The phone is, once again, rumored to be pretty powerful especially at its paltry $320 price point. In fact, if the leaked benchmarks are to be believed, the phone will once again be one of the most powerful handsets in existence. That probably won’t surprise Xiaomi fans too much, but music fans will be glad to know that the latest round of rumors also suggests a new “Mi Hi-Fi” feature. Exactly what that means or what it will do isn’t clear yet, but it’s meant to cater to music fans so if you listen to a lot of music on your phone it’s likely to be a neat new addition.

If leaked photos (like the one above) are to be believed, the new phone is also a tiny bit bigger and boxier than previous versions. But of course, all of this information should be taken with a sizeable helping of salt until we’ve heard the official word from Xiaomi about the new device.

(iMobile via TechWeb)

On stage at the Global Mobile Internet Conference (GMIC) in Beijing this morning, Lei Jun (pictured), CEO and founder at Xiaomi, was posed a question by the audience on his thoughts about WeChat and his company’s own social messaging offering, Miliao. Lei Jun was quick to compliment Tencent founder and CEO Pony Ma and team for a job well done with WeChat, which has nearly 400 million registered users. He said he didn’t have the intention to bootlick Pony Ma, but nonetheless thinks a good product should be given credit. He said (translation ours):

Being in the same space, it doesn’t necessarily mean we’re competitors and we don’t have to bash each other.

While saying WeChat has been doing a great job so far, Lei Jun is hoping that users can give Miliao a chance. He said Miliao (which is called MiTalk outside of China) offers different benefits to users. For example, he claims that Miliao is much more battery efficient than WeChat. He paints a picture that Miliao is like Apple’s Mac OS, which has a smaller market share but can offer great value to users. Miliao comes preinstalled on all Xiaomi’s phones.

Lei Jun said in his GMIC speech that Xiaomi uses word-of-mouth marketing, but stressed that in order to get the word spread, it’s a must that a company makes great products. While many people say that Xiaomi knows how to create demand and buzz in the market, Lei Jun disagrees that that’s the priority, saying that Xiaomi is only focused on building great products. Lei Jun is here to speak because he is a part of the Great Wall Club team that runs GMIC.

Lei Jun isn’t the first tech influencer in China who has publicly given his thumbs up to WeChat. Alibaba founder and chairman Jack Ma also recently gave his “attaboy” to Tencent’s smash-hit mobile app.

One Chinese e-commerce site that recently branched out into global sales has added what could be its hottest item yet – the newest Xiaomi phone. JD Global, the international version of China’s Jingdong, has stocked up on the latest Xiaomi Mi2 phone, which is now available in the 35 countries to which it ships.

Xiaomi’s phones are probably best known to overseas gadget fans for running MIUI, a popular Android skin that can also be flashed onto a number of other Android phones. Since MIUI has a strong global user-base with over 10 million users, the China-made Xiaomi phone actually works well in English. It’s not clear if this version will come equipped with Google apps like the Google Play store.

Only the 16GB version of the recently revamped Xiaomi Mi2S is available on JD Global right now. But, priced at $355 for overseas customers for the WCDMA version – and a further $30 more for the CDMA one – JD Global’s price tags (see here) are not quite so tempting as the RMB 1,999 ($320) price that it sells for in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

Pretty much every time we write about Xiaomi, we get commenters from around the globe asking how they can grab hold of one of the devices. However, there previously wasn’t an easy answer to that. While this global launch is not backed by Xiaomi itself, I get the feeling the phone will get a warm reception from Android fans around the world.

China’s newcomer phone-maker Xiaomi said a while back that it would make its first ever venture outside mainland China. And now Xiaomi has set dates and prices for upcoming launches in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

According to the now-online Xiaomi HK and TW sites, the recently launched Xiaomi Mi2S model (pictured) will launch in Hong Kong on April 23rd for HK$2,499 (US$322), which works out as the same price in mainland China. Over in Taiwan, the price will be a comparative TW$9,499 with a more vague sometime-in-May date set.

Xiaomi sells most of its Android-powered devices online, so the startup gadget-maker needs to tweak its e-commerce site for the new markets. The solution is accepting Paypal in both of the new territories. There’s no word yet on whether any Hong Kong or Taiwan telcos will carry the device in the same way that China Unicom and China Telecom has done on the mainland.

Xiaomi is aiming to sell 15 million phones in 2013, double its tally in 2012.

China’s Xiaomi is now widely recognized as one of the country’s best startups; it’s what happens when you take a good idea combined with experienced team and adequate funding and then insert all that into the perfect market environment. The company took in nearly $1 billion in sales revenue in the first half of 2012, and things are still going well today. But as Xiaomi founder Lei Jun writes in a recent column on his Xiaomi adventure, even for an experienced founder and investor, things don’t always look that rosy when you’re just starting out:

Actually, the decision to do Xiaomi was definitely not an easy one, there were a lot of things I was worried about. For example, I was going to do mobile phones and I had never worked in mobile before. Who would believe I was capable of making a mobile phone? Who would be willing to work with me on a mobile phone? What investors would be willing to give money to me to make a mobile phone? These are the questions I was anxious about.

Lei Jun continues:

Perhaps everyone underestimates the psychological pressure. I am also an investor, but the startup failure rate for investors is the same as for first-time founders. Many people might think I have a lot of experience to draw on, but often [if you're not careful] this experience can be a trap.

Indeed, failure may be an even larger psychological deterrent to those who have successful experience because the expectations for them are so much higher. Of course, this is not to say that a wealthy, successful man like Lei Jun is more courageous than the penniless tech geeks running their startups on bootstrap money and hope. But the pressure, the fear of failure, is powerful even for someone like Lei Jun, who is already at the top of the pyramid (so to speak). If you’re thinking of doing a startup, the psychological effects are definitely something you need to consider. (For more on this, also see Sohu founder Charles Zhang on why money and success hasn’t made him happy).

Lei Jun also makes the point that self-funding your startup can have a big influence on how investors see you. “If I didn’t have the courage [to invest in Xiaomi] myself, how could I convince Zhang Ying or other potential investors?” he asks. Of course, Mr. Lei was already a wealthy man by the time he founded Xiaomi, but the point is not so much about money as it is about demonstrating commitment. If you don’t believe in your own idea enough to put even a little money into it, why should any investor? There can be no half-measures. Whether you’re rich and experienced or poor and green, you’ve got to dive in headfirst. That’s scary, but as Xiaomi’s success (and the success of many other startups) proves, the rewards for your courage can be tremendous.

Lei’s whole piece is worth reading if you can read Chinese, although it’s very long. Or just check out our exclusive interview with him instead.

(iHeiMa via Sina Tech)

There’s a Xiaomi fan festival going on right now in Beijing. It turned into a surprise product launch with the startup Chinese phone-maker revealed a revamped flagship phone in two new forms: the Xiaomi Mi2A and the more powerful Xiaomi Mi2S (pictured). The specs bump comes just eight months after the Mi2 first launched, and seems designed to bolster its already beefy hardware up against the newly-unveiled Samsung Galaxy S4 and other rivals.

The biggest bump comes on the Xiaomi Mi2S whose 8-megapixel camera is swapped out for a 13-megapixel snapper. The price remains the same as for last year’s flagship: RMB 1,999 (US$319) for the 16GB model, and RMB 2,299 ($367) for 32GB of storage. The cheaper Xiaomi Mi2A is a new variant for those on a budget, costing RMB 1,499 ($239), which is a good price for a totally unlocked quad-core Android-powered smartphone.

At this afternoon’s event, Xiaomi founder Lei Jun confirmed the upcoming Hong Kong and Taiwan launches by saying that they’ll happen in two weeks’ time. Dedicated sales sites at Xiaomi.hk and Xiaomi.tw have been set up but are currently not online.

Xiaomi sold 7.19 million phones in 2012, which was only its first full year of sales. The aim is to double that to 15 million units this year.

The updated phone models, as well as the Xiaomi Box for streaming media to TV sets, will all go on sale on the Xiaomi site this evening in limited numbers.

The news has gotten a lot of attention in the Chinese press, mostly because Luo is a well-known figure (he’s the founder of Bullogger and also a well-known English teacher and author), but has also attracted attention from the English-language press (like Atlantic partners Tea Leaf Nation) because it seems to have echoes of China’s state media attacks on Apple.

In actuality, though, as an Android ROM, Smartisan OS is not particularly unique. Many Chinese companies have released their own Android ROMs (the best of them is probably Xiaomi’s MIUI). Nor does it really resolve any of China’s concerns about its reliance on foreign operating systems, because as an Android ROM, Smartisan is still Google software at its core. (Related: Why China can’t make its own mobile OS.) For all the bluster about Apple in the state press, Google and Android is what the Chinese government is really worried about when it comes to the world of mobile. After all, Apple users make up just 12 percent of China’s smartphone market. Android users, in contrast, account for 86 percent of it.

