Xiaomi announced in Shenzhen today its new flagship smartphone, the Mi 8, along with the Mi 8 Explorer Edition featuring a fully transparent back, and the more affordable Mi 8 SE model.

The Mi 8 is the company's first phone with a notch. It has a 6.21-inch 2,248 x 1,080 AMOLED screen made by Samsung, wrapping around a fairly large notch that houses a 20-megapixel selfie camera. The screen has a 600-nit brightness, and it takes up a good 86.68 percent of the front side.

The phone has a four-way curved glass back panel and an aluminum frame. Inside there's Qualcomm's Snapdragon 845 processor, and the new 12-megapixel dual camera setup with large 1.4um pixel sites is the same module found on the Mix 2S, according to Xiaomi. A 20-megapixel front camera uses pixel binning to combine four pixels to one, in order to simulate the efficiency of 1.8µm pixels. The Mi 8 also has 6GB of RAM, with the normal edition offering up to 256GB of storage, and the other with just 1238GB.

The Chinese company says that this is the first phone ever to use dual-frequency GPS, which is supposed to give more accurate location data.

Xiaomi is also releasing the Mi 8 Explorer Edition. The Explorer Edition has an in-display fingerprint sensor that, for the first time in a phone, uses pressure sensitivity. Xiaomi also claims that the Explorer Edition is the first Android phone in the world to use 3D face recognition technology, like the iPhone X's Face ID. But most importantly, the Explorer Edition has a transparent back panel.

For those with lowe budgets, Xiaomi offers the new Mi 8 SE. This is a a smaller, slower, and cheaper version of the Mi 8. It is powered by Qualcomm's new midrange Snapdragon 710 processor, and has a 5.88-inch OLED screen. It has a 12MP/5MP dual camera on the back, and a 20-megapixel selfie camera on the other side.

The 710 is said to save 30 percent in power consumption over the previous-gen 660 while offering around 20 percent greater performance.

The Mi 8 is priced from 2,699 yuan (~$421) in China, with the Explorer Edition starting from 3,699 yuan ($577) and the SE available for 1,799 yuan ($281).

The Mi 8 will be available on China from the 5th of June, with the SE following on the 8th and the Explorer Edition coming at a later date.

Availability for India or any other markets is unknown.