Behind the fall and rise of China's Xiaomi

Re:Behind the fall and rise of China's Xiaomi by jdietrich on Monday December 25, 2017 @04:56AM (#16003508)

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.

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Re:Behind the fall and rise of China's Xiaomi by dingo_bat on Monday December 25, 2017 @06:38AM (#16003762)

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.

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Re:Behind the fall and rise of China's Xiaomi by yummy on Monday December 25, 2017 @06:24AM (#16003722)

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

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Re:Behind the fall and rise of China's Xiaomi by jdietrich on Monday December 25, 2017 @09:31AM (#16004191)

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.

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