So why is Smartisan CEO Luo talking about Apple? One word: hype. Like it or hate it, just speaking the company’s name gets attention. And in fact, Luo is just following in the footsteps of Xiaomi, China’s most successful Android-based OS developer. As you may recall, in the days leading up to Xiaomi’s first handset launch, Apple’s name came up repeatedly. First, Lei Jun talked about how everyone was waiting for Apple founder Steve Jobs to die and then after Jobs actually died, the official Xiaomi weibo account tweeted a tasteless joke about him. The company later denied that Lei had actually made the aforementioned comment about Steve Jobs and the employee responsible for making the inappropriate joke on weibo was disciplined, but the incidents got Xiaomi a fair amount of attention, and there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

Luo’s approach with Smartisan seems, in a lot of ways, to be inspired by Xiaomi. But can it capture the attention of the Chinese smartphone-buying public? The launch event got a lot of attention, but it seems like very little of it was positive. In a front-page poll conducted by Sina Tech with more than 11,000 respondents as of this writing, for example, users overwhelmingly responded to the Smartisan reveal with apathy or total disinterest. For example, one of the OS’s main selling points is meant to be that it’s uniquely designed to fit Chinese users’ lives and habits, but when asked what they thought of the OS after the event, here’s how Sina Tech’s readers voted:

(Note that Sina Tech’s poll is ongoing and as such these results may change over time as more readers respond.)

When asked if they’d give the OS a shot, most users were similarly dismissive or hesitant:

And even fewer people were interested in Smartisan’s announced hardware:

Which just goes to show that all the hype in the world is no replacement for a solid product. Whether Smartisan OS is solid or not remains to be seen — it will be released in beta this June — but from what we’ve seen so far, it seems many observers have come away unimpressed. I must say I count myself among them, as while I’m generally a favor of clean, stripped-down aesthetics, I think Smartisan has taken things a bit too far. I may not be the mobile OS’s target demo, but I’m guessing Sina Tech’s readers are, and it looks like they’re not ready to bite this hook yet, either.

Update: This post was updated on Sunday to correct a translation error in the first chart; “Seems like a copycat” was changed to “Too easy to copy.”

Here’s what the thing looks like plugged in in front of a big HDTV.

A closer shot of the plugged-in Xiaomi TV.

A selection of streaming movie options from iCN TV, including Painted Skin 2 and some older films.

A close-up of the screen during HD streaming from the web. Not bad!

You can also connect a USB thumb drive to the Xiaomi TV box, and even stream content to other devices locally via DLNA.

Setting up local streaming for a dubious digital copy of Django Unchained. Looks like the Xiaomi TV could be a nice way to play pirated films, too.

The settings menu.

There’s not really much here we didn’t already know about, but it’s still interesting to see the box finally in action in the wild. Does this look like the sort of thing you’d buy?

(Sohu Digital via TechWeb)

The Xiaomi Box for streaming content to TVs.

After a delay of several months caused by China’s media regulator, the stream-to-TV Xiaomi Box is finally available for pre-order online, costing US$63 in general, or just $48 for previous buyers of its phones. It marks the arrival of the young Chinese company’s second product line after the success of its Android-based Xiaomi phones, of which over seven million were sold in 2012.

Today, an initial batch of 10,000 Xiaomi Box units were available for pre-order. But the device – which is comparable to the Apple TV except that it runs a version of Android – is not available nationwide, and for some reason is shipping only to three Chinese cities: Shanghai, Changsha, and Hangzhou. You’ll need to provide a shipping address in one of those cities in order to snag one. The devices will ship on April 9th.

All 10,000 have been snapped up, so the Xiaomi Box homepage remains inert until the next batch comes up for pre-order on March 26th. Xiaomi founder Lei Jun recently explained that “the supply of Xiaomi phones doesn’t meet the demand,” and it’ll likely be the same with its new set-top box. So you can expect more fitful releases in limited numbers for the Xiaomi Box, even after its proper launch next month.

(Source: IT168 – article in Chinese)

We’re even selling Xiaomi brand shoes; everyone thinks we’re being a little crazy. But we mostly sell what the users want; our model is different from other companies, we’re starting an e-commerce company.

Confused yet? Us too, but Xiaomi VP of technology Li Moqiang shed a little more light on Xiaomi’s strategy when he told TechWeb that the company was planning to work on smart shoes in the future. He says the shoes will be able to link up with your Xiaomi phone to measure things like steps taken, the wearers’ heart rate, and more, which could then presumably be fed into any number of health and exercise apps. He also promised the shoes would be up to par with Xiaomi’s traditional price-to-quality ratio.

If that still sounds a little crazy, it shouldn’t — wearable tech and the internet of things seem destined to be the buzzwords of this year and years to come. If Google is about to start selling its cyborg glasses, why shouldn’t Xiaomi make smart shoes? The company seems to be trying to set itself up as an integrated technology brand that might one day integrate with every part of your life from what you watch on TV to what clothes you wear.

Don’t get out your wallets just yet though, because the shoes pictured above are not smart shoes, they’re just regular old canvas ones. The Xiaomi smart shoes Li describes are coming at some undetermined point in the future, so if you’re in the market for wearable tech from Xiaomi, you’ll have to wait at least a little bit longer.

(via TechWeb)

China’s Xiaomi has proven itself to be pretty great at selling phones, but the company surprised a lot of people when it announced it would be selling a set-top box last fall. Unfortunately, shortly after that announcement came the news that the box wouldn’t be going on sale after all as it had run afoul of China’s rather strict regulations about television. Now, according to a Sina Tech report, the device is finally back in business and is head for its first limited sales on April 9th.

Insiders told Sina Tech that the device had been formally approved for sale, and that it will go on sale for the first time on April 9th, a day Xiaomi has designated “Mi Fans day” and on which it will also be selling its smartphones. That sale is likely to be quite limited, however, and it’s not clear when the box might be available for sale again after that.

The real question, though, is whether or not the service has been weakened as a result of the regulatory intervention. By law, Xiaomi was forced to partner with one of a few state-approved operators for online TV, and the company went with CNTV, CCTV’s online arm. It’s not yet clear what the effect on content has been, but an insider told Sina Tech that Sohu’s video content had disappeared from the platform but other video content like Tencent’s video library was still accessible. Music features like Douban also appeared to still be available, but we’ll probably have to wait until April to be sure of what the final picture looks like.

We have contacted Xiaomi for comment on this story and will update this post when we hear back.

(via Sina Tech)

We know that the rookie phone-maker Xiaomi sold 7.19 million smartphones in 2012, so how about 2013? According to founder Lei Jun, Xiaomi will mark its second-ever full year in the phone biz by more than doubling that number to 15 million.

Xiaomi investor Hans Tung – a partner at Qiming Venture Partners, who put funds into the fledgling phone-maker in 2011 – also revealed last week that Xiaomi is working on a 10 percent profit margin. Indeed, the startup company is always aggressive on hardware pricing, and its flagship Android-powered Xiaomi Mi2 sells for just RMB 1,999 (US$318).

The investor’s comment suggests that Xiaomi’s claimed 2012 sales revenues of 12.6 billion RMB ($2 billion) equated to nearly $200 million in net profit for the whole of last year.

Xiaomi’s sales this year will be heading outside of mainland China for the first time, necessitating a greater production volume. Next month, Xiaomi will launch official online sales channels for Android fans in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

(Source: Sohu IT (article in Chinese), via Marbridge Daily)

Xiaomi’s inexpensive but powerful Android smartphones have been a big hit with Chinese users over the last couple of years. But the company’s sales tactics have also raised questions, especially among cynics, about whether the company’s brief-and-limited sales of the phones reflect real scarcity or whether the company is creating artificial scarcity and using it to drive hype and sales. Yesterday, Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun took to his Sina Weibo account to address the company’s sales tactics:

A reporter asked me: is Xiaomi intentionally [creating] scarcity for the purpose of sales? My response at the time: That is an [abstract] concept, but the reality the supply of Xiaomi phones doesn’t meet the demand. We are constantly working to optimize our supply chain, and this year our goal is doubling our production capacity to 15 million units! But high-end [powerful] smartphones are like seafood: not every factory can handle them, and you don’t dare store them up without selling them! I hope our media friends and Xiaomi fans will understand this.

Personally, I think Mr. Lei’s seafood metaphor is pretty apt. Smartphones may not go bad as fast as seafood does, but he’s right to suggest that with smartphones getting more powerful every day, a modern phone is losing value every minute that it hasn’t been sold. Producing only what you can sell certainly makes sense from a business standpoint. And Xiaomi may well be producing as many of the phones as its suppliers are able to.

