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China's Xiaomi Announces New Venture To Bring Budget Flagship Smartphones To Over 50 Markets; Announces $300 Handset Featuring Qualcomm's Snapdragon 845 (venturebeat.com)
Chinese electronics giant Xiaomi has made a name for itself selling impressively durable smartphones at aggressive price points. But the company has so far focused on low and mid-tier handsets that it mostly sells in China and neighboring countries. At an event in New Delhi, India today, the world's fourth largest smartphone maker announced an ambitious plan to expand its offerings and reach. From a report: Xiaomi announced a new venture called Poco under which it plans to produce and sell high-end handsets that would compete directly with the top offerings by OnePlus and Samsung, two companies that have demonstrably performed well in what analysts call the "budget flagship" smartphone segment. To mark the debut of the new venture, the company today unveiled the first handset under the Poco umbrella, the Pocophone F1. The handset houses top-of-the-line hardware modules, including Qualcomm's flagship Snapdragon 845 SoC, a 20-megapixel selfie camera, and fast-cooling tech to sustain performance, in a polycarbonate body. The base model, which in addition to Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 SoC also features 6GB of RAM and 64GB of expandable storage, is priced at Rs 20,999 ($300), less than half the price of an arguably comparable Samsung handset. The handset, which runs a customized version called MIUI, which is based on Android 8.1, would be sold in more than 50 markets, the report added.
Further reading: Chinese Smartphone Maker Xiaomi Says It is Working To Enter the US Market Next Year.
Further reading: Chinese Smartphone Maker Xiaomi Says It is Working To Enter the US Market Next Year.
My Samsung S6 came pre-installed with software not owned by Samsung which I cannot remove (e.g. Peel Remote). The new versions pushed by the developer contain more intrusive changes including video adverts that play when I unlock the phone, which I assume also leak private information to advertisers. So, in practice, Samsung allows *others* to deliver malware to my phone.
My wife's Xiaomi seems much more customer-friendly than my S6, and receives security updates more promptly.
At this stage, I am more in favour of Xiaomi than Samsung to replace my S6.
Xiaomi's justification for the analytics app, and their explanation of the signature-checking makes it quite apparent that their motivation is right, but they could (and have, e.g. switching to HTTPS in MUIU 7.3) improve the security.
However, I wouldn't call it a back-door, it's an auto-update mechanism (like Flash, Java etc. all do or have done on Windows), with no evidence that they have used it for anything malicious.
Microsoft *has* abused their auto-update mechanism intended for security and bugfixes to deliver software the users don't want, yet I don't see you complaining about that and claiming that WindowsUpdate is a back door.