A few years back Xiaomi was very popular among Indian consumers for their great budget smartphone offerings. Since then, they have released products in so many other product segments and today they enter a new one, the laptop market. Xiaomi has finally taken off the wraps of its first ever laptop for the Indian market, the Xiaomi Mi Notebook and here we have our first impressions of its premium offering, the Xiaomi Mi Notebook 14 Horizon Edition.
Xiaomi has indeed put a lot of thought into the design and materials of the laptop. It is very clean and minimal looking, with nearly no branding visible. In fact, the only branding is the small “Mi” logo that’s visible on the bottom bezel of the display. Xiaomi has built the laptop out of the A5052 alloy, which is an aluminium and magnesium alloy. This makes the laptop quite light, 1.35Kg to be exact but still is very firm and rigid.
The laptop can be opened with just one hand, which is extremely satisfying, and here we find the next highlight feature of this laptop, its screen. It has a 14-inch 16:9 1080p anti-glare display and bordering it is thin bezels on the top, left and right edge. According to Xiaomi, the bezels measure at 3mm and it definitely looks really nice and modern.
What is interesting is that when Xiaomi made the bezels thin, they had to ditch the webcam.
However, they include an external USB HD webcam in the box, so that’s good.
The keyboard has no obvious faults in the layout and with 1.3mm key travel, the typing experience was not bad at all, but it is not backlit. The trackpad however, did not give me confidence when using it. The clicking mechanism was not up to the mark and trackpad material did not feel great either. We will test this out in more detail in our full review.
The specs of this laptop looks very promising. Our model is specced with an Intel Core i7 10510U CPU, 8GB of RAM and a 512GB M.2 NVMe SSD. The Core i7 10510U is part of Intel’s 10th Gen Comet Lake CPU, which can boost up to 4.9GHz. We will definitely be testing out this CPU with benchmarks in our full review. Xiaomi has also included a dedicated GPU, which is NVIDIA’s new GeForce MX350. This GPU is not powerful for high-end gaming by any means, but should enable light gaming and a give boost in GPU accelerated tasks.
There is a decent selection of ports for the Mi Notebook 14 Horizon Edition. A total of 3 USB Type A ports, of which 2 are USB 3.1 while the other is USB 2.0. Along with this, there is a USB Type C port which supports 1C charging, a full size HDMI and a 3.5mm combo headphone jack.
Windows 10 is preinstalled and Xiaomi promises there will be barely any bloatware in the device when setting it up. The only two extra applications present on the laptop were Mi Smart Share and Mi Blaze unlock. Both applications can be uninstalled if the user wishes.
The Mi Notebook 14 Horizon edition has great specs on paper and it looks like they have made good choices for its design and material choices. Reviewing this laptop is going to be interesting, considering its price tag of Rs. 59990, and also because this is Xiaomi’s entry into a new market space. It will be available from Amazon.in, Mi.com, Mi Home stores and Mi Studio from June 17th. Stay tuned to FoneArena for in-depth review.