Xiaomi India will be conducting another sale of the Mi TV 4A and the Mi TV 4 today on its official website and Flipkart. The Mi TV 4 was launched back in February and is targeted at a different audience when compared to the Mi TV 4A series. The Mi TV 4A series is a better fit for most Indian households as they are much cheaper and also come in more accessible sizes.
Xiaomi recently conducted the Mi Fan Festival where the company offered all three TVs along with its latest smartphones on sale for two consecutive days. The sale also encompassed accessories and older Xiaomi products.
The Xiaomi TVs come with Patchwall interface. Xiaomi claims that the Patchwall interface on the Mi TV series offers around 5 lakh hours of content with around 80 per cent of it being available for free. The company has tied up with content providers like Hungama, Sony Liv, Voot, TVF and many more.
The Mi TV 4A comes in two sizes; a 32-inch HD Ready panel and a 43-inch Full HD panel. The Mi TV 4, which is the flagship TV for Xiaomi in India, comes with a 55-inch 4K panel. All three models are competitively priced when compared to other brands with similar specifications.
With Xiaomi's new line-up, one can side-load android applications. However, the operations won't remain bugfree unless there is a dedicated application. Xiaomi has promised that it is working with content providers for offer more options.
Mi TV 4A series is powered by an Amlogic 64-bit quad core chipset coupled with 1GB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage. The budget line-up comes with three HDMI ports, two USB ports, Ethernet port, WiFi and a headphone jack. The bigger 43-inch variant comes with an additional USB port and an S/PDIF port.
Xiaomi has been facing a lot of flak from consumers due to the shortage of stock as well as the entire flash sale model. To deal with it, they have arranged a two-days-a-week sale. The Mi TV 4 is priced aggresively with competition pricing a similar offering at nearly double the amount. However, the Mi TV 4A series has a lot of competition from brands like TCL, Sanyo and VU that offer similarly speced TV at low-prices.
VU has managed to take the lime-light among growing competition in the SmartTV segment. The India-based company has launched three new Android TVs to compete with Xiaomi's entry in the segment.
VU has launched Android TV in a 43-inch size, 49-inch size and 55-inch panel. All three displays come with 4K resolution and are priced at Rs 36,999 for the 43-inch version, Rs 46,999 for the 49-inch version and Rs 55,999 for the 55-inch variant. The TVs will come with Android Nougat 7.0 out of the box.
Another weak point for Xiaomi which is an advantage to Vu's Android TV series is the availability of applications. The interface comes with stock Android for TV which also comes with comes with all popular video streaming applications like Netflix and YouTube.