Xiaomi presented several products yesterday, and among them stood out its new high-end smartphones, the compact Xiaomi 12 and the Xiaomi 12 Pro. However, there was a common thread, and that was not the role of these mobiles, but that of your MIUI customization layer, which is more mature than ever thanks to MIUI 13 but which is also increasingly ambitious.
This particular layer of Android is now more interesting than ever, especially since it is the one that interconnects a catalog that continues to grow without stopping. Attentive, because it arrives MIUI Home, the answer to home automation ecosystems like Apple or Google.
Hello MIUI Home
The image that heads this topic makes clear the ambition of Xiaomi, which with MIUI wants interlink all your devices so that they work more fluidly and together than ever.
This was demonstrated with part of a presentation in which it was demonstrated how your smart screens Redmi 8, Redmi Pro 8 (pictured) and Xiaoai Pro 8 served as control centers of that (almost) endless catalog of home automation products.
Those smart displays —competitors to the Nest Mini Hub or the Amazon Echo Show— were the control center of MIUI Home, the new platform that interconnects devices with or without a screen and it makes everyone work together.
MIUI becomes more ambitious and now wants to be the link between all Xiaomi devices, especially those with a screen.
MIUI Home consists of a hardware part in which many of Xiaomi’s products are integrated – televisions, tablets, mobiles, smart screens and speakers, home automation solutions – and a software part in which MIUI customization layer is the common interface.
Xiaomi’s smart displays thus become an integral part of its home automation ecosystem.
It is based on Android, of course, but it offers its own solution and an ecosystem that competes with those of Google or Apple, and it also does it with interesting news in the hardware and software field.
Xiaomi launched for example PaiPai, a kind of Chromecast for laptops that allows us to send the screen of our laptop to a 4K television wirelessly and that has a price of 499 yuan (69 euros to change).
The new MIUI 13 Pad is the version of MIUI adapted to tablets and with improvements in keyboard and pen support, in multitasking and in that joint work between mobile and tablet.
This new member of the Xiaomi family of devices was joined by an interesting improvement at the software level: the ‘MIUI Wonder Center’ (or ‘Magic Center’, we will see its final name) of which our colleagues from Xataka Smart Home they were talking a few days ago.
The event showed how these Xiaomi smart screens are capable of serving as control centers for topics such as content, lighting, security or the setting of our home.
This tool, part of MIUI 13, is responsible for facilitating the transmission and sending of files between some devices and others —AirDrop type in macOS / iOS / iPadOS—, but it also offers a very interesting interface to send screens from one place to another and to be able to see what you are watching on your mobile through television or tablet, and vice versa.
With the ‘Magic Center’ It is possible to add labels to each device with a screen, and then make audio or video casting from one to another simply by dragging a device to any of the screens detected in the Xiaomi ecosystem.
It is in fact similar to what was already seen in Huawei with its Super Device feature for HarmonyOS: a way to manage your products from one place, being able to do ‘casting’ of those screens or of the music of each other.
They are, of course, small but interesting options in an ecosystem that Xiaomi has been building for some time with endless products in all kinds of segments. Now it’s time to connect them, and MIUI Home wants to be the common thread of that platform That competes from you to you with the proposals of Apple or Google. We’ll see if they get it.
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