At the same time, though, from a consumer perspective that may not matter. Xiaomi’s flash-sales were a good way to drum up interest and the scarcity greatly increased the phones’ cool factor, but at some point, consumers are likely to stop seeing Xiaomi as a quirky startup and start seeing it as an established mobile company. When that happens, Xiaomi will need to have worked out its supply chain issues and be producing phones on a level commensurate with any other major handset maker. It has already had almost two years to optimize its supply chain; I wonder how much longer Xiaomi fans will be willing to put up with the constant supply shortages.

If the comments section on Lei Jun’s weibo feed are any indication, some fans are already questioning the narrative of limited production capacity, and complaining that Xiaomi’s sales tactics play right into the hands of scalpers, who buy the phones and then resell them to Xiaomi fans at higher prices than Xiaomi itself charges. “It’s virtually impossible to buy a phone from the official website; they’re available on the market [via scalpers] but they’re hundreds of RMB more expensive,” one user wrote. “I hope that when the Mi 3 comes out, it will be possible to buy it at the advertised price.”

For more on Lei Jun and Xiaomi, check out our exclusive interview with him from this past fall.

(via Sina Weibo)

From left to right: Pony Ma, Lei Jun, Robin Li

It’s spring in Beijing, and China’s yearly celebrity parties legislative conferences (the “Two Meetings”) are being held in the capital. Among them is the National People’s Congress (NPC), which boasts among its members two new representatives: Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun and Tencent CEO Pony Ma. But the NPC doesn’t have a monopoly on the stars of China’s tech industry. The other meeting, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), is also welcoming a new representative: Baidu CEO Robin Li.

So China’s tech giants are out in force in China’s legislature. Neither the NPC nor the CPPCC wields much real power, but that hasn’t stopped any of these guys from making proposals. So what have these fine gentlemen suggested so far? Let’s take a look!

Xiaomi’s Lei Jun: Cut away the red tape for startups

Lei Jun’s proposals this year are focused on making things easier for startups. In his NPC proposal, Lei lists five problems and proposes solutions for them.

• Problem: The government industry and commerce organizations often force new companies to register legal documents using specific forms and structures because its employees don’t have the time or expertise to assess the legality of more customized documents, even though those may be better for companies. Solution: Let companies and their lawyers take responsibility for the legality of their documents and don’t require industry and commerce organizations to assess them.
• Problem: In cases of premium capital increase at an LLC, the Industry and Commerce officials only investigate and certify the capital that is on the books when the company is registered, and not the premium increase in addition to what’s on the registry. Solution: The Ministry of Industry and Commerce should start investigating and certifying all of the capital.*
• Problem: Registering a company name can be a long and inconvenient process. Solution: Increase options for communication (such as phone and web communication) and implement web tools to streamline the name-registration process.
• Problem: Official industry and commerce organizations require a specific number to be filed along with a pledge of stock rights, even though some pledges of stock rights aren’t for specific sums of money but rather for fluctuating sums tied to stock prices, voting shares, etc. Solution: Don’t require the registration of a specific sum in some cases.
• Problem: Buying enterprise invoices can become expensive as there are only a few authorized printers and little wiggle-room for debate on price. Solution: Make them free, like other invoices.

Tencent’s Pony Ma: The government should embrace the internet, support tech companies financially

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Pony Ma’s NPC proposals also focus on improving China’s startup environment. According to Sina Tech, he has so far made three proposals:

• The government should support startups by pushing big companies to create epayment, microfinance, and capital investment platforms that will improve the startup supply chain. The government should also establish its own organizations to support and invest in startups, as well as cracking down on IP violations and law-breaking.
• China needs to put more strategic emphasis on the internet by doing three things: establishing a single organization with clear-cut responsibilities for managing the internet, increasing subsidies for basic telecommunications services, and speed up the move to the web when it comes to government and social services.
• China should do more to assist tech companies as they move out internationally by actively participating in international trade agreements and safety standards as well as providing additional support and assistance to internet companies and even establishing an “internet commissioner” in overseas Chinese embassies.

Baidu’s Robin Li: Don’t require real names to use public wi-fi

Robin Li’s proposal to the CPPCC is focused on making public wi-fi faster and easier to use. According to Sina Tech, the current regulations governing public wifi require wifi providers to track and store users real names, and what sites they visited. Public wifi time is also limited, and logging in is difficult. Li’s proposals states:

Under the current system, wi-fi loses the convenience and speed that was originally the point, and raises the difficulty and threshold for using wi-fi to the extent that many people have just given up on it. When you make users take one extra step, you lose 90 percent of them.

Li has two recommendations for combatting this:

• Lower the threshold for getting online by eliminating the real-name and phone number requirement for some public wifi locations.
• Use a web-exclusive ID for logins (such as an email address or a weibo account), don’t require an authentication code every time, and that should solve the problem of repeat registrations and get everybody online more quickly and conveniently.

We probably won’t see more formal proposals from these guys this year, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to keep quiet for the rest of the session, and other luminaries in China’s tech industry will probably also make use of the Two Meetings to call for changes in China’s tech scene. We’ll be keeping our ears to the ground to bring you all of the latest in the Two Meetings tech madness, so stay tuned!

(images via Forbes, therichest, kelikuru)

*This one involves a lot of financial jargon and we’re not 100 percent sure we’ve gotten it exactly right, so we’ve contacted Xiaomi for a bit of clarification and will update the post if needed.

The relatively new Chinese phone-maker Xiaomi teased a possible expansion into Hong Kong and Taiwan a while back – and now we finally have a date for Xiaomi’s first ‘overseas’ push. Xiaomi team member Li Wanqiang posted to his 1.25 million fans on Sina Weibo over the weekend that the startup company “will begin sales in April in Hong Kong and Taiwan.”

Xiaomi sells a strippd-down line-up of just two Android-based phones, the flagship quad-core Mi2, and its revamped first-ever phone, the dual-core 1S. It’s rumored that the Xiaomi Mi2 will sell for HK$1,999 (US$257) in Hong Kong, but it’s somewhat unrealistic that it would be at such a price-tag, which would make it slightly cheaper than its already barely profitable mainland Chinese price.

Confirmed: An April launch.

Xiaomi revealed last month that it sold 7.19 million phones in mainland China in 2012. After selling in Hong Kong and Taiwan (probably via its preferred e-commerce channels, as well as one or two telco tie-ups), the Beijing company is contemplating launching in North America in 2014 or 2015.

(See: Founder Lei Jun Talks About Xiaomi, China’s Disruptive Phone-Maker)

The young phone-maker already has a Facebook page where it’s posting in traditional Chinese – the script used in Hong Kong and Taiwan – and has garnered 15,000 likes so far.

We contacted Xiaomi, but no further details about the April launch can be revealed.

(Spotted via: BuyBuyChina, Netease Mobile – article in Chinese)

Xiaomi’s Lei Jun (left) secures a deal that’ll put his much-delayed set-top box on sale.

On Friday evening we suggested that the Apple TV-esque Xiaomi Box had risen from the dead after being given regulatory approval. And that’s exactly what was announced officially today, with the founder and CEO of the Chinese gadget-maker, Lei Jun (pictured above left), unveiling a three-year partnership with state broadcaster CNTV.

The announcement from Xiaomi adds that the set-top box will soon go on sale only in three trial cities: in Shanghai, nearby Hangzhou, and in central China’s Changsha. No date has been set for that yet, and the Xiaomi Box homepage – which has been unchanged since the gadget’s unveiling last November – still isn’t taking orders.

The Xiaomi Box. Click to enlarge.

The Xiaomi Box aggregates streaming video content from partners such as Tencent Video, Sohu TV, and PPS. Although it’s not a standalone video service, China’s media regulator SARFT put the brakes on the launch of the Xiaomi Box a few days after it was unveiled, indicating that Xiaomi’s service didn’t have the requisite media license. That’s now solved with the CNTV tie-up. As an added bonus (though who knows how much all this cost Xiaomi), the set-top box will be permitted to stream some of the state broadcaster’s best content, such as the 2014 World Cup.

After the success of Xiaomi’s Android-based smartphones – selling over seven million of them in 2012 – this is the young company’s first other product.

How was your week? Fun week? Big week? As usual our week was pretty busy trying to stay on top of all the latest tech happenings around the Asia region. And for your reading pleasure, we’ve put together of some our favorite picks from the past seven days. Read on for more.

Steven’s pick: Apple Sees iPhone Sales Double in China

With so many analysts recently putting the bull in bullish, there was quite a reality check from Apple’s newest financials. The numbers revealed that the iPhone is still seeing good growth in the country, with double the number sold in 2012 compared to 2011.

Andrew’s pick: China’s Xiaomi Aims its MiTalk Messaging App at Southeast Asia, Japan, and Korea

The chat app war is getting interesting, and I can’t help but wonder how Xiaomi’s MiTalk will fare in this competitive market. It will be tough for the Chinese handset maker since all the other apps have a significant head start. But still, I think Xiaomi can give them a run for their money. Let’s see.

