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Already Valued at $4B, China’s Xiaomi Has Declared War on Apple
- krakensden 14y agoTheir Android flavor, MIUI, is fairly popular as an alternative to Cyanogen.
- timdorr 14y agoInterestingly enough, MIUI is based on Cyanogen.
- drzaiusapelord 14y agoWiki: " Xiaomi is a high-end smartphone, using a Qualcomm Snapdragon S3 (dual core, 1.5 GHz) as its CPU and an Adreno 220 as its GPU,[4] but its price (RMB1999/around USD310)[5] is less than half the cost of a typical dual-core CPU smartphone.[6] " So they're selling the phone equivalant of a Nexus 7 (decent hardware that deeply undercuts the competition.)
- taligent 14y agoDid I miss something ? Nexus 7 is the same price than the Kindle Fire.
- drzaiusapelord 14y agoThe Fire is a locked down Amazon appliance with a proprietary app store and all manner of restrictions running on a heavily modified version of Android. The Nexus is a proper tablet with access to all of Google's tablet services including Google's unfiltered app store. Sure, you can put some ROM on it, but Joe and Jane Public aren't.
- taligent 14y agoI don't think Joe and Jane Public are going to know the difference between a filtered and unfiltered app store or what an unmodified Android version means.
- Steko 14y agoYes and the Kindle Fire is substantially lower spec'd and is often claimed to sell at a loss while the Nexus 7 has weaker distribution but is claimed to sell at cost. Exercise left to the reader.
- ttran4 14y agoThis may be the first company in China to be innovating instead of working on the Hiphone 6. Regardless, they will never be taken seriously because Chinese companies reputations are already destroyed.
- gilrain 14y agoNever? Japan and Korea have recovered from very similar reputations very nicely indeed.
- dinkumthinkum 14y agoSure but Japan and Korea and completely different from China (ok, who knows, maybe there won't be ditch executions in China in 200 years).
- gilrain 14y agoI don't know as much about Korea, but Japan had plenty of pretty atrocious human rights violations of its own which it also recovered from. Yes, China is different. I'm just saying, "never say never".
- pvarangot 14y agoLast time the Japanese systematically vivisected women and children without anaesthesia, including live amputation of limbs and injection of bacteria was between 1935 and 1945. That is about 70 years ago, not 200.
- dinkumthinkum 14y agoAbsolutely, the Japanese did some pretty heinous things. But Japan and South Korea are different in a way none of the responses have dealt with. China is still behaving badly and a fundamental change in their government looks generations and generations away, if it is even on the horizon.
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- programminggeek 14y agoCan you buy a Xiaomi phone outside of China? For a $300 phone it looks pretty nice.
- amirmansour 14y agoWow the Xiaomi keynote looks a lot like Steve Jobs keynotes with significantly less production quality: http://player.youku.com/player.php/sid/XMjk1MzcxNTY4/v.swf http://player.youku.com/player.php/sid/XMjk1MzcxNTY4/v.swf
- zcvosdfdgj 14y agothere's a guy on stage with a projector in the background. It looks like a million other presentations.
- warech 14y ago"Xiaomi appears to have hit a sweet spot in the market, selling high-spec devices that compete with the iPhone on quality, but undercut it substantially in price" This strategy follows Christensen's disruptive innovation to the letter. Interesting to see Apple on the brink of disruption in a consumer category it principally defined.
- Steko 14y ago"This strategy follows Christensen's disruptive innovation to the letter. Interesting to see Apple on the brink of disruption in a consumer category it principally defined." Sorry I'm not seeing it. Who's to say Xiaomi doesn't end up eating Samsung's lunch instead of Apple? I mean people in the market for "a cheaper iphone" or "a more open iphone" traditionally that's where Samsung and company have been making money right?
- mbesto 14y ago> This strategy follows Christensen's disruptive innovation to the letter. Really? They offered a different package of attributes valued only in emerging markets remote from, and unimportant to, the mainstream.[1] So basically it's the same exact device but cheaper. That doesn't represent "different package of attributes". Sorry, but I'd barely call that "to the letter". [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_innovation#The_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_innovation#The_theor...
- xxiao 14y agothis guy stole the internal know-how from Meizu, and is great at marketing while cloing whatever Jobs did, I'm uncertain on its future.
- StacyC 14y agoWhat is it with the “war” on everything? How about you just make a great product that people want. Easier said than done, I know, but it’s not war.
- slantyyz 14y agoRemember, this article is from Pando, so it's not surprising that the headline is, um, a little excessive.
