I have been a fan of MIUI ROMs since its early days. Mainly because of the colors, UI and functionality it brought to a device, which weren't available in most ROMs, back in 2010. Some of my personal favorites were the music player with lyrics , themes and gesture controls. With each generation of MIUI, their developers have come up with lots of new features to help users and soon they will be rolling out the brand new MIUI 8.
Contents1. Notification drawer2. Scrolling screenshot3. Clone apps4. Second space5. Floating Mi button (touch assistant)6. Calculator7. Lockscreen wallpaper carousel8. Better Gallery Sharing and Redesigned Photo Editor Conclusion
The brand new MIUI 8 is more colorful and is based on the design of how a kaleidoscope changes color when you rotate it. But aside from all the colors and animations, there are some solid changes to help the user in their day-to-day life. So let's take a look at the top 8 features of MIUI 8.
The first change you will see in MIUI 8 is the drop-down notification drawer. The default notification drawer no longer consists of two pages where one page takes up the notification and the next page houses the command buttons. You get a quick search bar and temperature information in the drawer and you can scroll through control buttons just like you do in Samsung TouchWiz phones.
Personally, I like this change and think it makes things less cluttered. However, if you need to switch back to the two-page notification display, you can do so from the settings menu. Open Notification and Status Bar from android settings and once there change the option of Layout to Separate (from Combined ). Once done, you will get the old notification style back. But whatever you choose, let me know which one you liked the most, via the comments section.
Even though it's not an exclusive feature like they claim, it's still one of my favorites. Unlike previous times where you received a notification in the drawer after taking a screenshot to open or share it, this time you will get a small thumbnail on the top left where you can preview the screenshot . However, a new feature here is that you can choose to scroll further and take a scrolling screenshot of an entire page.
After taking the screenshot, you can also crop the image to remove unnecessary information. While cropping, you will see a magnified preview in the background for precise editing. Once you have the screenshot you want, you can share it from the gallery.
With MIUI 8, one can run two parallel instances of the same app with a different set of private data. Simply put, you will be able to clone apps like WhatsApp and Facebook and set up two accounts on the same device. Under Android settings, you will find the option of Clone Apps , where you can just toggle the switch next to any app to make its clone.
You can then work on both applications in parallel. The feature will only be available for devices that get the MIUI update on Android Lollipop and above. However, for other Androids, there are a few apps on play store using which they can get similar functionality.
If cloning apps wasn't enough, you also have the option of creating an entirely different space on MIUI with a different home screen, apps, and even files and photos. You can set different unlock patterns for these spaces and based on that it will take you to the respective space. The feature is useful in many ways for all kinds of users.
Parameters are available as Second space in the settings and here you can choose all the data you want to share with the second space which will be stored in a sandboxed environment. You can't use the fingerprint sensor for the second space, which makes perfect sense in my opinion.
This one might look like the Assistive Touch feature of iOS, but it's much better than that. Mi Button is specially designed for large screen devices like Mi Max, to help user navigate the phone with one hand. You can find the option to enable this feature in Settings->Additional Settings->Touch Assistant .
The floating icon will have shortcuts to back, home, recent apps and also default screenshot. However, you can change these shortcuts and add frequently used apps of your choice. We've seen apps like these on the Play Store, but having the feature integrated into MIUI at the system level makes it much smoother.
Well, I should really say converter because that's the new feature. In the calculator app, a 9-dot menu at the top left opens up the ability to convert different units of currency, area, length, and more. In addition, values such as currency conversion rates are updated automatically (via the Internet) and eliminate manual work.
MIUI introduced this feature with MIUI 7, where you can set a different wallpaper for the lock screen which changes automatically. However, in MIUI 8 you can also grab these photos from online repositories and the option is under Lock screen settings from MIUI. Here, just select the categories you want to use and save the settings.
When you open the Gallery app to view photos, swipe up on photos to open the sharing menu where you can select your photos and share them. You also get information like the file size of the photo, just in case you share it on an email where it won't compress the photos, by default.
The image editor has also received many changes, such as better filters and stickers, which make it easier for the user to edit and post-process photos. Even the video editor has many features that you must experience on MIUI 8.
So, these were the top 8 interesting features of MIUI 8. The development is still in pre-beta and the first public beta will be available from July 11 and a final version will be rolled out to all devices on August 15, 2016 and during During this time, some features may be added or removed. However, if so, we'll keep you posted, so be sure to stay tuned.
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