A CRITIC might say Xiaomi borrowed too much from Apple for its latest Xiaomi 17 series launched Thursday at a Beijing event; a fan might argue the Chinese tech giant is trying to beat Apple at its own game. Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun repeatedly referenced Apple’s newest iPhones while walking the audience through the phones’ specs, highlighting areas where the 17 series wins on battery life, performance and photography. The Pro and Pro Max draw the most attention for their additional display on the back, occupying the area around the camera “plateau.” The secondary screen functions much like the cover displays on modern flip phones: it can serve as a viewfinder for selfies, show music playback controls, host interactive widgets and more. Xiaomi isn’t the first Android maker to add a rear display, but the company leans on interface refinements from flip?phone designs to make the feature more practical. There’s also an official Game Boy–inspired case with functional buttons that effectively turns the phone’s back into a portable console. Beyond the rear display, the two Pro models are similar in most respects apart from size and battery. The Pro has a 6.3?inch main display and weighs 192 g, while the Pro Max stretches to a 6.9?inch panel and weighs 231 g. Xiaomi emphasized that the Pro Max is thinner and lighter than Apple’s 17 Pro Max and showed a promotional clip to underline the toughness of its screen — an attention?grabbing demo that still feels like “don’t try this at home.” Performance is driven by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset. Battery capacities are superb: 6,300 mAh for the Pro and 7,500 mAh for the Pro Max, with support for 100W wired charging via the PPS standard and 50W wireless charging. The standard Xiaomi 17 shares the Pro’s 6.3?inch size and the same Snapdragon chipset, but lacks the secondary rear screen. Interestingly, the vanilla 17 has an even larger battery than the Pro — 7,000 mAh. Xiaomi underlined endurance with a continuous video playback demo comparing its 17 to an iPhone 17, even placing a 5,000 mAh MagSafe battery on the iPhone during the test to make the point. Photography is a clear focus: each phone features three 50?megapixel rear cameras. All share an f/1.67 main camera and an f/2.4 ultrawide; the telephoto implementations differ. Both phones offer a 5x zoom distance, but the Pro Max uses a larger sensor and a faster telephoto aperture (f/2.6 versus f/3.0 on the Pro), which should produce noticeably better low?light telephoto performance. All three models are available now in China: the Xiaomi 17 starts at 4,499 yuan (US$630), the Pro at 4,999 yuan and the Pro Max at 5,999 yuan. Xiaomi has not disclosed global release dates, but a European launch for some models is likely in spring — potentially timed to the Mobile World Congress in late February — when the company may also unveil a more powerful Xiaomi 17 Ultra. (SD-Agencies) | 