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Android China

China's Xiaomi Announces New Venture To Bring Budget Flagship Smartphones To Over 50 Markets; Announces $300 Handset Featuring Qualcomm's Snapdragon 845 (venturebeat.com) 72

Posted by msmash from the china-calling dept.
Chinese electronics giant Xiaomi has made a name for itself selling impressively durable smartphones at aggressive price points. But the company has so far focused on low and mid-tier handsets that it mostly sells in China and neighboring countries. At an event in New Delhi, India today, the world's fourth largest smartphone maker announced an ambitious plan to expand its offerings and reach. From a report: Xiaomi announced a new venture called Poco under which it plans to produce and sell high-end handsets that would compete directly with the top offerings by OnePlus and Samsung, two companies that have demonstrably performed well in what analysts call the "budget flagship" smartphone segment. To mark the debut of the new venture, the company today unveiled the first handset under the Poco umbrella, the Pocophone F1. The handset houses top-of-the-line hardware modules, including Qualcomm's flagship Snapdragon 845 SoC, a 20-megapixel selfie camera, and fast-cooling tech to sustain performance, in a polycarbonate body. The base model, which in addition to Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 SoC also features 6GB of RAM and 64GB of expandable storage, is priced at Rs 20,999 ($300), less than half the price of an arguably comparable Samsung handset. The handset, which runs a customized version called MIUI, which is based on Android 8.1, would be sold in more than 50 markets, the report added.

Further reading: Chinese Smartphone Maker Xiaomi Says It is Working To Enter the US Market Next Year.
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China's Xiaomi Announces New Venture To Bring Budget Flagship Smartphones To Over 50 Markets; Announces $300 Handset Featuring Q More

China's Xiaomi Announces New Venture To Bring Budget Flagship Smartphones To Over 50 Markets; Announces $300 Handset Featuring Q

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  • Communist Party of China and Google wants you! Enlist now.

    • Communist Party of China and Google have you! You are already automatically enlisted, no further actions are necessary on your part.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sinij ( 911942 )
        Well, being had by these isn't binary and there are progressive levels of loss of privacy. There are extreme cases that are worthwhile avoiding, such as leaking location data, associations, medical history.

        Google knows relatively little about me, I don't have Android or any Google apps, I use multiple search engines, and I don't generally over-share online.

    • The Communist Party of China is the largest capitalist business on Mother Earth. Has been so since about the midpoint of Deng's rule.

      Get up to date on your information, citizen, and bow to the raw power of Capital Unlimited, with no "democracy" to get in the way.

  • Race to the Bottom! (Score:3)

    by chill ( 34294 ) on Wednesday August 22, 2018 @12:11PM (#57175010) Journal

    Let the formal race to the bottom begin!

    This should drive prices to consumers down, but might also start shaking out the competition and reduce the number of vendors.

  • "Budget Flagship"

    LOL

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      What do you call it when it has the almost same performance as other brands flagships but costs a fraction of the price?

      If you buy a phone for the function then yes, you can consider it a flagship.
      If you also need to show people how much money you spend on a phone then no, you can't really use this phone for that.

  • Budget
    Flagship

    Pick one.

    • Flagship is really just the one that they are pushing the most. It doesn't have to be expensive. Personally I think this is the best way for unknown names like Xiaomi to get westerners to take notice of their products. If they can offer a high end phone for half the price of the competition, then they are going to get the attention of a lot of people. They can still sell higher end phones to the people who want to buy them, but the majority of their marketing should go towards a phone that a large number o

    • The Xiaomi flaships are phones that are roughly on par with the best "brand" phones out there, at less than half the price - you can get one for less than 350 euros. Xiaomi mid-tier (Note) will have some cheaper components, but still be great phones at a price of less than 200 euros. I don't know about the cheap models. Software support is great, boot is unlockable (the recent 360 hours delay being annoying, but still...) they distribute rootable roms themselves, and there is a bunch of 3rd party roms, too.

      • It doesn't take a genius to see that the $1000 phone will soon go the way of the $5000 desktop. It was a status symbol at one time, now it isn't. If you need an expensive status symbol, buy a watch.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      If you mix bullshit into the barrel, everything in the barrel turns to bullshit.

      I think what you're zeroing in on is that a flagship phone is supposed to be a status symbol, but really phones should be a tool. With the exception of a superior camera, most of the characteristics that make a flagship are of questionable utility. I was sitting next to a woman on the airplane who had a Samsung S8, with the wrap-around screen. She had it in a case so that wrap-around part of the screen was under the bezel the

      • For the price I'll take a smaller, thicker phone and buy a GoPro.

        Cameras on midrange phones are getting really nice too. I just love what I can do with my G6+. (But of course I stil use the DSLR for anything serious.)

  • Not Gonna Buy It, But Glad It Exists (Score:3)

    by EndlessNameless ( 673105 ) on Wednesday August 22, 2018 @12:28PM (#57175144)

    This will put pressure on the prices of competing devices that I might buy.

    If one or two manufacturers drop out of the market, well, too bad. There are dozens of phone manufacturers.

