Exclusive: the Xiaomi Mi Mix 2S is real and is coming with Android Oreo and a 3400 mAh Battery

Xiaomi smartphones rarely make their way outside of China and India, and that’s a shame because of their great value. The Xiaomi Mi A1 is perhaps the best Android One device to date, and the newly announced Redmi Note 5 & Note 5 Pro are already contenders for the best mid-rangers on the market. Xiaomi also releases several flagship devices in its Mi series of devices, but the one brand that has caught the world’s attention is the Mi Mix series—the phones that started the bezel-less craze. The second generation Mi Mix 2 was announced late last year, and for the first time we now have confirmation that a long-rumored successor, the Xiaomi Mi Mix 2S, is indeed real.

For the past few weeks, we’ve seen rumors of such a device’s existence, mostly coming from various users on Chinese blogging website Weibo. Some Weibo users have even posted what may be possible renders of the device, though unfortunately it is difficult to verify the authenticity of such leaks. That’s why you haven’t seen us cover any rumors of this device so far as we don’t know how credible they are. The renders could be entirely fake, which happens all too often.

Supposed Render of the Xiaomi Mi Mix 2S. Source: Weibo.

At the very least, I can confirm that the purported Mi Mix 2S does in fact exist, and I can corroborate some (but not all) of the rumored specifications. This is possible thanks to firmware files obtained by XDA Senior Member duraaraa (@FunkyHuawei), the man behind the FunkyHuawei.club service, which allows users to update, unbrick, or rebrand Huawei and Honor phones for a fee. He has begun offering links to OTA update files for some Xiaomi devices, and has shared the Mi Mix 2S firmware files exclusively with XDA-Developers. In our own digging, we confirmed the authenticity of these files as well as the fact that they are from the unreleased Xiaomi Mi Mix 2S.

Thanks to these firmware files, we can confirm that the Mi Mix 2S, code-named “polaris,” will be powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 SoCand will have a 3,400 mAh battery. We can also confirm that the device is running Android 8.0 Oreo out of the box, which is great news as it means the device is Project Treble compatible. Finally, we can also confirm that the display will have an 18:9 aspect ratio with a FHD+(2160×1080) resolution, since that matches the “polaris” exclusive wallpaper we obtained.