An unannounced Xiaomi smartphone was recently spotted on the benchmarking website GFXBench wearing the “Xiaomi Jason” moniker. The Xiaomi Jason will fit in the mid-range market judging by the hardware specifications disclosed on GFXBench, and numerous reports suggest that the device could be a mid-range alternative to the Xiaomi Mi 6, called the Xiaomi Mi 6c.
According to the source, the Xiaomi Jason is equipped with a 5.1-inch display sporting a resolution of 1920 x 1080, and draws processing power from a Qualcomm (ARMv8) system-on-chip (SoC) featuring eight CPU cores clocked at 2.2 GHz. The exact SoC model is unspecified, however considering the aforementioned characteristics and the inclusion of an Adreno 512 graphics chip, it looks like the Xiaomi Jason relies on Qualcomm’s recently announced Snapdragon 660 chipset. Moving on to other details, GFXBench reveals that the Xiaomi Jason features a generous 6GB of RAM and 64GB of on-board memory, as well as a 12-megapixel main camera and possibly a 5-megapixel front-facing sensor inaccurately detected as a 3-megapixel unit by the benchmarking tool. Lastly, the smartphone takes advantage of NFC, Bluetooth, GPS, and runs Xiaomi’s proprietary MIUI user interface based on Android 7.1.1 Nougat. As for the smartphone’s ability to handle GFXBench’s synthetic benchmarks, the Xiaomi Jason was able to crunch a total of 928 frames in the Manhattan 3.1 off-screen benchmark, and 1417 frames in Manhattan OpenGL ES 3.0 off-screen. Keep in mind that these figures may not necessarily be an accurate reflection of the smartphone’s performance at launch.
Only time will tell when the Xiaomi Jason will hit the shelves, but assuming that the device will be launched as the Xiaomi Mi 6c, it’s worth looking at the smartphone series’ brief history beginning with the Xiaomi Mi 4c, which was released in September 2015 as a higher-end device sporting a Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 SoC. A sequel was released rather late in February 2017 as the Xiaomi Mi 5c featuring a Xiaomi Surge S1 SoC under the hood, and with that in mind, it’s safe to say that the Xiaomi Mi Xc series has been rather unpredictable. Either way, the Xiaomi Jason could complement the Xiaomi Mi 6 flagship released earlier in April 2017 and fill the spot as a mid-range counterpart if priced accordingly. As a point of reference, the Xiaomi Mi 6 carrying 6GB of RAM and 64GB of storage costs roughly 2,499 Chinese Yuan, which translates to about $364 at today’s conversion rate.