    The limited selection in the US market is primarily due to carrier interference. If one of their OEMs goes away, they'll partner up with someone else.

  • Wait what? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Ecuador ( 740021 ) on Wednesday August 22, 2018 @12:29PM (#57175150) Homepage

    "But the company has so far focused on low and mid-tier handsets..."

    I beg your pardon? Xiaomi for those who actually know the company, because indeed it had not been trying to sell globally until relatively recently, was well known for its high quality, yet inexpensive, flagship Mi series. Sure, their cheaper series like the various Redmi were higher volume, but one of the main points of the brand was that you can get a flagship phone that was higher quality than the other Chinese makers and still stay at around $250 - $300. It was always trying to be "the Apple of China".
    I got tired of paying $600+ for Samsung Galaxy, especially given various issues I had and the Mi 4 was the first time I switched to Xiaomi, to find out I could get the same hardware, including things like Gorilla Glass etc, for almost a third of the price, with a longer lasting (and non-exploding) battery. And I even preferred the Android distribution (MIUI) which does get updated often.
    And Xiaomi went beyond run-of-the-mill flagships, e.g. their original Mi Mix was one of the first "bezel-less" phones and it got copied by many companies. I currently have last year's Mi Mix 2, which was the first smartphone that I found "exciting" in quite a long time (I guess since the amazing Nokia N9 running Maemo/Meego).
    So, no, a $300 flagship is what they have been doing for several years now, and they had Snapdragon 845 phones for a while (Mi Mix 2S), so the only difference I see is that they now are starting to give very silly names to their new phones. As much as I have enjoyed Xiaomi, I cringe at the thought I'd get a device called the "Pocophone". Oh, and they are trying to expand their markets, but that's not exactly news, they've been doing steps for a while now (e.g. the Mi Mix 2 was their first phone that supported US LTE bands like T-Mobile so they seem to be preparing for jumps to the West).
    And no, I don't mind that (in addition to Google etc), Xiaomi tracks me instead of Samsung. I mean, it's in the price of owning a smartphone, get a feature phone if you want to avoid it.

    • "But the company has so far focused on low and mid-tier handsets..."

      I beg your pardon?

      Yep. My Mix 2 128Gb is hardly "low or mid-tier" - it beats almost everything else out there on every specification you can name.

      (and only $500)

    • Don't forget you can also unlock their devices and install custom ROMs. There is also quite good official support from LineageOS (although you might have to go unofficial for a while with newer devices.)

    • Re:Wait what? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 ) on Wednesday August 22, 2018 @07:56PM (#57177718) Journal
      A good phone, a really great phone is about US$300-400. Put a US brand name on it and it becomes $1000.
      China wants to build its own brand names and not only make parts for US brands.
      To build the brand now they will offer a low price and great quality.
    • I've paid $250 (special) for a Xiaomi Mi MAX 2 a year ago -- it's wonderful. Android 7.1, 4G RAM, 64G storage, 2 SIMs or a SIM and a uSD, a 5.3A battery (it runs for over 2 days with me actually USING it) and a bloomin' big bright screen. The screen has a thin vertical bezel and is almost as big as Google's original Nexus screen released 6 years ago that had humongous edges everywhere.

      It apparently has radios for GSM, but doesn't for CDMA (Verizon) which I knew before I bought it. I use my old CDMA pho
      • Battery life in Xiaomi phones is excellent. This was one of the main reasons I decided to get the Redmi 4x which has been a joy to use for the last year.
    • I switched from Samsung to Xiaomi Redmi 4X in 2017 and haven't looked back. You're basically getting high end phones at a fraction of the price. Octocore CPU, 6gb RAM, 64GB rom in 2017 for less than $200. It's over a year old now and still working great.

  • Supongo que los asesoro para el branding la misma gente a la que se le ocurrio el mitsubishi "pajero"

    For the english speaker, Poco in spanish means little, while pajero means wanker.

    my post in english says:

    It seems to be very little, better not buy it.

    I guess that they got branding advice from the same people that came up with the mitsubishi pajero.

    • Yeah Pocophone doesn't sound very well in Spanish. Anyway, the "pajero" was renamed "montero" in Spanish speaking countries, at least here in Spain

      • During my IMBA at Instituto de Empresa, we had a business case about Global brands which selected names that were downright offensive in other languages. Pajero was but one example of bad names in spanish. And there were examples in other languages too.

        I guess that in a couple of years, Pocophone will be added to the infamous list.

    • It doesn't matter what it's called as long as it does what the user wants it to do and is good value for money. The name of something doesn't affect it's capability in any way.
  • Those new smartphones will look exactly like iPhone X and any future versions of it... with one inevitable exception: They will come pre-loaded with some kind of SuperFish app that will send cookies, surfing history, usernames/passwords, messages, phonebooks back to the factory for "customer satisfaction research".
  • Who lives in a market? I do have a home country, state, nation... but market?
    • You do. People are the product.
      • People are products for Google, and Facebook, because they are not the ones that pay.But they are still customers to carriers, and half products, half customers for smartphone makers.

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