China's mini Apple takes slice of smartphone pie | Hacker News Reader

China's mini Apple takes slice of smartphone pie

reuters.com

39 pointsnikcub20 comments

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 =)

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

Yes, UI-customized Android. You can install the XiaoMi ROM on other Android phones as well

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.

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

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.

Miui is really good. Better than stock or TouchWiz from what I've heard.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hICCWO8vaXU

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?

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.

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.

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 ;)

"Xiaomi has already sold 300,000 of its latest phone model, launched in October."

It doesn't even look like the phone sold well; it sold out, but not well. Numbers like that will not be concerning to Apple, HTC, Samsung, et. al.

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

Pierre Menard, the author of Don Quixote...

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.

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?

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.

TIL wearing a black shirt and blue jeans is "copying" Steve Jobs.

By that measure you should probably be angry at this guy:

http://ccinsider.comedycentral.com/files/2009/08/89460317.jp...

> TIL wearing a black shirt and blue jeans is "copying" Steve Jobs.

When you're the founder of a major smartphone company doing a presentation of your tech in a black shirt, jeans, and tennis shoes, yeah, you're copying Steve Jobs.

For reference: http://www.buzzom.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/steve-jobs-...

It's painfully obvious that's the look he's going for.

I feel that this finally shows what are the key factors to Apple success, by successfully copying the success with use of those factors.

It does not seem to be innovation, or genius. It's just specific marketing of a just decent product.

I don't think there's anything wrong with copying. I think copying is how science works. When you are confronted with phenomenon it's not ok to just sit and admire, you should try to replicate eventually finding minimal and sufficient set of conditions for phenomenon to occur.

Some people might be disappointed at the loss of uniqueness of their act but all people progress thanks to it.

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