Xiaomi Mi Mix 2 expected to be uncovered on September 12 in China

We've been hearing a lot about Xiaomi’s latest flagship device, the Mi Mix 2. Now, a fresh leak suggests that the successor of the Mi Mix might be launched on September 12, the same day as the iPhone 8 is expected to be launched.
Over the past few days, there have been a lot of leaks about the Mi Mix 2 and little is left to imagination. While there has been no confirmation from the company about the launch date, Xiaomi CEO, Lei Jun had earlier revealed that the device will be launched in the second half of the year, which makes the leaks a lot more plausible.
To recall, the Mi Mix was launched in October last year and it came with near bezel less display and curved edges. It was powered by a Snapdragon 821 processor, coupled with 4GB or 6GB RAM, up to 256GB internal storage and a 4,400mAh battery.

Philippe Starck, the man behind the Mi Mix design will also design its successor. This was confirmed by Lei Jun in a Weibo post. Starck recently shared a concept which revealed extremely thin bezels on the top, left and the right side of the Mi Mix 2. The bottom of the device houses a camera and is slightly bigger than the other sides.
The main highlight of the device will be its bezel less display and a dual camera setup. Some rumours have also revealed that the Mi Mix 2 will come with a 3D camera for facial recognition.

Coming to the leaked specifications, the Mi Mix 2 is expected to be powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor, 6GB RAM and up to 256GB of internal storage. It will come with an AMOLED display and a 4,500mAh battery.
The Xiaomi Mi Mix 2 is expected to be priced around CNY 4,599, which is roughly Rs. 48,000. However, like its predecessor, the Mi Mix 2 may not be launched in India and may be limited to the Chinese market only.

Xiaomi: It's China's Apple, though you've probably never heard of it

The easy way to think of Xiaomi is as a Chinese smartphone maker which mimics Apple’s designs. But that would be wrong. It’s a narrative that was enunciated by Apple’s head of design Jonathan Ive, who when asked about the company last October was blunt: he “didn’t see [the similarities in design] as flattery” and called the superficial similarity in appearance of Xiaomi’s phones and software “theft” and “lazy”.


Some might instead think it’s a startup that aims to undermine Samsung, previously the sales leader in China, by offering phones with the same specifications as the South Korean giant, but at lower prices. Certainly it has mimicked some of its names: one of the new phones unveiled on Wednesday, a 5.7in device called the “Mi Note”, echoes the 5.7in Galaxy Note phablet range.


Both lines of thinking miss what keener observers believe is Xiaomi’s true character, and its ambition: to become China’s biggest provider of internet-connected devices to an eager, ever loyal, following drawn from a young demographic numbering hundreds of millions who will soon be outfitting their first homes – and looking for a brand to help furnish it.

Furthermore, it could be ideally placed to do what neither Apple nor Samsung can: become the first company of the smartphone age able to shift into and control the next era – the “internet of things” age, when all sorts of items around the home and elsewhere have internet connectivity.
Xiaomi staff and users of Xiaomi phones react at the launch ceremony of the Mi Note in Beijing January 15, 2015.

Neither the company’s chief executive/founder Leu Jun, nor any of its pronouncements, have expounded that strategy. Yet it’s clear that it must have had a persuasive story to lure Hugo Barra away from head of product management for Android inside Google in mid-2013 to spearhead its international expansion. Barra’s interviews, however, haven’t said anything about longer-term strategy; only that he saw “a dream job, this idea of building a global company which could be as significant as Google, from the ground up.” He suggested in September 2013 that it would aim to sell its phones nearly at cost, and profit on services – but which services is unspecified.


Most people outside China, or away from the tech mainstream, haven’t heard of Xiaomi. Even the pronunciation can be a challenge; try replacing the “er” sound in “shower” with “me” (that is, “sh-ow-me”). In China, though, Jun has almost rockstar status, product unveilings are shrouded in mystery and rumours – before the latest phones were released, some suggested (wrongly) they would have expensive sapphire screens – and thousands of excited fans pack the venues.

However, if Xiaomi were just another smartphone company, even a popular one in the world’s biggest phone market, that wouldn’t really justify the $45bn valuation it attracted in late December when it raised $1.1bn in venture funding. Handset makers generally struggle to make profit, even in China where hardly any use Google’s services, instead using the open-source Android Open Source Platform (AOSP) and offer (and monetise) their own maps, search and app download services.

As a phone company, it’s thriving: Jun founded Xiaomi in 2010, having already had success as chief executive at software maker Kingsoft, Joyo (which he sold to Amazon for $75m in August 2004), and as chairman of browser maker UCWeb.

Xiaomi’s revenues have doubled each year, and it ended 2014 having shipped 61m smartphones – more, that is, than the entire Windows Phone ecosystem, where about 50m were shipped. In all, 97% of Xiaomi’s phones were sold in China, with a few in India and the rest of Asia.