Willis’ pick: Revenue First

Revenue first. Though the concept isn’t quite true for every startup, I think it’s a refreshing angle to communicate the brutal truth about how hard it is to build a startup in Asia. The article helps to pull back entrepreneurs to reality, so they don’t get mesmerized by Silicon Valley magic. Asia ain’t like the Valley and it’s beautiful in its own ways. Needless to say, there’s lots of growth in Asia too.

Minh’s pick: Apple Indonesia Investment Confirmed, Jakarta Store and Online Sales Coming Soon

An Apple Store in Indonesia? How awesome is that? After all, it’s the largest Muslim country in the world and the most populated country in Southeast Asia. This only reinforces my thinking that Indonesia is on fire right now. With Tim Cook wanting to step up Apple’s market in China, it makes sense that Indonesia is also on his list.

Emily’s pick: Growing Faster than Facebook and Twitter: Key Highlights for Japan’s Line App [Infographic]

Japan’s popular Line app has taken Asia by storm. This week NHN Japan released an infographic (complete with their iconic characters) that confirmed their success in countries like Thailand, Taiwan, and Japan. It is also interesting to know that its amazing growth rate is about three times faster than that of Facebook and Twitter!

Rick’s pick: China Train Ticket Site Cost Nearly $100 Million, Seems to Be Harassing Programmers, And Might Be Broken Again

I’m not really that interested in the continued failings of the Railway Ministry’s miserable website — we’re sort of getting used to that. But I did find it really crazy that one plugin developer in Beijing was visited by ‘strange men’ and asked to take it offline. That’s harsh.

Charlie’s pick: Xiaomi Box Gets Regulatory Approval, Can Go on Sale

I’ve said before that I’m a big fan of Xiaomi’s courageous set-top box idea. I’m not sure this newly-partnered (and, probably, neutered) version of the device is going to set the world on fire, but it’s something that’s definitely worth keeping an eye on!

Now with regulatory approval, the Xiaomi Box (pictured bottom right) is back in business.

Remember the set-top streaming device from Xiaomi which was seemingly killed off by China’s media regulators before it even hit the stores? Well now it’s back. An official letter from Chinese state broadcasting group CNTV has just emerged (as posted by Phoenix Digital on Sina Weibo; see screenshot) that spells out a deal between CNTV and upstart gadget-maker Xiaomi that will allow the ‘Xiaomi Box’ to go on sale.

The gadget was revealed in mid-November, but it took just a week for SARFT, China’s video and TV regulators to swoop in and declare that the Xiaomi Box, though it just aggregated content and wasn’t a new video streaming service in itself, didn’t have the right license and was therefore technically illegal. But today’s CNTV letter says there’s now a “collaboration” that will be formally announced on Monday that “resolves the Xiaomi Box licensing issue” for its aggregated video streaming service (pictured above).

The Apple TV-esque Xiaomi Box is only the second device made by the young phone-making company, which sold an astonishing 7.19 million of its Android-based smartphones in 2012 – despite it being the startup’s first full year of sales.

Xiaomi’s stream-to-TV box will cost 399 RMB (US$63), or a mere 299 RMB ($48) for owners of Xiaomi phones. It comes with DLNA and Miracast support and will be controllable with its own Android app. Among its established web-based video-streaming partners are Tencent Video, Sohu TV, and PPS.

It’s not clear when online sales (the company’s preferred sales channel) for the Xiaomi Box will begin, but it seems that there’s no longer any barrier.

China’s Xiaomi not only makes a range of popular Android-based smartphones (a whopping 7.19 million sold in 2012) but also its own group messaging app. Called Miliao in Chinese (and now with the English name MiTalk), it’s a smaller rival to WeChat, Line, KakaoTalk, Whatsapp, and many others. Now MiTalk will be pushed across Southeast Asia thanks to a new partnership between the phone-maker and Taiwanese startup Mface.

According to QQ Tech today (via TheNextWeb), MiTalk is now up to 23 million registered users, although I’d suspect that the vast majority of those are in mainland China. Mface will help promote and distribute the chat app – even though it has a slight overlap of features with his own startup’s Path-like app – in Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea and Japan with the aim of MiTalk reaching five million overseas users by the end of the year.

We know that Xiaomi will launch its phones in Hong Kong and Taiwan soon – the first official sales channels outside of mainland China – so MiTalk is clearly going to be a part of that expansion. Xiaomi expects to sell 10 million smartphones in 2013, and is considering launching in North America in 2014 or 2015.

(Image: QQ Tech)

MiTalk faces a buzz of talkative competition from WeChat and its 300 million users, and aggressive overseas user acquisition from NHN Japan’s Line app, which crossed 100 million users last week.

(Source: QQ Tech – article in Chinese)

The new MIUI Love theme running on a Nexus S.

It’s not just buyers of the China-made Xiaomi phones – of which there were over seven million in 2012 – who get to use its pretty Android interface. That’s because Xiaomi’s MIUI skin can be installed on a variety of other devices. Today the company is celebrating having just over 10 million MIUI users around the world with the launch of a ‘MIUI Love’ theme (pictured above) – and for everyone who downloads the free theme, Xiaomi will donate one Chinese cent to the Smile Angel Foundation.

That’s a charity based in Beijing which helps low-income families with children born with a cleft lip and palate. So for every 10,000 downloads of the theme, 1,000 RMB (US$160) [UPDATED: My math sucks; corrected those numbers] will be going to that good cause. The very pink MIUI Love is here in the Xiaomi App Market, and has been downloaded over 30,000 times in just a few hours.

MIUI was created in 2010, currently supports being flashed onto 30 different Android handsets, and has now 17 fan sites around the world from which Android tinkerers can download unofficial versions of the Android 4.1 ROM in lots of different languages. Or,if you’d like to have the MIUI stylings on your phone without going through with the rather tricky flashing of a new ROM, there’s always the Xiaomi-made MiHome Launcher.

When we talked to Xiaomi founder Lei Jun a few months ago, he identified its MIUI ROM – built on top of the very open Android platform – as one of the three main building blocks in the success of his company. The phone-maker – which only began making smartphones in the summer of 2011 – is now valued at $4 billion, which is nearly as much as BlackBerry maker, RIM.

Xiaomi aims to sell 10 million phones in 2013, and will launch in Hong Kong and Taiwan pretty soon, the company tells us. But fans of Xiaomi worldwide will have to wait a bit longer to be able to get their hands on the phone via an official channel, as the Beijing-based company might launch in North America in 2014 or 2015.

Xiaomi’s Mi2 phone, its flagship model.

China’s startup phone-maker Xiaomi seems to have arrived on the scene at the perfect time – just when Android is seriously taking off in China, and when hardware costs allowed it to create a powerful phone for just over $300 unlocked. Today, Xiaomi team member Li Wanqiang revealed to QQ Tech that the young company sold a total of 7.19 million phones in 2012, of which 70 percent were sold online via Xiaomi’s own site.

Li added that Xiaomi’s sales in the past year amounted to 12.6 billion RMB (US$2 billion). That works out at an average of 1,752 RMB ($278) per device; it’s not clear how many of the phones sold were its 1,999 RMB flagship Xiaomi Mi2 phone versus its entry-level 1S model that sells for just 1,299 RMB, but the average suggests it sold more of its pricier devices in 2012. Though it’s worth noting that the Xiaomi 1S just launched back in September. Also, that stat might not include any sales cut taken by telcos such as China Unicom when they sell the phones offline.

Venturing overseas

Xiaomi will launch in Hong Kong and Taiwan soon, the company has confirmed with us, so that 7.19 million figure will very likely grow in the new year. Indeed, Xiaomi now says it expects to sell 10 million in 2013.

Tantalizingly, Li mentions that the Beijing-based company is considering launching, the Chinese-language article says, “in 2014 or 2015 in the North American market.”

Xiaomi is one of several domestic phone-makers that are now dominating China’s smartphone market. 60 percent of purchased smartphones in the country are made by Chinese brands like Lenovo, Huawei, and the very uncool Coolpad. Though Samsung remains the nation’s top smartphone brand for the moment.

But Xiaomi is not having an easy ride, and its TV-streaming device, the Xiaomi Box, is effectively canned after China’s media regulator objected to Xiaomi not having the relevant license to operate in the online video space.

According to one recent study, Chinese consumers bought 189 million smartphones in 2012; in the fourth quarter of last year, an incredible 86 percent of those sold were Android-powered phones.

(Source: QQ Tech – article in Chinese)

We here at Tech in Asia have been very impressed with some of the low-cost smartphones coming out of China over the past year, and we’re not the only ones. But as Communication Information News reports, the innovation and price wars have come at the cost of profits, which are remarkably slim.

