saw the company launch the Xiaomi Mi 9 in Europe just the other day at Mobile World Congress. Before MWC, though, they announced the Xiaomi Mi 9 SE, a cheaper model of the Mi 9 with a 5.97-inch AMOLED screen, 6GB of RAM, 3,070mAh battery, and the Qualcomm Snapdragon 712 system-on-chip. Since the Xiaomi Mi 8 SE never saw a release outside of China, we assumed that would also be the case for the Mi 9 SE. However, there’s some evidence that Xiaomi might release the product outside of China.
At MWC, Xiaomi had the newly announced Mi 9 and Mi 9 SE on the floor. GizChina got their hands on a Mi 9 SE at the booth, where they noticed something interesting. The unit that these guys examined was running MIUI 10.2 Global Stable. If that doesn’t raise any questions, then allow me to refresh your memory. Xiaomi maintains two versions of MIUI, one for global markets and one for China. The Global software is running on all Xiaomi devices launched outside of China. It comes with way more localization options, pre-installed Google Play Services, and other extra features more suited to Western markets. The discovery of a Xiaomi Mi 9 SE device running MIUI 10 might indicate that the company will launch it globally.
Image via: GizChina
That’s not all, though. We’ve had another clue about this happening for some time now. XDA Recognized Developer yshalsager, the developer behind XiaomiFirmwareUpdater, discovered the existence of a “grus_global” branch of MIUI. “Grus” is the codename of Xiaomi Mi 9 SE, and the “global” suffix always refers to the MIUI Global ROM. Thus, it’s natural to assume the company is working on bringing MIUI 10 Global to the device, which means that Xiaomi may bring this device outside of China. The smartphone’s price varies from about 1999 to 2299 Yuan (~262 to 302 Euros) in China, and so we expect that any European launch won’t differ too significantly from that price range. That might give us a clue of an approximate European price of Mi 9 SE if it ever launches globally.
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