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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.
No sig today...
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.
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
Flagship is really just the one that they are pushing the most. It doesn't have to be expensive. Personally I think this is the best way for unknown names like Xiaomi to get westerners to take notice of their products. If they can offer a high end phone for half the price of the competition, then they are going to get the attention of a lot of people. They can still sell higher end phones to the people who want to buy them, but the majority of their marketing should go towards a phone that a large number of people can afford. This is similar to car manufactures pushing lower end vehicles because they know that's what the majority of people buy. No point in spending billions of dollars marketing a product that only a small portion of the population can afford.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.
If you mix bullshit into the barrel, everything in the barrel turns to bullshit.
I think what you're zeroing in on is that a flagship phone is supposed to be a status symbol, but really phones should be a tool. With the exception of a superior camera, most of the characteristics that make a flagship are of questionable utility. I was sitting next to a woman on the airplane who had a Samsung S8, with the wrap-around screen. She had it in a case so that wrap-around part of the screen was under the bezel the case added to the phone.
What's the point? For the price I'll take a smaller, thicker phone and buy a GoPro.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It doesn't take a genius to see that the $1000 phone will soon go the way of the $5000 desktop. It was a status symbol at one time, now it isn't. If you need an expensive status symbol, buy a watch.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
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.