In fact, according to the Southern Metropolis Daily, domestic brands account for 50 percent of China’s smartphone market but earn just one percent of its profits. Who is making the other 99 percent of the profits in the industry? Samsung and Apple.

Granted, most of these domestic brands are quite young, but it’s likely many will still have trouble reversing this phenomenon anytime soon. Xiaomi, for example, has attracted a lot of praise, and sold 6.5 million phones. But like most domestic companies, it has built its brand on making high-quality but inexpensive smartphones, and a jump in price would bring profits but probably alienate fans and destroy the brand loyalty the company has been fostering over the past couple years.

Xiaomi, like other domestic handset makers, plans to get its piece of the pie eventually via software and added-value services, but as of yet, no one has been able to make much in that way. It will be interesting to see if in the next few years Chinese domestic companies continue down this path or whether some turn to jacking up handset prices and trying to make a profit from the hardware. But it’s clear that whatever else happens, something has to change; 50 percent of the market and only 1 percent of the profits is not where Chinese smartphone makers want to be.

[Communication Information News and Southern Metropolis Daily via Sina Tech]

Chinese phone-maker Xiaomi has only been in the hardware business for only about a year and a half, but it has made a big impact in that time. And now we have new numbers that show how much of a dent that its phones have made in the smartphone landscape. Xiaomi team member Hong Feng has revealed that the startup has sold a grand total of 6.5 million of its Android-powered devices so far. That’s across just two current models – the flagship Mi2 and the cheaper 1S.

He added that the Xiaomi 1S – which is a revamped version of its first-ever phone – has sold one million units from its launch in August up to October of this year.

In the summer of this year, the Beijing-based company was thought to have passed the three million sales milestone. And in May, Xiaomi officially stated that it shipped 700,000 units in May alone. From those figures, it would appear that Xiaomi is still selling nearly a quarter of a million phones each month, but the new 6.5 million stat suggests that the number is not accelerating. But, being quite new to the hardware sector, Xiaomi tends to sell phones in batches as they become available, suggesting that they’re still grappling with the challenge of manufacturing enough of its gadgets to meet sustained demand. Or possibly creating artificial scarcity is good marketing.

Xiaomi’s Hong Feng (left) at a recent event.

It’s a strong performance, and reason for Samsung, HTC, Motorola, and other global smartphone brands to be very concerned. We’ve already seen China-brand phones take up 60 percent of the country’s smartphone market, led by the likes of Lenovo, Coolpad, Huawei and ZTE. And so Xiaomi is another contender for the top in that sector.

Hong Feng had one more interesting stat up his sleeve. He revealed to Donews that Xiaomi’s own Android UI/skin/ROM, called MIUI, has surpassed 10 million users worldwide. MIUI – which is the interface on all Xiaomi phones – can be flashed onto numerous Android phones and is popular among tweakers. The ROM supports 32 phone models and 23 languages thus far.

Xiaomi wrapped up $216 million in funding back in June, and its Twitter account recently teased a possible expansion in the Hong Kong and/or Taiwan market. For now, its phones are mostly sold online within mainland China.

If you haven’t seen it yet, check out our in-depth interview with Xiaomi founder Lei Jun.

[Source: Donews - article in Chinese; Lower image: Silicon Dragon Ventures]

Sina Weibo is not making money. Not yet at least. But it may have found a way to do so, as we saw from last week’s Weibo social commerce test with Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi. The manufacturer offered 50,000 MI2 phones to Weibo users, which they could order through tweeting. Payments are all done within Sina Weibo.

The result was staggering, with 1.3 million reservations made for those phones in just over five minutes. That was pretty shocking, and I chose it to be my pick for the top news story of last week. As I noted then, we have to give credit to Sina Weibo as a platform as it enabled Xiaomi to capitalize on such high demand. If Xiaomi could to fulfill each request, that would have meant $416 million!

I can’t help but feel that this is something that Twitter could try too. In fact Twitter has already tested something like this with its @EarlyBird experiment. That turned out to be a flop.

But the mechanism is different. @EarlyBird helped brands tweet out deals, but that’s about it. In contrast the Xiaomi-Weibo experiment last week was led and spread by Xiaomi. Folks who made a reservation also had to tweet their orders. And the result of this brand and fan push was a viral one.

Another key difference between Weibo and Twitter’s @EarlyBird is that payment is made through Weibo credits, thus providing a seamless process of ordering and paying for a Xiaomi MI2 entirely on Weibo.

I’m not sure if Sina Weibo will open this up for all brands, but given this Xiaomi success, my guess is that it probably will.

Remember that interesting little social commerce experiment earlier this week in which Chinese phone-maker Xiaomi sold phones via Sina Weibo? Well, that two-day promotion has now ended, and Xiaomi has revealed that it generated about 1.3 million reservations on its way to selling the allotted 50,000 Xiaomi Mi2 phones in just five minutes and 14 seconds.

Not bad considering the Mi2 was being sold at full price (1,999 RMB, which is US$318). As for the social side of all this, Xiaomi’s original post about the promo on Weibo ended up getting 810,000 comments and 2.33 million retweets/reshares.

With the whole experiment being way over-subscribed, a lottery will decide who are the 50,000 people that can go through with the transaction. They have just 24 hours to sort it out, so their credit cards better not be maxed out already.

This all looks to have been an e-commerce test for the Twitter-esque Sina Weibo, which has been piling on new features in the past couple of years as quickly as its accruing new users. It surpassed 400 million registered Weibo-ers last month, and assuming that it has not reached a plateau it could well hit half a billion users before next summer. But it’s still not milking monetizing all those folks very well.

As for Xiaomi, we noticed last night that the Beijing-based phone-maker was teasing the prospect of its expansion into Hong Kong. So far it has focused solely on selling online within mainland China.

[Source: The Next Web; Xiaomi]

Piling on the clues, the image features a map of Hong Kong in silhouette, and has the Bauhinia flower (as appears on the Hong Kong flag), so those are massive clues that suggest this is related to Hong Kong. In case the tweet gets deleted, I’ll post a screenshot:

We reached out to a Xiaomi representative in Beijing, but the team could not comment on this.

When we talked to Xiaomi founder and serial entrepreneur Lei Jun a few months ago, he did reveal that the phone-maker was looking to expand to Taiwan and Hong Kong in the near future.

Then, at the GMIC Silicon Valley conference, Lei expanded on what he told us to pin-point Hong Kong, Taiwan, and even Singapore as targets for online sales by the end of the year.

The new Xiaomi Mi2, a quad-core Android smartphone that costs only 1,999 RMB (US$318), looks set to replicate the success of the first-ever phone the company made. The device is sold in batches, partly to generate hype as it repeatedly sells out, though also to alleviate the fact that it’s struggling to manufacture the phone in sufficient numbers at a time when giant manufacturers like Samsung dominate the supply-chain of key components from smaller suppliers. If Xiaomi is indeed launching in Hong Kong and/or Taiwan, then it must be confident that it has enough stock to ship to these markets – despite their small size.

Rival Meizu has its own brick-and-mortar store in Hong Kong, which opened at the very end of last year. But Xiaomi is a big believer in e-commerce, and its overseas sales would certainly be done purely online.

Here’s the full teaser image; notice the Hong Kong map in silhouette and the iconic flower:

Click to enlarge.

If you’re not willing to face the Mayan’s mooted apocalypse on the 21st while clutching your lousy old phone, then Xiaomi has some good news for you. The young Chinese phone-maker is doing some clever social commerce today, selling two of its new Xiaomi Mi2 devices every hour via Sina Weibo, China’s hottest Twitter-y service.

The Xiaomi Mi2 on sale on Sina Weibo. Click to enlarge.

Sales of the Android-based Xiaomi Mi2 run through to the 21st – but note that only 50,000 units of the popular phone are available in this promo. The most unique part of the whole exercise is that, as a Xiaomi representative tells us, “Ordering and payments are all done within Sina Weibo,” so you don’t even need to leave the social site so as to snag your new smartphone. Ordering can be accessed via a special events page on Weibo, here (pictured right).

To make it truly viral and social, all orders also get posted as Weibo ‘tweets’. The hashtag attached to this event is seeing lots of action, and the original Xiaomi post about the sale (here) has so far racked up nearly 617,000 retweets and over 281,000 comments.

This promo is also very likely to be a test-bed for Sina Weibo shifting more fully into e-commerce, so we can expect more like this on Weibo in the future.

Xiaomi has always taken social media – especially Weibo – very seriously as a key way of building up its small brand as it takes on giants such as Samsung and Huawei in the country. The newest Mi2 model went on sale in October.

The9 is one of China’s biggest gaming companies. ZTE is one of its biggest handset and telecom equipment makers. So what do you get when you put those two things together? No, seriously, take a second and think of a guess! Got one? OK, here’s what they’re working on: an internet television company. Wait, what?

