There’s no doubt that in the past two years or so, budget smartphones have surpassed the unreliable moniker they were known for. But have we reached that stage where someone can move from a once top-of-the-line flagship to a current, but well-liked, budget phone without feeling much of a difference?

To put that hypothesis to the test, I decided to give up my HTC One m7, which I had been using since November of 2013, for Xiaomi’s latest offering, the Mi 4i.

Hardware

At first glance, it really is surprising how pretty the device is. I would go as far as to say it’s the best-looking Xiaomi phone I’ve used, and I’ve used all but the top-of-the-line Mi Note and its pro variant. Compared to something like the Redmi Note and the Nexus 5, it definitely feels lighter. The back has a soft touch and feels great, although I do worry that it may collect dust. The Mi 4i’s rear is exactly what the white Nexus 5 should have been, soft touch and not plastic. It definitely feels more premium than some of the other phones in that price category.

Switch the device on and the 5-inch, 1080p display impresses you even further. It’s bright and vivid without being oversaturated and the colors stay true to their source.

The device doesn’t come with a micro SD card slot, which makes it hard living with the 16GB of built-in storage (only 12GB of which is usable). It does come with a dual always-on 4G-supported SIM card slot. Another thing worth mentioning is that Xiaomi left NFC out of this device.

The device rocks a Qualcomm Snapdragon 615, which is actually made up of two processors — a quad-core 1.7 GHz Cortex-A53 and quad-core 1.0 GHz Cortex-A53 — and Adreno 405 for graphics. It packs 2GB of RAM and comes equipped with a non-removable 3,120-MAh battery, a 13-mp shooter on the back and a 5-mp front-facing “selfie” camera. It also supports Bluetooth 4.1.

Software and performance

Up until this point, the phone has managed to meet and even somewhat surpass the expectations of a budget phone, Unfortunately, this is where it begins to go downhill.

At first boot, Xiaomi’s MIUI firmware is close to unusable. It’s choppy and weird, it lags and apps freeze.

I soon realized the reason for this: MIUI can’t handle Android Lollipop animations. Once you figure out what needs to be tapped in order to access developer settings, and navigate your way through the mess that is the MIUI settings page and change the animation and transition scale, it sort of gets better.

There are things that still don’t work well, though. For example, I had to switch off chat heads in Facebook Messenger because that remained choppy. What adds salt to the wound is how great MIUI v5 was. Sure, it makes sense given that they had years and years to perfect v5 and not only is MIUI 6 fairly new, but this is the first device to run MIUI v6 in tandem with Lollipop, which was a huge jump from KitKat.

When you look past the flaws, you see that MIUI is pretty nice. Besides the obvious fact that it looks a little like iOS, the UI design is gorgeous. It advances on the elegant yet worldwide poorly executed idea on flat design by making it useful, clean and elegant.

MIUI alone remains as customizable as ever, with a theme store that lets you change everything from the notification shade to the system font. MIUI also has a bunch of built-in apps that happen to be useful and don’t really feel like bloatware.

Another nice touch is how the compass app’s icon actually works as a compass; it’s the attention to detail that shows how serious Xiaomi is. That said, MIUI is a fairly heavy skin, leaving you with just around one gigabyte of usable RAM, not counting apps that run in the background.

Battery life on the Mi 4i is pretty stellar coming from something like the HTC One. I easily get a whole day of charge, taking it off the charger at around 9 a.m. and ending up with about 5 percent by 2am the next morning. In fact, I’ve never had to use my charger.

The Snapchat benchmark

Now we reach the true test of a phone: how good is it for Snapchat? Snapchat always has a long list of bugs and errors that are unique to different devices. This is why, on all phones I test, I run what I call the Snapchat benchmark to see how well it can play and record videos and photos.

Snapchat on the Xiaomi Mi 4i is average at best. The HTC One scored a 2/10 on the benchmark, due to the fact that every time I tried to apply a filter it would crash, it had trouble switching between the front and back cameras, and on top of everything it couldn’t take a video to save its life. All of these work on the Mi 4i; in fact, it handles all these things like a champ, aside from the video recording.

Snapchat video taken on the Mi 4i isn’t choppy, but instead morphs and turns everything into weird shapes, as if it’s trying to run Premiere Pro’s Warp Stabilizer on all the footage. It’s usable, but not great. Keep in mind this is only Snapchat video. Periscope video runs smooth and fine, as do regular videos taken via the camera app.

The weirdest thing, however, is that every time you want to use Snapchat, you’re going to have to exit the app through the task switcher and move back in. Otherwise, every time you take a picture the screen is either going to go gray, or the cute image you took of your cat will be replaced with a giant, pixelated icon from the Snapchat UI.

The Xiaomi Mi 4i gets a solid 6/10 on the Snapchat benchmark. It’s not great, but compared to the HTC One, it’s a blessing.

Camera

The Mi 4i has a pretty great camera for a phone in that price range. Where the camera falls short is, as most other smartphone cameras, in low light. The Mi 4i takes pretty decent shots in low light, surpassing even those of the HTC One m7, but it’s really hit or miss. The likely reason for this is the omission of optical image stabilization that causes the camera to get very shaky in low-light conditions.

The front-facing shooter on the Mi 4i is more than capable of handling all your narcissistic tendencies (we all have them). Pictures are nice and bright, although nowhere near as wide-angle as some of the other options out there. It also has a feature that allows you to say “Click!” to take a picture, making it much easier for selfie-stick users.

The camera app has a few features, while feeling minimal and not as bloated and overcomplicated as Samsung’s camera app. It has a live filter feature ilke iOS, and also some pretty unique features such as “Beautify” (which supposedly makes you look younger) and “Refocus” for those pictures that missed the mark, as well as a full manual mode for the more pro photographers. All in all, one of the better camera apps available for Android.

Final thoughts

On paper, the Xiaomi Mi4i is an excellent device, and one would think that it’s a bargain at just Rp 2.799 million ($210). After using the device for more than two weeks, however, I can easily see why this phone is priced so low. I’m still convinced, though, that this is a software issue rather than a hardware one. The HTC One m7 runs as smooth as a Japanese bullet train, while sporting the Snapdragon 600 chip, the older generation of the processor in the Mi 4i. Xiaomi may still be able to bounce back with a software update, but one thing is certain: the moment CyanogenMod is released for the Xiaomi Mi 4i is the day this phone will get much, much better.

Soham Adwani is a technology enthusiast and can be reached on twitter, @snazzyham, for any comments.