The Mi 4i is only the second phone to launch with this new battery technology -- the first being Samsung's own Galaxy S6. Xiaomi also claims that it hasn't skimped on the components, using the best it could find and, it says, selling the phone at cost. To prove this point, Barra did a quick teardown of the Mi 4i, while explaining the thought process behind the phone's design. As his fingers nimbly disassembled the phone with practiced ease (he's been doing this all day), the Xiaomi exec was eager to explain just how much work had gone into making the Mi 4i.

"The challenge nocturne iphone case here of course is how we make as much space as we can for the battery, knowing that if we can't make a lot of horizontal and vertical space we would have to make it thicker," he said, "Making as much space for battery meant reducing the motherboard as much as we could -- it's the smallest and densest motherboard we've ever made."Barra also pointed that while the company could have saved even more space by combining both the speakers and the USB PCB board with the main board, he says this was purposely kept separate..

"One easy way to make things cheaper is to move the functionality up here for a single motherboard, but you'll end up with the USB at the top and the speakers at the back top of the device. It's obviously not good, as you'll want the sound to bounce off your hand when you're cupping your device."Barra's in-depth understanding of the phone's internals are reminiscent of Apple co-founder Steve Job's dedication to making the insides of Apple's products as beautiful as the outside. Xiaomi's homage to that thought process is evident.

One of the new features found on the Mi 4i, and one you'd not find on other devices, is Sunlight Display, Making the screen usable under the glare of outdoor light is clearly a key concern in India, The technology uses local tone mapping to determine which areas of the screen are darker, and then only light up those areas to make it viewable under bright light, In the indoor demos nocturne iphone case I see, the pictures actually look a lot better with Sunlight Display turned on, so why didn't Xiaomi just make the feature enhance all images without having to worry about the lighting conditions?..

"This is a very long debate we've had on this," Barra said. "Largely speaking, there's the engineering camp and the product camp. The product camp says, if there's a way to make images look better on the screen we should go for it. The engineering camp says that means you'd be looking at an image on your phone that's not accurate, because it's artificially made to look better. It's very important for this accuracy to be preserved."Barra, firmly in the product camp, argues that looking at images on the phone is a self-contained experience, but chose to settle with the engineering option, because Xiaomi didn't want to misrepresent the image.