The Mi Max is Xiaomi’s new 6.44-inch smartphone

With a 6.44-inch display, the Mi Max will make anyone's hands look small.

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Overnight, Xiaomi launched the Mi Max, a massive 6.44-inch smartphone, and a new version of its Android skin, MIUI 8.

We'll start with the phone. For RMB1499 ($230/£159) you get a crazy-big 6.44-inch, 1920×1080 (342ppi) display, a Snapdragon 650 SoC, 3GB of RAM, 32GB of storage (plus a MicroSD slot), a 16MP rear camera, a 5MP front camera, and a 4850 mAh battery. The Snapdragon 650 is a six-core SoC with the usual big.LITTLE architecture, which gives you a set of power-hungry "big" cores for the heavy lifting and a set of "little" cores for low power and idle operations. On the Snapdragon 650, you usually get two 1.8GHz Cortex-A72 cores for the heavy lifting and four 1.2GHz Cortex-A53 cores for the "little" cores, but Xiaomi doesn't have the CPU clock speeds listed.

Things get complicated with the more expensive models, which don't just offer more storage but also upgrade the SoC and RAM. For RMB1699 (~$260/£180) you can upgrade to the 64GB version, which changes the SoC to a Snapdragon 652. The 652 adds an extra two "big" cores over the Snapdragon 650 for an even, eight-core chip with four big cores and four little ones. For RMB1999 (~$307/£212) you can have the 128GB version, which keeps the Snapdragon 652 SoC and adds an extra GB of RAM for 4GB total.

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