So what’s special about it? The first clear clues emerged with a study in January 2014 by analytics company Flurry, which found Xiaomi users spend more time on their devices than those of any other brand – including Apple’s iPhone. For every 100 minutes iPhone users spent in apps, Xiaomi users spent 107; for Samsung users the figure was 86, for HTC users 73, and averaged across other Android devices it was 71. That means Xiaomi users spent 50% more time on their phones than non-brand Android users.
Xiaomi users are younger than average and more likely to be using their phone for business use.

Flurry dug deeper and found another key difference: compared to the average smartphone owner, those on Xiaomi were much more likely to be aged between 18 and 34, and much less likely to be aged over 35. They’re also more than twice as likely as the average to be business professionals (rather than parents, fitness nuts or gamers), probably from university – a demographic expanding by about seven million every year, and by 2020 will number 195 million just in China, more than is forecast for the entire US workforce.

All this points to the key appeal and enormous potential of the company, says Ben Thompson, who has worked at both Microsoft and Apple, and now runs his own blog – Stratechery – and consultancy.

Thompson lives in Taiwan, where he is able to observe the particular social and practical nuances of the fast-moving smartphone and internet market in Asia at ground level – unlike many commentators in the west, who see only the surface sheen of Xiaomi’s products.

Earlier this month, Thompson outlined on his blog how he sees Xiaomi’s ambition playing out. Because most of the target demographic will still be living with their parents, even at 24 (renting is “frowned upon”, he says), they have disposable cash; they also have a desire to build their own lifestyle that differs from their parents. Unlike their parents, the upcoming demographic will value home-grown brands.

And when the time comes to leave home, Thompson explains, those Xiaomi fans “will need to buy TVs and air purifiers and all kinds of (relatively) high renminbi [price] goods. And which brand do you think they will choose?”

They can already choose an Xiaomi air purifier, smart TV, tablet, Wi-Fi router, Wi-Fi dongle and fitness band; as of Thursday, there will also be headphones and a tiny TV set-top box the size of an iPad charger with Chromecast-like functions. Can a watch be far behind? The company has invested in iHealth, a healthcare device maker with offices in the US and China, and in other companies that make mobile payments systems, Wi-Fi LED bulbs, and portable chargers. In the future, might there be Xiaomi-linked washing machines, dishwashers, door locks? It’s not inconceivable.


But how does that put it ahead of Apple or Samsung, where the latter has announced a $100m fund to develop its “internet of things” (IoT) strategy, and Apple has offered HomeKit, a platform for connecting IoT devices to iOS?

In that, Xiaomi’s advantage is that it doesn’t have any of what Benedict Evans, an analyst at venture capital company Andreessen Horowitz, calls “technical debt”. Writing on his blog this week, he noted that Apple and Google (with Android) overcame the incumbents, Nokia and BlackBerry, because they could build devices using technologies – big touchscreens, fast mobile networks – that would have sunk them in 2000, but led to success after 2007.
Xiaomi chairman Lei Jun in front of the company’s logo.

Could it be that Xiaomi is also free of the original assumptions of smartphone builders, and can be the first IoT company? Thompson thinks so: “you could argue that Xiaomi is actually the first “internet of things” company: unlike Google (Nest), Apple (HomeKit), or even Samsung (SmartThings), all of whom are offering some sort of open software development kit to tie everything together (a necessity given that most of their customers already have appliances that won’t be replaced anytime soon), Xiaomi is integrating everything itself and selling everything one needs on Mi.com to a fan base primed to outfit their homes for the very first time,” he writes.

After watching the latest product unveiling, Thompson noted in his subscriber-only email that the introduction of the two top-end phones – priced notably higher than any previous Xiaomi models – were a surprise. But, he realised, it’s just a refinement of its aims: just like any company, it wants to build a “moat” – a unique selling point that protects it from would-be rivals undercutting or displacing it.

“It’s a classic strategy,” Thompson noted: “bring someone in on the low end and gradually lever them up into higher priced – and higher margin – segments. It also makes sense; it perhaps turns out that Xiaomi is, in the end, first and foremost a phone company, just one that is trying to build an actual moat around an Android-based operating system.”

In that way, Xiaomi isn’t copying anyone; it’s striking out on its own, an insurgent in the mobile phone space with an eye on a future that older companies might not be able to follow it into. That could make it easily worth its huge valuation.

Xiaomi now world's second-biggest wearables maker

Chinese technology firm Xiaomi has become the world’s second largest wearables manufacturer in less than a year, data shows.
Xiaomi’s recently released fitness tracker the Mi Band, launched in the second half of 2014, sold 2.8m copies in the first quarter of 2015, data from research firm IDC showed. Xiaomi accounted for 24.6% of the wearables market, making it second only to Fitbit’s 3.9m devices sold and 34.2% of the market.

