Anything with lasers always sounds pretty cool. Unfortunately, most of the time, the addition of lasers adds up to nothing more than just a marketing gimmick.
Lasers in smartphones aren't anything new either. Two years ago, LG was the first smartphone manufacturer to equip one of their units with lasers.
In 2014, the LG G3 was packed with a 5.5-inch Quad HD screen with all the bells and whistles for its innards. On top of all that, the device also had laser autofocusing technology in its 13-megapixel rear camera.
From that point on, lasers caught on. HTC, Oppo, OnePlus, Asus and even Google's latest Nexus 5X and 6P handsets would all have laser-assisted autofocus. Now, Xiaomi is expected to pack the same laser features in its upcoming Mi 5, too.
But first, a primer. Just because a phone's camera is marketed to be equipped with a laser doesn't mean that a laser is directly focusing the camera itself.
How it works is that a laser provides the camera's sensor with a rough estimate of distance to the subject really, really fast. As a result, smartphones equipped with lasers tend to focus faster on a subject than their laser-less counterparts.
With the Mi 5, Xiaomi gets closer and closer to offering a bunch of features at dirt-cheap prices compared to the rest of the players in the smartphone race.
Thanks to a leak from Chinese website Weibo (a Chinese hybrid of America's Facebook and Twitter), the Mi 5 was revealed to have laser-assisted autofocus in its rear camera. Interestingly as well, an IR blaster was reported to be coming to the device.
IR blasters have been stripped from flagship devices for a while so it's unusual to find it on Xiaomi's high-end handset.
As cool as they sound, especially since "Star Wars" just came around the corner, IR blasters are basically the same infrared blaster used in our remote controls. IR blasters in smartphones just allow them to work just like a remote control for TVs and other home entertainment components.
Other leaked tidbits about the Mi 5 include a Snapdragon 820 processor, 4 GB of RAM, a more rounded back compared to last year's Mi 4 and a rectangular home button similar to that in Samsung devices.
Photo: Thomas Nilsson | Flickr
