"Skeptics say the company produces low-price iPhone imitations with no significant software or hardware advantages."

I must say that compared to other low-price phones in china like Lenovo, ZTE, Huawei and Hisense I'd rather take Xiaomi. They seem to pay more attention to quality than others and they do show innovativeness with MIUI for example. And more importantly they seem to have more and more of their own innovation in each product generation. For example their MI2S offers exchangeable colored backs that I haven't seen with many other companies (Nokia maybe).

I used to think NYT is respectable paper, but with words like "aping" in the title of an article like this I'm giving up on that thought.