

China's mini Apple takes slice of smartphone pie - nikcub
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/12/07/us-china-xiaomi-apple-idUSBRE8B60A420121207

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happywolf
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
=)

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r3m6
Xiaomi's phones run Android, so what sets them apart? Just the price?

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yareally
They run a version of Android called Miui (<http://en.miui.com/>). It's based
off of AOSP (Android Open Source Project) and also some off of Cyanogenmod
(<http://www.cyanogenmod.org/>), another custom ROM for those unfamiliar.

However, it's diverged to have little in common with either AOSP or
Cyanogenmod in the past few years. They more or less try mimic an iphone-like
experience on Android, only with more customization and features.

I'm not a fan of it really due to the fact it's closed source and I won't
touch any Android ROM that doesn't post its source. Quite a number of people
like it, but there's many other options out there.

~~~
acchow
Presumably the parts of AOSP they modify are open sourced? Or do Chinese
companies ignore licenses?

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yareally
They ignore them, sadly. They did a PR stunt claiming to be open source a
while ago, but all they did was release some patches to apply Miui to AOSP if
one wanted to do so, but they infrequently update it as Miui updates itself
every week (<https://github.com/MiCode>). They don't have to really give any
of that out since it's all Apache Licensed.

However the ironic part is the areas of the Android source they must disclose
under GPL, they avoid sharing. They don't release the kernel for any of their
devices as well and that's a huge GPL violation. I would presume if they did
release it for their own phones, it would be on here with the rest of their
stuff. The rest of their official sites (there's a lot of non-affiliated
English and other language sites that label themselves as Miui) are in
Mandarin and much harder to navigate if you're an English speaker.

Doing a google search for Xiaomi MI2 kernel source, turns up nothing positive
about their kernel or about them and GPL though.

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ricardobeat
The article doesn't even show one of their phones. The mi-1 looked just like a
Samsung phone, the mi-2 kind of resembles the iPhone 4. Looks like a standard
knock-off business to me, what's special about them?

~~~
happywolf
XiaoMi was special because it was the first one (or even the only one for a
good half year) to offer a smart phone with sub-RMB2k (~US$320) price point.
Samsung and Apple phones were and are still selling for RMB4K+ (~US$640).
Don't underestimate the price difference: it could very well be a typical
worker's whole-month salary.

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so898
You know why this shit phone sold well? Because the advertisements of this
shit are almost everywhere in China. Chinese now get one idea: if I want to
buy a smart phone, there are only two choice, Xiaomi or iPhone. However, most
people get another idea after they use Xiaomi for a time: Xiaomi is just a
shit. This company, really spends all of their money on their advertisement.
That really makes their phones become shit.

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happywolf
I really doubt you ever used a XiaoMi phone, or been in China. First of all,
you mentioned you saw XiaoMi 'everywhere in China'. Where did you see XiaoMi
advertisements? Here in Shanghai, I do see Samsung and even ZTE ads very often
and I still fail to remember I had ever come across of any XiaoMi ads in Puxi.
If they are 'everywhere', the Metro must be covered somehow, right? Sorry, no
luck, I didn't see any. XiaoMi does do marketing, but mainly on Weibo, which
is the China version of Twitter. Second, XiaoMi has fallen so far in supplying
enough phones that people have been waiting for weeks (A lot of people this is
XiaoMi's starvation campaign, well, it makes sense a few months ago, but not
likely now since competition has been so fierce). So, up until now, if you
wanna buy a smart phone in China, XiaoMi is usually not available at the
counter, and you may be amazed to know Samsung has really invested in
marketing and channel development in Greater China these days ;)

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anovikov
Nice, these copycats now took the next step: instead of copying Steve's stuff,
they copied Steve himself. Kinda cool.

~~~
andybak
Pierre Menard, the author of Don Quixote...

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aresant
I found the photo of the founder clad in blue jeans and a black polo shirt in
front of a large, clean presentation to be arresting.

It instantly evoked the negatives that I read again and again about Chinese
companies: brazen "pirating" of innovative products (in this case, Jobs
himself!) with slight bastardizations (polo instead of turtleneck).

It took me a minute to recover and read the rest of the article and the
comments, which suggest there is actual innovation happening, likely on the
supply side, that lets Xiamoi sell at a disruptive price point.

~~~
Zariel
I really hope this is sarcastic post that you can be offended by a person
wearing clothes, I could chose to dress like Al Capone, would that invoke
terrors of Mafia like memories?

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bdcravens
Pretty sure Capone dressed like many others and didn't have a unique style.
Wearing black shirt + jeans everyday (or perhaps as a public persona) is
obviously intentional. I'd say those are like a football coach always wearing
a fedora (Tom Landry) or a rapper always wearing a giant clock around their
neck (Flava Flav) to name a couple of examples.

That said, I really don't care if they copy Jobs. I can think of several
entrepreneurs I'd love to copy in an attempt to channel whatever insights they
might have had.