Only 11.4m wearable devices – a category that includes fitness trackers and smartwatches – were sold globally in the first quarter of the year, but that marked a 200% increase year-on-year from 3.8m in the first quarter of 2014.
“Bucking the post-holiday decline normally associated with the first quarter is a strong sign for the wearables market,” said Ramon Llamas, IDC’s research manager for the wearables sector.
Garmin placed third behind Xiaomi with 700,000 devices, Samsung fourth with 600,000 and high-profile fitness tracker maker Jawbone came fifth with just 500,000 devices.
Xiaomi’s success over the last few quarters was primarily driven by sales within its home market of China, where it found success with smartphones. Its Mi Band, headphones and rechargeable battery packs recently went on sale outside of China in the UK, US and parts of Europe. Its smartphones have yet to expand beyond China and a few select developing market.
‘Price erosion has been quite drastic’
The Mi Band significantly undercut the market leader Fitbit on price, costing under £20. But the big change from a year ago has been the introduction of devices such as the Jawbone Up Move and Misfit Flash costing £40 with similar capabilities to those costing more than £100.
“As with any young market, price erosion has been quite drastic,” said Jitesh Ubrani from IDC. “We now see over 40% of the devices priced under $100, and that’s one reason why the top five vendors have been able to grow their dominance from two-thirds of the market in the first quarter of last year to three quarters this quarter.”
What these numbers do not take into account is sales of the Apple Watch, which launched at the end of April and sold in March. While other smartwatches from Google and Pebble have been on sale for the last three years, none of them have shipped in volume.
“What remains to be seen is how Apple’s arrival will change the landscape,” said Llamas. “The Apple Watch will likely become the device that other wearables will be measured against, fairly or not.”
Analysts expect that Apple managed to sell in the region of 5 to 10m Watches in the second quarter of this year, with estimates putting total Watch sales for the year in the region of 30m. That would make Apple the top wearable manufacturer.
Apple’s Watch is the highest priced smartwatch from a major manufacturer currently available, and will test willingness of consumers to pay a premium for wearable technology.
The wearable market is highly likely to become polarised in the next year between the cheaper, sub-£40 market lead by Xiaomi and others, and the premium £300-plus market with Apple Watch as its poster child.

Apple to Xiaomi: being number one is easy to say, more difficult to do

After becoming the third largest smartphone manufacturer in the world, China’s Xiaomi is bullish about taking the top spot from Apple in five to 10 years.
Top Apple and Xiaomi executives traded blows under the veil of light-hearted barbs at China’s World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, where Xiaomi’s chief executive and founder Lei Jun described the company as a “small miracle” and said that it was setting its sights on world smartphone domination.

“I believe that no one thought the Xiaomi from three years ago, which just made its first phone, would later rank as the third largest player,” Lei said speaking for three minutes after arriving two hours late for a panel that was scheduled for two hours. “India is becoming our largest overseas market. Within five or 10 years, we have the opportunity to become the number one smartphone company in the world.”
‘A small miracle like Xiaomi’
Xiaomi was founded in 2010 and made its first smartphone in 2011 in China. It quickly became the number one smartphone manufacturer in China, rising to have 70 million users and becoming the world’s third largest smartphone manufacturer in the third quarter of this year.
Lei said that the company is forecast to almost triple its user base in the next year to 200 million users and targets the number-one spot globally currently held by Samsung powered by Xiaomi’s expansion into new markets.
“It is easy to say, it is more difficult to do,” Bruce Sewell, Apple’s general counsel and senior vice president of legal and government affairs, told the conference when asked about Lei’s bold claims which would require Xiaomi to displace Apple in second place, adding that there were “many good competitive phones in China”.
“In this magic land, we produced not only a company like Alibaba, but a small miracle like Xiaomi,” Lei said.

Xiaomi may be number one in China, where Apple languishes in sixth place, but on a global scale with 6% of the smartphone shipments in the third quarter, it is far behind Samsung’s 25% and Apple’s 12%.
Xiaomi’s smartphones use Google’s Android software with designs which some say mimic Apple’s iPhone. They compete with both Apple and Samsung smartphones with similar functionality, but at prices significantly lower than the cost of an iPhone 6 or Galaxy S5.
Moving from outside of China and select developing markets in south-east Asia and India may also be difficult for Xiaomi, potentially facing legal challenges from Apple. Jony Ive, Apple’s chief designer, recently hit out at designs that could be seen as copying Apple.
“I’ll stand a little bit harsh, I don’t see it as flattery,” said Ive when asked about Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi, described as “the Apple of China” in an interview with Vanity Fair. “When you’re doing something for the first time, you don’t know it’s gonna work. You spend seven or eight years working on something, and then it’s copied. I think it is really straightforward. It is theft and it is lazy. I don’t think it is OK at all.”
Xiaomi has made efforts to be more appealing to the west, hiring key executives from Google, including the outspoken Brazilian vice president of Android Hugo Barra, who became Xiaomi’s head of international sales and spoke out about copycat claims.
“Our designers, our engineers, are inspired by great products and by great design out there. And frankly who in today’s world isn’t?” Barra said at the WSJD Live conference in Laguna Beach, California.