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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.
Plenty of expensive ones, too. Yours included.
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Communist Party of China and Google wants you! Enlist now.
Communist Party of China and Google have you! You are already automatically enlisted, no further actions are necessary on your part.
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The Communist Party of China is the largest capitalist business on Mother Earth. Has been so since about the midpoint of Deng's rule.
Get up to date on your information, citizen, and bow to the raw power of Capital Unlimited, with no "democracy" to get in the way.
Let the formal race to the bottom begin!
This should drive prices to consumers down, but might also start shaking out the competition and reduce the number of vendors.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
"Budget Flagship"
LOL
Well, being had by these isn't binary and there are progressive levels of loss of privacy. There are extreme cases that are worthwhile avoiding, such as leaking location data, associations, medical history.
Google knows relatively little about me, I don't have Android or any Google apps, I use multiple search engines, and I don't generally over-share online.
Budget
Flagship
Pick one.
This will put pressure on the prices of competing devices that I might buy.
If one or two manufacturers drop out of the market, well, too bad. There are dozens of phone manufacturers.
The limited selection in the US market is primarily due to carrier interference. If one of their OEMs goes away, they'll partner up with someone else.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
"But the company has so far focused on low and mid-tier handsets..."
I beg your pardon? Xiaomi for those who actually know the company, because indeed it had not been trying to sell globally until relatively recently, was well known for its high quality, yet inexpensive, flagship Mi series. Sure, their cheaper series like the various Redmi were higher volume, but one of the main points of the brand was that you can get a flagship phone that was higher quality than the other Chinese makers and still stay at around $250 - $300. It was always trying to be "the Apple of China".
I got tired of paying $600+ for Samsung Galaxy, especially given various issues I had and the Mi 4 was the first time I switched to Xiaomi, to find out I could get the same hardware, including things like Gorilla Glass etc, for almost a third of the price, with a longer lasting (and non-exploding) battery. And I even preferred the Android distribution (MIUI) which does get updated often.
And Xiaomi went beyond run-of-the-mill flagships, e.g. their original Mi Mix was one of the first "bezel-less" phones and it got copied by many companies. I currently have last year's Mi Mix 2, which was the first smartphone that I found "exciting" in quite a long time (I guess since the amazing Nokia N9 running Maemo/Meego).
So, no, a $300 flagship is what they have been doing for several years now, and they had Snapdragon 845 phones for a while (Mi Mix 2S), so the only difference I see is that they now are starting to give very silly names to their new phones. As much as I have enjoyed Xiaomi, I cringe at the thought I'd get a device called the "Pocophone". Oh, and they are trying to expand their markets, but that's not exactly news, they've been doing steps for a while now (e.g. the Mi Mix 2 was their first phone that supported US LTE bands like T-Mobile so they seem to be preparing for jumps to the West).
And no, I don't mind that (in addition to Google etc), Xiaomi tracks me instead of Samsung. I mean, it's in the price of owning a smartphone, get a feature phone if you want to avoid it.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
And ... you have evidence to back this up? Or just Xenophobia?
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My Xioami updates/patches itself quite regularly, thanks.
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Supongo que los asesoro para el branding la misma gente a la que se le ocurrio el mitsubishi "pajero"
For the english speaker, Poco in spanish means little, while pajero means wanker.
my post in english says:
It seems to be very little, better not buy it.
I guess that they got branding advice from the same people that came up with the mitsubishi pajero.
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
I see an article saying they could do something, if they wanted to, but no evidence that they are doing that.
Is there anything there that couldn't be done by any other manufacturer? Isn't already being done by other manufacturers?
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Yeah, Apple would never do that.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2...
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Don't forget you can also unlock their devices and install custom ROMs. There is also quite good official support from LineageOS (although you might have to go unofficial for a while with newer devices.)
Black holes occur when God divides by zero.
Those new smartphones will look exactly like iPhone X and any future versions of it... with one inevitable exception: They will come pre-loaded with some kind of SuperFish app that will send cookies, surfing history, usernames/passwords, messages, phonebooks back to the factory for "customer satisfaction research".
Who lives in a market? I do have a home country, state, nation... but market?
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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/16/us/politics/china-phones-software-security.html
"Secret Back Door in Some U.S. Phones Sent Data to China, Analysts Say"
Only mentions Huawei and ZTE. Xiaomi phones don't ship with the software mentioned.
http://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/27486/security/xiaomi-handset-usersdata.html
Another
Heard of iCloud? Same thing. It isn't required for use of the phone, only if you want to backup contacts and messages etc. to the 'cloud', in which case it sends, you guessed it, contacts and messages to their cloud service. But you don't have to register, and now even if you have registered you can disable it.
http://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/34583/hacking/xiaomi-mi-4-preinstalled-malware.html
Another
This looks like a supply-chain attack. Did they try flashing with an original Xiaomi image? No.
http://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/49346/hacking/xiaomi-smartphone-flaw.html
Another
If this was intentional, why have they put in a lot of effort to fix their mistakes? These are all 2-year-old issues that the company addressed very quickly once they were reported. Please give us a recent (less than 1-year-old) example, you know, one that actually applies to the current version of the software they ship on current hand-sets.
Yes, google and apple and everyone do different things we don't like either, but Xiaomi had backdoors to Beijing. We can talk about other phones having flaws, but that's a change of subject from Xiaomi's backdoor problem.
Look, everyone and his mother knows about the backdoors, you need to think one step further.
Let me show you why people doesn't care about what you say:
Chinese government spies on: Their citizens, other countries officials.
NSA spies on: Their citizens, other countries officials.
This is a typical case of my enemies enemy is my friend.
If you are a US citizen you should go for a Chinese phone. The Chinese government isn't going to abuse your data the way the US government does.
If you are a Chinese citizen you should go for a US phone, the US government isn't going to abuse your data the way the Chinese government does.
If you work in the government in either country, go for local brands and have your local intelligence agency secure it for you.
Show me a phone company that doesn't have backdoors in their product and I will introduce you to a real unicorn.
As opposed to the NSA, MI5 and Mossasd, all of whom have been proven to be hacking and spying on their own citizens.
Also, in whose reality is $300 "cheap"? A cheap phone of roughly the same type is $100 or less, and an actually cheap phone, which is what'd be required for India where this one was pitched, is $20-30. $300 is an expensive phone. $800-1000 is a fucking expensive phone.
Use Google? The company that records/tracks every move you make online?
So you trust Google but not Xiaomi, just because one collects it for America and the other for China?
The thing is, at the end of the day most of them are all the same. If you're online then someone is always trying to track you and collect as much information they can get their hands on.
And btw, if you were so "search literate", you would use DuckDuckGo and not Google.
Nope. Again.
When you're given lemons, make lemonade.
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Excellent reasoning.
Beijing doesn't care what I do with my phone - because I'm not in China.
All US citizens should be embracing that concept
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