- SoftwareMaven 14y agoI declare war on...dill pickles. Now come buy my sweet pickles. yawn Also, a nit: it is sad to see a journalist refer to the "lead" of his/her story.
- geuis 14y agoI don't like the article overall, but don't have a problem with the internal reference. Way too often, titles are written to be provacative and the content of the story is much more mundane, or doesn't even support it. I don't mind an instance where an author elaborates on their lead in an attempt to explain it.
- m0nastic 14y agoI believe SoftwareMaven was referring to the literal "lead" spelling that the writer used (as the majority of actual journalists use the "lede" spelling), not to the reference.
- ambler0 14y agoI was unfamiliar with this. I googled it, and found this discussion: http://howardowens.com/2011/09/18/lede-vs-lead/ http://howardowens.com/2011/09/18/lede-vs-lead/
- swalsh 14y agoI realize it was a sarcastic remark, but pickles can actually be interesting. Here's a pretty fun story http://cambridgebrewing.com/blog/comments/i-have-a-pickle-mentor/ http://cambridgebrewing.com/blog/comments/i-have-a-pickle-me...
- GiraffeNecktie 14y agoFrom the article "The name, by the way, translates to “millet” in English, but it is also the combination of two Chinese words that have a powerful resonance here: rice and rifle. As any patriotic citizen will tell you, together those words mean “revolution.” " Huh? The two characters in xiaomi (小米) are xiao3, meaning "small" and mi3 meaning "rice". In other words, millet. Rifle is qiang1.
- vorg 14y agoSoundalikes are quite important in Chinese language. Perhaps 小 sounds like another character meaning "rifle". Or perhaps, as you suggest, the reporter got it slightly wrong... 小(small) often means "half", e.g. 小时= "little two-hour-period", and 米 also means "meter". So 小米 could mean "half a meter", the length of a rifle, which could've colloquial speech in revolutionary China.
- GiraffeNecktie 14y ago小时 = one hour (or literally "small time period"). I searched through several dictionaries and couldn't find anything related to guns or revolutions that fit with xiaomi.
- mads 14y agoYes, I noticed that too, the journalist must have misunderstood that. Don't see any rifle association there.
- mturmon 14y agoWith reference to a near-quote from Mao Zedong (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-5/mswv5_40.htm http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works...): "We have an expression, millet plus rifles. In the case of the United States, it is planes plus the A-bomb. However, if the United States with its planes plus the A-bomb is to launch a war of aggression against China, then China with its millet plus rifles is sure to emerge the victor." You pay for the phone, but you get the juvenile nationalist reference for free.
- xiaoma 14y ago
- mrlase 14y agoWould anyone happen to know if the bootloader is unlocked on these? EDIT: For what it's worth, here's a review that Engadget did of the phone back in September 2011: http://www.engadget.com/2011/09/27/xiaomi-phone-review/ http://www.engadget.com/2011/09/27/xiaomi-phone-review/
- chucknthem 14y agoGreat to see them doing well. I first heard about the company while exploring different Android ROMs, and the MIUI rom by XiaoMi was the best I've seen overall in terms of stability and usability which cyanogen lacked. Their native apps felt really intuitive to use and it adds a lot of functionality that you normally get from apps and more. e.g. a toggle to turn things on and off in the notification area is an app in the app store, but the quality just isn't good enough and I hate going through a bunch of crappy quality widget apps just to find one that I might like. Cyanogen has most of the features that xiami offers and more, but they're not as well designed nor as stable.
- tomflack 14y agoI'm in China and nobody gives a shit about home-grown Chinese brands. I mentioned to a friend I wanted to check out a Meizu MX and her boyfriend asked "what's that?" To which she replied "Oh, just a shanzai iPhone". The first meizu store I went to, there was a guy selling rugs inside. The second meizu store had two very bored looking sales assistants and in the half hour that I poked around and pestered these guys nobody else came in. The technology malls are filled with Apple, HTC, Samsung and even Sony phones. Zero obvious brand presence for Chinese phones. In the future this will change, I'm not saying that the Chinese phone industry won't be a powerhouse, but for now temper your excitement.
- noamsml 14y agoIf there's any company I won't be sad to see hit with an Apple lawsuit, it's Xiaomi. The MIUI ROM is great, but it copies the iPhone Look&Feel to an absurd degree. I get that MIUI is all about "usability" and "beauty", but WinPhone has proven usability and beauty can be achieved without blatantly copying Apple.
- xiaoma 14y agoI very nearly bought one of these a few months ago, but it was sold out.