Xiaomi Mi 6 Pro: A phone never released

The Xiaomi Mi 6 is the brand's last non-small flasgship to debut with coffee, and its small size and traditional looks mean it's still loved by many. The Mi 6 had a little-big brother called the Mi Note 3. The reason it's a strange term is because, although it was bigger in size, but, while the Mi 6 had the then-peak Qualcomm, Snapdragon 835, the Mi Note 3 had an upper-mid-range Snapdragon 660.

The predecessor model had a Plus version, the successor models had Pro versions, but the Mi 6 had neither. Or there was, but it was left on the drawing board.

Recently, a Chinese blogger shared some pictures of the never-released Mi 6 Pro. So the pictures show a prototype.

1 a 4

The device would have been codenamed Achilles and would have been released around February 2017. The processor inside is the now-discontinued Snapdragon 660, the operating system is MIUI 8, based on Android 7.1.1. The display is a curved 5.5-inch Samsung AMOLED panel. The fingerprint scanner is located on the front, the back is occupied by 2 cameras. The battery is supposed to be 4000 mAh with QC3 support.

So, what is it and why hasn't it been published?

It's the love child of the Mi Note 2 and Mi 6. The front clearly resembles the Mi Note 2, while the back clearly resembles the Mi 6, with the exception that the camera layout is vertical instead of horizontal. It's hard to say why it wasn't released. My guess is that the Mi Note 2's curved display didn't appeal to users back in 2017, which is why Xiaomi stuck with the traditional straight display until 2019, when it tried the concept again with the Mi Note 10. By then, the design seems to have worked, as several Mi 10 series have been released with curved displays.