It’s certainly not what I was expecting, but it’s true: ZTE and The9 have announced the establishment of a new joint subsidiary company (to be not-so-creatively called ZTE The9) based in Wuxi that will work on value-added services for the internet television industry. The ultimate goal is to create products that will support the web, mobile phones, and televisions, to get into 90 percent of Chinese households with internet TVs, and to create a high-quality internet TV entertainment platform. The new company’s CEO Zhao Jingyi said that the goal is to do all of that within two or three years, which certainly sounds ambitious.

The9 does have content partnerships with a number of mobile and TV companies to bring gaming videos to their platforms, so the partnership isn’t quite as weird as it sounds at first, although I have no idea what ZTE is bringing to the table. But it may just be that the companies see an opening for smart TVs in China. If that’s the case, they certainly wouldn’t be alone; there has been a lot of talk about the future development of China’s internet and smart TV sector recently (fueled in part by all the Xiaomi TV news).

Personally, I do think there could be an opening for smart TVs and an internet TV platform to explode in China. Although the concept hasn’t really caught on in the West, where people who want to access the internet services via TVs often do so via gaming consoles or HTPC setups, both of those things are far less common in China, and set-top boxes seem like a very short-term solution that is destined to ultimately be replaced by services and platforms that come pre-installed on the televisions themselves. My guess is that ZTE The9′s two to three year timeframe is a bit overly ambitious, but I could certainly be wrong. The tech industry in China is developing very quickly, and in another couple of years, things might really look totally different. My guess is that ZTE The9 will also be up against a lot of competition, though. It’s clear that Xiaomi is interested in the internet TV sector, and I expect a lot of other internet and tech companies to head in similar directions over the next year or two, especially if Xiaomi is able to resolve its regulatory issues.

[via Sina Tech]

Here’s what we think the new Xiaomi set-top box might look like after a few weeks on its hot new SARFT content diet!

Mobile phone makers Xiaomi recently branched out into the world of entertainment, announcing a set-top box that looked ready for an interesting run at the Chinese market until regulatory bureau SARFT got involved and shut things down because the gadget violated several regulations about streaming video content. Now, according to an article in Yicai, the set-top box may be on its way back, minus the offending content and with a possible rebranding of sorts.

Yicai’s article is based almost entirely on information from one or more anonymous sources at Xiaomi, which means this entire story should be taken with a grain of salt. That said, supposedly Xiaomi has cut access to all offending content from the device — any content that Xiaomi itself did not have the rights to stream — and will have the device back on the market soon. If true, that would also imply that Xiaomi has partnered with one of the seven media organizations SARFT requires companies making set-top boxes to partner with. That could mean the set-top box is also coming back with some new content courtesy of that new partner, but in all likelihood the device has lost a lot of its most desirable content: popular TV dramas that viewers demand by Xiaomi hasn’t purchased the rights to.

The Yicai acticle also speculates that the device may be repositioned somewhat as a mobile accessory to the Xiaomi phone, rather than as a standalone set-top box. Although this is not an entirely uncommon tactic for avoiding regulation — think eedoo’s iSec game console that was going to be branded a “home entertainment device” to circumvent the console ban — it’s not likely Xiaomi is trying to throw regulators of the trail here; rather, such a move would likely be aimed at shifting consumer expectations and lowering the hype surrounding the device.

Since Yicai is already speculating, though, let me throw in some speculation of my own: Xiaomi could also consider launching the set-top box outside the Chinese mainland. I’m no legal expert, but I suspect the regulatory environment would be a bit more relaxed in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and perhaps even Singapore — all markets where some consumers might be interested in a device that streams the latest and greatest in Chinese television. We knew Xiaomi has been toying with the idea of launching its smartphone handset in Taiwan, and a company like this does seem destined to make moves internationally sometime, so why not now? I certainly don’t expect Xiaomi will concede its Xiaomi TV dreams in China, but it may find a more receptive regulatory audience for selling its original version of the device overseas.

[Yicai via Sina Tech]

It’s clear that Chinese startup Xiaomi is not content to rest on its laurels making handsets. Its recently-announced set-top box may be in some regulatory trouble, but apparently the company is also thinking about actual televisions and, according to an announcement from Kingsoft last night, it has just purchased 9.87 percent of Kingsoft Cloud Group, a subsidiary of Kingsoft that itself has a number of cloud-tech subsidiary companies (there’s a useful chart of their relationships here).

The total cost of the shares came to more than $1.8 million. It’s not clear yet exactly what Xiaomi plans to do with this new investment, but the cloud technology Kingsoft Cloud Group works on could certainly be useful both for the company’s MIUI mobile OS and for its new television plans, if those are fully realized someday. It’s also worth mentioning that Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun is quite familiar with Kingsoft, having worked there years ago when the company was just a few people and a dream. (See this interview with Lei for more details on his time at Kingsoft and his other experience before forming Xiaomi).

[Via Sina Tech]

The Xiaomi set-top box: just the beginning?

We’ve written a lot about Xiaomi’s set-top box, which readers may recall has recently become tangled in a regulatory mess. That nightmare is far from over, but according to anonymous sources cited in a report in the Southern Metropolis Daily, Xiaomi is already looking past the set-top box, which it sees as just a stepping stone to producing an actual Xiaomi television.

The sources are vague, but the basic idea is a logical one: even with massive sales, Xiaomi isn’t going to be able to generate much revenue with the relatively cheap set-top box as compared to the sales of its first and second generation phones. Stepping back even further, the set-top box is, by its very nature, a temporary solution — a stopgap to help us get internet video onto our televisions until the time when everyone’s television supports all kinds of internet video apps natively. Smart TV manufacturers thusfar have done a rather clunky job of it, but that day is coming, and certainly Xiaomi can generate a lot more revenue selling TVs than it could seeing set-top boxes or low-cost smartphones.

So is an actual Xiaomi television coming in the near future? Probably not. Especially given the regulatory issues the set-top box has run into, it seems likely it will be quite a while before we see any traces of an actual Xiaomi television. But regardless of the veracity of this particular rumor, it does seem likely that a television is a part of the company’s long-term strategy.

[Southern Metropolis Daily via Sina Tech]

We reported on Friday that Xiaomi’s TV set-top box had stopped working and speculated that the reason might be regulatory. And while the founder and CEO of the upstart gadget-maker, Lei Jun, has said the suspension was scheduled, the fact is that, in the gadget’s current form, Xiaomi’s ‘Box’ does run afoul of a couple of regulations laid out by SARFT, China’s main media regulator. And that makes it effectively illegal in China for the time being.

The first problem is that any company interested in offering a set-top box in China is required to partner with one of seven media organizations that have been issued the relevant permits by SARFT. Additionally, the fact that the Xiaomi TV allows users to watch videos directly via public websites that Xiaomi doesn’t own the rights to is also in violation of SARFT’s rules for set-top boxes. Finally, Xiaomi may also need to apply to SARFT for permits relating to the individual serial numbers that must be listed on each device. SARFT officials have declined to comment directly on whether or not Xiaomi is being investigated or otherwise dealt with, but a SARFT spokesman told Sina Tech reporters, “The document [with the relevant regulations] is out there; going by that document is enough,” so it seems Xiaomi may not be in hot water so long as it cleans up its act before the box hits retail when it ships next month.

The problem, of course, is that achieving legal compliance requires Xiaomi to remove many of its publicly available videos and partner with one of SARFT’s seven content providers, which means the Xiaomi TV may not be able to offer the kind of content it was supposed to. The box plays video content from Sohu and Tencent Video, among other third party providers, but if Xiaomi doesn’t buy the rights to all of that content itself, it can’t legally show it through the device – yes, that’s even though the Xiaomi Box is merely a content aggregator, sort of like Flipboard is for reading news.

This is the offending gadget. Click to enlarge.

Here’s why that matters: the videos that Chinese internet users watch tend to be popular television shows from around the world. Streaming video sites have driven themselves nearly bankrupt paying the sky-high prices for the internet rights to top programs, and while costs are coming down, they’re still significant. None of SARFT’s seven official partners offer much of this kind of content; they’re mostly focused on news and state-sponsored programming. So Xiaomi has to do one of three things: either be forced to pay huge sums in licensing fees to buy the rights to fun content that’s publicly available online already; cut all that content and sell a set-top box that doesn’t allow users to watch what they want; or try to find some way around the SARFT rule that doesn’t provoke SARFT into stepping in and shutting the whole thing down.

