[ad_1]
Along with the reveal of the Xiaomi 14 series, the company unexpectedly announced a completely revamped custom Android overlay called HyperOS, which was supposed to replace MIUI.
Now that the first phones with HyperOS have started to arrive, we see that despite the radical name change, HyperOS is not that different, at least on the surface.
People who are used to MIUI will feel at home when using HyperOS. The overall aesthetic, apart from some iconographic changes, remains almost unchanged.
Xiaomi clearly focused more on internal changes and optimizations with HyperOS. Or at least the first version of the new operating system, which is based on Android 14. Let’s get those out of the way before moving on to the actual features and user-facing changes.
Internal optimizations
Xiaomi says one of the main changes is the way HyperOS handles and schedules hardware resources, resulting in lower latency and faster switching between tasks. This should be particularly useful for low-end devices.
Thanks to storage optimizations, HyperOS promises at least a 50-month experience without performance degradation, as well as lower storage requirements. The new operating system is lighter than MIUI 14: size reduction from 3.5 GB, now 9 GB.
Faster OTA downloads and smaller storage space for OTA updates are also part of the updates.
Last but not least, the Pro HDR feature comes to Xiaomi devices, those that have hardware compatible with this feature, of course. Photos taken with HDR will take advantage of the HDR-enabled display on your phone when you view them in the default Gallery app. However, unlike the Pixel, Galaxy S series, and iPhones, the Pro HDR feature is only supported within the stock gallery, so HDR photos uploaded online won’t display differently. Perhaps Xiaomi plans a full integration in the future, but it is definitely not possible at the moment.
This is supposed to be a feature built into Android 14 by default, as phones will now store HDR metadata in standard JPG images, so they can be viewed in HDR in any app or gallery.
News in design and UI
HyperOS is designed around the Alive Design philosophy with dynamic and cheerful color palettes found in nature, particularly flowers, subtle curvatures of windows, buttons and other user interface elements, and new optimized fonts. These fonts have reportedly been meticulously optimized for various types of writing, not just Latin.
New animations around the status bar provide contextual information. For example, during charging, a subtle pop-up window will appear showing the battery percentage and charging speed. The battery status of your wireless headphones also appears briefly in the status bar.
To further enhance the visual experience, HyperOS supports more advanced and complex rendering, giving the impression of more realistic objects and material design elements. We talk about time visualizations, light transitions, transparent elements, textures, etc. However, this feature is supported on more powerful phones as it requires more hardware resources.
This browser does not support the video element.
This browser does not support the video element.
Interaction with Windows is seamless, regardless of form factor. Windows is flexible and adapts to different screen types, which in turn means HyperOS is more foldable and compatible with tablets.
Subjectively speaking, HyperOS is just a more polished version of MIUI. Matte glass effects, explosive textures, and HDR-like effects on some dialogue make everything look more refined and elegant.
Customizations
The usual customization features are implemented with some new additions and changes. These are the lock screen options available. You can create a theme from scratch or use a particular style and adjust it to your liking.
And here are the new lock screen styles too. You can choose an image and apply different effects.
As always, a wide selection of community-sourced wallpapers, themes, fonts and icons are available. The Always On feature is also highly customizable but without any changes compared to MIUI.
The rest is as usual, except you can no longer choose between the classic style notification tone and Control Center. The latter is now the only option. Phones that were originally released with MIUI still have the old notification tone.
Speaking of the notification tone, there are quite a few customizations available.
You can use the HyperOS notification card style with full icons of the apps sending the notification or the default Android-style cards with more minimalist, flat icon styles. This latter style also offers larger, expandable cards.
You can opt for an app drawer or a simple home screen, while the recent apps menu allows for a vertical or horizontal layout.
Connected devices and multitasking
HyperOS offers deeper integration with devices connected to your home network and devices connected to your personal Xiaomi account. Of course, this isn’t new to MIUI users, but HyperOS offers a little deeper integration with other Mi Share-compatible devices.
Now you can multitask and cast your screen to other devices (tablets and PCs), not just send files. However, it’s not a complete desktop-like experience. Samsung and Motorola still have an advantage in this regard.
Still, Xiaomi achieved a sense of continuity: you can share your clipboard with other devices, attach a photo in your Notes app using the phone’s camera (while working on your PC or tablet), and continue listening to your music where you once left off. Connect your headphones to your smartphone, for example. You can even sync your themes and colors between devices, similar to Windows Appearance Sync across devices.
AI Features
With HyperOS, Xiaomi also joins the AI trends. Google’s Pixel phones offered their first AI-related features with the launch of the Pixel 7 series, and Samsung is also focusing heavily on AI this year. Xiaomi promises similar features and even announces numerical calculations on the device. This means that the device is capable of processing all LLM data without having to connect to the cloud, so all its AI functions should also work offline, thanks to NPU optimizations.
However, we couldn’t find any of the announced AI-related features on the Xiaomi 14 or Xiaomi 13 Ultra, both running the latest available version of HyperOS. This is because these features are in a beta development stage and are available only to beta testers, so a broader rollout is expected in the future.
Like the Pixels and Galaxy S series of the last two generations, HyperOS-compatible Xiaomi phones can transcribe live conversations and generate subtitles on videos and third-party apps.
These two features also work in video chat apps, so you don’t need to take notes during a meeting as the AI will do it for you.
The default Gallery app also gets a boost. Search understands context and offers intelligent search, just like the Google Photos app.
Xiaomi also leverages the generative power of AI. In addition to the usual set of editing tools, the Gallery app now offers AI Portrait. It can generate an image of you by analyzing a database of your existing photos. Using that same AI-generated portrait, you can place yourself in any environment of your choosing: snowy peaks, tropical islands, whatever.
AI Expansion is another editing tool that allows you to expand the scene on an existing photo. The AI understands the context of the image and enlarges the background, hence the name of the tool: AI Expansion.
Security
Security is an essential part of every operating system and Xiaomi also put effort into it. A self-developed TEE security system (hardware level security) stores all your sensitive data in a separate microkernel. It keeps your facial and fingerprint data safe, as well as your files and photos hidden or locked. Interestingly, TEE is present on all HyperOS compatible devices.
Wrap
Although from the users’ perspective, HyperOS is not a complete overhaul of MIUI, it is a more polished custom Android skin that retains the functionality of MIUI and is even updated in this regard, mainly thanks to AI-related features.
We also liked how small changes to the UI design improve the overall experience without sacrificing performance in the process. HyperOS feels as fast and fluid as ever and now promises to stay that way for years of use.
We just wish more intrinsic Android features came to Xiaomi’s proprietary overlay. We’re still waiting for notification history (Android 11 feature) and would like to see Pro HDR rolled out fully, not just for Xiaomi’s default Gallery app.