I have followed China's handphone scene quite closely and want to chip in: XiaoMi no doubt has garnered a respectful number of fans early this year with its fir

I have followed China's handphone scene quite closely and want to chip in: XiaoMi no doubt has garnered a respectful number of fans early this year with its first generation of phone, XiaoMi 1. However, XiaoMi (the company, as well as its phones) are not as glamourous as it used to be because of two reasons: First, its lack of supply of XiaoMi 1S, and now XiaoMi 2, coupled with various hardware/software issues, has caused a lot of bad publicity. On the other hand, companies like HuaWei are showing their manufacturing and logistics prowess. Huawei's Ascend P1 is well-received ever since it is in the market. Second reason is nowadays a lot of China companies jump into phone-making business. In fact, beside the traditional phone makers like Huawei and ZTE, the top China Internet companies: Baidu, Tencent, Shengda, and Ali all have shown interest some point to jump in. However all these phones are Android-based running on ARM (usually Qualcomm). This leaves very little room for the phone makers to differentiate themselves apart. The fact a lot of phones allow users to install third-party ROMs actually worsens the effort to lock-in users. What I foresee ahead is a cut-throat price war which happened to the ShanZai (Clone) phones these smart phones replaced. History does repeat itself =)