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Comment by dingo_bat | Hacker News Reader

The only redeeming feature of Xiaomi phones is the price. It feels cheap in the hand, design is a very detailed rip-off of the latest iphone, software is horrid, hardware is unreliable (shaky gps, loose sim cards, etc.), battery life is mediocre. But it costs 1/4 of similarly spec'ed phone from Samsung.

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The Redmi phones are 95% as good as a flagship for 25% of the cost. The Mi phones are flagships, for about half the price of something from Samsung or Apple. That's a remarkable selling point and it's the basis of the Xiaomi brand. If you pay any less, you're probably going to get a substandard product. If you pay more, it's not always obvious what you're getting for your money. Xiaomi represent the platonic ideal of mid-range.

The Miui OS is hugely popular, for good reason. It has quirks and quality issues like any other phone OS, but it also packages a stock-ish Android experience with a ton of very useful features and a bare minimum of bloat. Updates are regular as clockwork, even on older devices.

Indian and Chinese consumers might want an iPhone or a Galaxy S8, but they're overwhelmingly buying Xiaomi devices. Western brands should be seriously worried about the threat that Xiaomi represent to their fat margins.

MIUI is garbage, just like any Chinese software. It's the most bloated mobile OS I've ever used. WiFi tethering got broken after some update, which is ridiculous. Bluetooth tethering never worked at all. Memory leaks are so bad you can't keep two apps in background after 5-7 days of uptime. And that's with 3gb of RAM. They even had to add some swap space to make it usable, but at least you can turn it off, which is called "Memory optimization" for some reason. Plus, you have to register a MIUI account to turn on developer settings. I'm not even talking about silly UI bugs. Basically any non-stock ROM is better

I haven't experienced any of the memory issues you describe. I have heard complaints about memory utilisation in previous versions of Miui, but I haven't seen evidence of major leaks.

You don't have to register a Miui account to turn on developer options - you just tap "Miui version" in the "about phone" dialog seven times. It's a slightly eccentric UI decision, but I understand that it's intended to protect naive users against shooting themselves in the foot. You do need to register a Miui account to unlock the bootloader and install a custom ROM, which isn't an entirely unreasonable security measure.

The MiOS or whatever they call it is utter crap. Frankly, it turned me off from a perfectly good Redmi Note phone. IMO, the low price is very alluring but the software should be at least as good as plain android. A good example is oneplus. I believe people have bought mi phones in india a lot due to the media blitz, but these numbers will not be sustainable because nobody will buy a phone from them a second time.

That seems like a very sweeping statement for a company that makes wide range of profucts. E.g. the 150 eur RedMi 4X has excellent build quality and battery life that easily beats any iPhone by days.

> detailed rip-off of the latest iphone

Mi Mix 2 looks way nicer than iPhone X.

And iPhones are actually late comers for this bezel less trend. Sharp starts it, but it is Mi Mix 1 really advertises this idea to the market.

You're right, but I am talking about the rest of their phones which have actually sold in huge numbers and contributed to the "rise" of xiaomi.

Please compare the highest end Xiaomi phone with an iPhone. Not their low cost phones

But it's the low cost ones that have contributed to the "rise" of xiaomi referenced in TFA. The high cost ones nobody is buying.

What is this "rest"? Are you really convinced this is a correct generalization? What about Mi 5, Mi Mix, 4C/A/X, can you show what they copied? Their first well-known phones barely had any design to speak of, and the same could be said for modern Redmi Notes etc.

Loose sim cards, really? I've had experience with 6 Xiaomi phones to date and never noticed that. Shaky GPS? Yes, this happened on one bottom-line Redmi, but it's hardly pervasive as far as I can tell. Software is debatable – it's not Pixel experience, I'll concede, but also definitely not TouchWiz. Battery is on average better than for most Chinese brands or for Apple, though inferior to, say, LG and Samsung. (One actual issue: camera performance is varying, typically it's bad without customization).

I won't argue that at least some models are clearly very closely copying a major brand (for instance, MiA1 is openly compared to iPhone, Mi Note 2 has Samsung S6 design), but this does not appear to be a crucial part of their business strategy (unlike the more abstract "Chinese Apple/cheap Samsung" sales pitch), and comments like yours strike me as repating a vague stereotype. In the post-iPhone era, striking design originality is rare to find, and Xiaomi doesn't seem more prone to copying than most others. They jump on the bandwagon as soon as the new technology becomes available/popular, and that's about it.

I don't own one, but I've read Xiaomi provide regular software updates. As a Motorola G4 owner stuck on the Android March 2017 update, that's attractive.

Believe me, you don't want Xiaomi's "updates". The base OS is bad, and the updates usually break already working stuffs. I had an issue where I couldn't use photos from Google photos as my whatsapp profile photo. Unlimited small headaches like this.

Are you paid by some other company to post?

No, I'm just a dissatisfied customer. Don't want others to fall into the same trap I did.

Check out lineageos. In 15 min you can be runniing latest Android without any junk.

I have a Mi 5s and the build quality is much better than any of the Samsung phones that I have ever owned and the price was just HK$3k for a very powerful phone. Many of the imports into the West are fake and it's usually best to buy them from a Xiaomi store, which I admit is just a ripoff of the Apple store.

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