None of that, of course, answers the question of why this is actually happening. Why would SARFT — which is China’s film and TV regulator/censorship bureau — implement such buzz-killing regulations in the first place? Here is where we enter the realm of speculation, but I would say it is because SARFT feels the move to internet television has seen content that SARFT prefers to control fall increasingly under the purview of other departments in China’s vast bureaucracy (primarily MIIT, which is responsible for a lot of internet regulation). The result has been a sort of on-again off-again bureaucratic turf war that has played out over the last few years and appears to be ramping up again. A set-top box that plays internet video content only would at first glance appear to be in MIIT’s domain, but SARFT also regulates this area to protect “traditional” television and, to the extent that it can, prevent users from switching to internet video before SARFT has the ability to totally regulate the content there.

I recently wrote about the plans to establish a new, state-run telecom under SARFT, which would put an awful lot more than just TV under SARFT’s control, and those plans ought to concern internet users and TV fans alike. SARFT has a long history of buzzkilling, banning all kinds of stuff, and it may well be crippling the Xiaomi TV before the device has even launched by requiring it to remove its most attractive content.

Just one week after the launch of Xiaomi’s set-top box for streaming media to TVs, the company has announced that it has been forced to suspend its online media service. Effective immediately, it makes the Xiaomi Box into a brick, and there’s no official comment yet on why this has happened or when service will be restored. We’ve reached out to gadget-maker Xiaomi in Beijing, and will update if we hear back. [UPDATE two hours later: Xiaomi responds by saying that founder and CEO Lei Jun has already said the service is just in pre-launch beta testing for now. The full explanation is in the quote below]:

As you known, Xiaomi Box is still in testing. It’s not on sale now. Xiaomi invited 600 fans to try it, these fans would give us their feedback which the we could then learn from. It’s Xiaomi tradition. To halt the video services is because of system maintenance. [It] may affect the 600 users experience. [The] Xiaomi Box official Weibo account posted a notice at 8:30pm last night, and Xiaomi official Weibo account retweeted. And also, Xiaomi forum posted the news at the same time.

Speculation on Chinese tech blogs such as Techweb is that the Xiaomi Box has run afoul of China’s media regulator, SARFT, which also controls online video. Another theory is that the Xiaomi Box service – which is an aggregator of partner content, not a standalone content provider – has been taken down by a non-partner that has an issue with its content ending up on the set-top box. In that regard, fingers are already being pointed at CNTV, the online video subsidiary of state-controlled television company CCTV. That’s because CNTV’s web TV and radio can only be carried by those who have the correct (SARFT-issued) license, such as China People’s Radio. It is thought that Xiaomi might not have permission for this.

Being tripped up by strict media regulations is a worry for all of China’s web companies, and Xiaomi – whose one other product is a popular Android-based smartphone – seems to have had a brutal first lesson in this.

But the outage won’t affect too many people, as there are only media-issued and test Xiaomi Box devices out there. Pre-orders for the ‘Box’ have started, but they don’t ship until sometime next month – which at least gives the startup gadget maker time to get its content back online before the general public can access it.

[Source: Techweb - article in Chinese]

According to the release, Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun believes that as the smartphone replaces the PC for many applications, the television is poised to become the most important end-user client in one’s home, provided it’s connected to the internet. The Xiaomi TV, then, is the first step in that direction; a way of bringing the internet’s video content to the TV.

The new device also represents an interesting challenge for Apple. Xiaomi now offers a device similar to the Apple TV for less money, with far more localized content, and it even supports input from all of Apple’s mobile devices. If Apple ever gets its Apple TV together and starts really pushing it, the company may find that Xiaomi is already eating its lunch in China, having already attracted Apple fans to Xiaomi’s TV platform.

Of course, we may not really be able to see Xiaomi’s reasons for launching the set-top box yet. The company is promising frequent updates and it will release an APK to third-party developers, meaning that what the device is capable of now could be very different from what it is capable of one year from now.

Xiaomi is today capitalizing on the success of its Android-based smartphones by launching a stream-to-TV box, also based on Android, called the Xiaomi Box. It’ll stream media from your phone, tablet, or laptop over your home’s wifi network, bringing your movies or music onto the big-screen just like with similar set-top products from Apple and Google. The Xiaomi Box will cost 399 RMB (US$63), or a mere 299 RMB ($48) for owners of Xiaomi phones.

Xiaomi’s new toy goes on order at 9pm tonight (Beijing time) sometime in December via its website in limited numbers. The Xiaomi.com site has just been updated with some promotional videos and images.

Image from official @小米盒子 Weibo page. Click to enlarge.

The Xiaomi Box was given a very low-key launch this afternoon in Beijing, with Xiaomi founder and CEO Lei Jun (pictured right) giving a hands-on demo. The gizmo supports Apple’s Airplay for streaming media, as well as the industry-backed DLNA and Miracast protocols, and of course allows for full 1080p HD playback. It’ll run the same MIUI-themed Android OS that Xiaomi first created back in 2010, and will get regular over-the-air updates in the same way that the company’s phones do.

Users of the set-top box can use their Xiaomi phones as a remote control for their zapped-to-TV content, thanks to Xiaomi’s new video app which we previewed earlier this month. The company promises that the support for Airplay means that the same applies to iPhone, iTouch, and iPad owners.

The box can handle videos of all kinds: RM/RMVB、MKV、TS、FLV、AVI、VOB、MOV、WMV、MP4 and more are all supported. The device comes with a remote and an HDMI cable, too, so it’s ready for use right away. In terms of content, Xiaomi already has partnerships with PPTV, Sohu video, and Tencent video among others. And in addition to videos, the device will allow users to share their photos on the big screen with friends and family.

Here’s the interface on a TV:

This post was updated to correct the Xiaomi TV release date and add additional details about the device.

Chinese phone-maker Xiaomi has today confirmed its acquisition of Duokan, a startup maker of e-reader and Apple TV apps. The financial details have not been revealed, but the wholesale buy-up will see Duokan CEO, Wang Chuan, installed as the eigth core Xiaomi team-member.

Xiaomi currently has only two smartphone models for sale, the Android-based 1S and Mi2, and has confirmed that it will reveal its Xiaomi TV set-top box – thought to be called the Xiaomi Box – tomorrow. The Duokan acquisition will clearly be relevant to both of Xiaomi’s products, with the Duokan e-reader software likely going onto the smartphones, and the Duokan TV app perhaps surfacing in an all-new version for the Xiaomi Box. We’ll see tomorrow.

Duokan raised $10 million in series A funding in May of this year, led by Xu Xiaoping, MorningSide Ventures, and none other than Lei Jun, Xiaomi’s founder.

Duokan is best known for its Kindle firmware, which replaces Amazon’s own software on the Kindle with Duokan’s own platform for reading and downloading e-books. Later Duokan launched more conventional e-reader apps for Android and iOS, and more recently added Windows Phone and Apple TV to its repertoire.

In our recent interview with Lei Jun, he made it clear that the disruptive phone-maker was keen to diversify its hardware, but that it wasn’t going to take the more obvious route of making an Android tablet.

[Source: QQ Tech - article in Chinese]

The Xiaomi TV teaser photo tweeted out by CEO Lei Jun this morning.

Just six days after we gave you an exclusive peek at a new video app from China’s Xiaomi that suggested it might be working on a TV set-top box, the founder and CEO of the upstart phone-maker has all but confirmed the Apple TV-esque gadget with a teaser photo (above). It shows that the Xiaomi TV streaming video box will launch on November 14th.

Yes, Lei Jun’s photo is just a cardboard box – similar in style to the recycleable ones that carry its phones – but the “box” pun (“This time, we’re just selling a box”) indicates that Xiaomi is taking on Apple with an Android-powered set-top box.

Together with its afore-mentioned video app for Android (which is being added to Xiaomi’s MIUI software in gradual updates), it’ll allow streaming video to be sent across a home network to your TV. Your Xiaomi phone will thereby serve as a remote control. It’ll support all of China’s top video sites, such as Youku and iQiyi. It’s not clear if the Xiaomi video app will launch for other Android devices.

Local rivals to Xiaomi in this space include the video-streaming site LeTV, which launched its own box – albeit tied to its own site’s content – this summer.

[Source: @雷军 on Weibo; via TechinAsia Chinese]

You’re out of MiBi, says the system when a user attempts to download a paid theme in the new theme store, before prompting them to purchase the virtual currency.

Xiaomi’s MIUI platform has been totally free since its inception. And while the OS itself remains free, the company has taken its first step towards monetization, launching a new version of its theme store in which designers can opt to charge money for their themes. Themes, which are downloadable skins for the Android-based MIUI OS, had previously all been free, but now some themes will cost money. Or rather, they will cost “MiBi,” a virtual currency that Xiaomi users can purchase with real money via Alipay or by adding the charge to their phone bill.

There has been some user backlash over this change already (although part of this is also because the new version of the store is quite buggy, something that Xiaomi says it is working to fix). And indeed, some themes that previously were free may now cost money, as whether or not a theme is free is now up to its designer. Xiaomi itself has promised that all of the themes it designs will remain free, but third-party designers can now opt to charge. Xiaomi takes a 30 percent transaction fee, just like the Apple App and Google Play stores.

