I can give some insider perspective on Xiaomi as a Chinese guy(Xiaomi user, but not fanboy). Xiaomi was recently evaluated at ten billion dollars. They are THE

I can give some insider perspective on Xiaomi as a Chinese guy(Xiaomi user, but not fanboy). Xiaomi was recently evaluated at ten billion dollars. They are THE HOTTEST series of smartphones that young Chinese people and recently their parents are trying to get. Since 2011, it has brought several competitive phones to market, usually priced 300 dollars, selling millions within minutes online. And the quad-core 4.7 inch RED-MI which was partnered with Tencent sells for about 150 dollars, which is winning over the lower end market in China. It has this beautifully polished MIUI OS, which is much better than the original Android, and most other distributions(there are places better than iOS). At the same price, most Chinese made phones, incl. Lenovo, Huawei, Coolpad, have mediocre hardware and software. Xiaomi is often sold at 10% the price online at Taobao, since you need tremendous luck to buy one online (The first batch of Red-MI was sold in 90 seconds, 7 million users were waiting for it, only 10 thousand got one). So to say, Xiaomi is a company creates pretty good smartphones at a fraction of the of ip5 and S4 that mostly everyone in China wants, while mostly everyone outside China has never heard of it. I guess Hugo Barra would be a boon for the internationalization of Xiaomi smartphones.