The introduction of a virtual currency suggests that the move to monetize MIUI may not stop here, and that other aspects of the mobile operating system could also become a bit less free. It’s a change that was likely inevitable given the low price of Xiaomi handsets — they have to make money somehow, after all — but it does pose a danger to the “cool factor” the brand has been carefully cultivating over the past year. Xiaomi will have to tread carefully here, as while it appears that most users aren’t all that upset about the change as yet, taking something that was free and charging money for it is always a risky proposition.

This week we saw more developments in the mobile chat application space, as a number of Asia-based companies and startups continue to push the envelope in mobile communication. As long as the internet remains stable, then maybe we’ll have a chance to test them all out. Got that, China?

Here are our picks for notable news stories from this past week.

Willis’s pick: Vertical chat apps might be the future

The recent Cubie funding news is an indication that there could be an opportunity in vertical chat apps. Cubie is a chat app for females which I think could inspire more niche chat apps to mushroom.

Charlie’s pick: Xiaomi is Totally Making a Set Top Box

We’ve done a bunch of stories on this rumor this week, and I for one am pretty convinced it’s true. It’s a ballsy move for Xiaomi that, if it really catches on, could accelerate the changes in the way Chinese people watch television (and maybe leave CCTV out to dry in the process).

Steven’s pick: EBay set to Return to China This Month With E-Commerce Tie-Up

Who remembers eBay? In China, pretty much no-one. In 2004, it came, it saw, it got its butt kicked by the local competition. So perhaps the auction site will be luckier the second time. This week we heard from Chinese e-commerce site Xiu.com, which is set to reveal a tie-up with eBay on November 12th.

Rick’s pick: Are Beijing ISPs Cutting Internet in Run-Up to China Leadership Handover?

Widespread reports of ‘internet maintenance’ leading up to the 18th Party Congress this week are pretty discouraging, but yet not at all surprising. Wondering why China ranked poorly in the recent World Bank’s recent ‘Doing Business’ report? It’s shit like this.

Enricko’s pick: Tencent to Gain Nationwide Visibility in Indonesia With Global Mediacom Partnership

Tencent is going to make its presence felt really soon in Indonesia, with its app WeChat leading the way. Its partnership with local media powerhouse Global Mediacom will certainly help. Korean-made app Kakaotalk as well as Japan’s Line are looking to expand their respective user bases in Indonesia as well.

At present, the app contains video content from Sohu video and Qiyi video (Baidu’s video site). That would seem to indicate that although Xiaomi has attracted some big players in the field, it hasn’t yet locked down a deal with Youku Tudou, which is far and away China’s biggest streaming video service.

Of course, the addition of a video app to MIUI can’t be considered official confirmation of anything, but the fact that streaming video was added to the developer version of the OS shortly before the set-top box is expected to be announced seems likely to be more than coincidence, especially since there is no real reason for Xiaomi to push its own video app and set up partnerships with Sohu and Qiyi if the only target for this new video platform is Xiaomi phones (which already have tons of app options including dedicated apps for Sohu and Qiyi video). This isn’t a company that’s going to waste time and money to do something redundant, and I think the presence of this new video app is the best evidence yet that Xiaomi really does have a set-top box in the works.

The anonymous tipster to that forum also says the Xiaomi box will cost 499 RMB (US$80), up from the earlier rumor of a mere 299 RMB, Also, it will support both Apple’s Airplay and DLNA protocols to allow streaming over wifi to your TV from other devices, such as smartphones or laptops on your home network.

On a more obvious note, the set-top box is believed to run Android – but since Xiaomi’s phone runs that, it’s not exactly an area of mystery. The leaked picture also shows a few other unexpected things, like HDMI output.

We reached out to Xiaomi staffers in Beijing, but were told there’s “no official comment” from them. If this is for real, then it appears there are devices out there that are either at fairly early prototype stage, or perhaps even up to limited test-manufacturing batches. The rumors continue to indicate that Xiaomi’s Apple TV challenger will be unveiled in mid-November, ready for the usual buyers rush before Chinese New Year.

[Source: Sina Tech - article in Chinese]

That was all a year or so ago, and in the intervening year I have grown to like the company enough that I even bought one of its phones. I’m very excited about the rumored set-top box that may or may not be coming. And increasingly I find myself liking Lei Jun and hoping Xiaomi succeeds. So what changed?

A couple things. First and foremost is that from what I can see, the company is interested in solving real problems and in actually serving consumers. In the early goings, the price needed to be low for Xiaomi to remain competitive. But a year of branding and hype later, it would have been easy for Xiaomi to raise the price a little bit for the Mi2 handset. Even with the influx of other cheap smartphone competitors, I’m fairly certain the Mi2 could have been priced at 2499 RMB instead of 1999 RMB and it would still have sold out its preorders in record time. So why didn’t Xiaomi ratchet up the prices? I can’t claim to be privy to the company’s internal discussions. But what I do know is the current price allows lots of people who can’t afford something as expensive as an iPhone or a Galaxy SIII to buy a comparably powerful smartphone for a fraction of the price. It’s making the internet and smartphones more accessible to more people, and what’s more, its success at a low price point has inspired lots of competitors to try to do the same thing. That’s a great thing for consumers.

I also like that Xiaomi backs up the hype, of course. Any company is only as good as its products, and while I haven’t gotten a chance to play with the Mi2 yet, the company’s first smartphone was pretty damn good. And I don’t just mean good for the price, I mean good period.

Finally, I like that Xiaomi has guts. Just like it would have been easy for the company to raise prices a little bit for the Mi2, it also would have been easy to capitalize on its branding and crank out yet another Android tablet like everyone else seems to be doing. But Lei Jun has said that although that would be easy, he’s not interested. Instead, rumor has it the company is working on a set-top box for internet TV. Sure, it sounds like Apple TV, but Apple TV is one of Apple’s least successful products. If the rumors are true — and increasingly I suspect that they may be — then Xiaomi is taking a pretty big risk with potentially huge rewards. It’s hard not to respect that.

I don’t like everything about Xiaomi; for example, I’m not a huge fan of its artificial-scarcity sales tactics. But as cynical as it may be to mail phones out a few thousand at a time, it’s tough to argue with Xiaomi’s success. And from a marketing perspective, the preorders, ship dates, and open sales enable the company to take what would be one burst of publicity and turn it into dozens because every time a new round of devices is sold, there’s a new quotable statistic (“Xiaomi sold X handsets in Y hours!”) and thus a new round of news stories.

Of course, Xiaomi is still quite a young company, and things could still go very wrong. But as of right now, I’d say that if Chinese startups out there are looking for a role model, Xiaomi is about as good an example as they’ll find. Here’s hoping the company stays focused and gutsy and doesn’t drop the ball and get lazy or greedy.

Note: Hopefully this is obvious, but I have no relationship with Xiaomi or any of its staff and no interests (financial or otherwise) in it or any of its competitors. Of course, we do cover Xiaomi and its competitors here on Tech in Asia, and will continue to to so, basing our coverage on the facts available to us.

This isn’t a real photo of the device. But it might look like this. Hooray for groundless speculation!

A couple weeks ago we passed along an interesting rumor that Xiaomi, the company that more or less started the cheap-but-powerful Android phone trend in China, has been working on an Apple TV-like set-top box product. Xiaomi, of course, isn’t commenting on this one way or the other, but the rumors have just gotten a bit more specific: the device will cost 299 RMB ($47), Xiaomi has already signed contracts with a few partners for content, and the device will hit the market or at least be announced next month.

It’s all still just rumors, of course, but reporters at Investor China found that a number of potential partner tech companies weren’t willing to do interviews, and insiders at several places have dropped hints that the reason is a Xiaomi set-top box that will be announced in mid-November.

Given that Xiaomi continues to no-comment rather than outright deny this, it’s starting to feel like one of those rumors that’s actually true. If Xiaomi is making a set-top box it will be interesting to see whether the company attempts to sell it like it sells its mobile handsets — in small batches at a time, through its own website — or whether it will take a more traditional approach this time around.

It will be also interesting to see whether Xiaomi fans take the bait. If the 299 RMB price is accurate, it’s easy to see lots of dedicated fans snatching this up as soon as they can. But whether the device actually delivers will probably determine whether or not it can expand beyond Xiaomi’s existing fanbase. Even Apple has had trouble in this sector, so a Xiaomi success would be truly impressive; an example of a company many see as aping Apple beating it at its own game.

But of course, that’s all a little premature given that we’re not sure the device even exists. Until we know, you’ll just have to get by with your imaginations and my crudely-photoshopped Apple TV expertly-crafted mockup of what the device might look like (pictured above).

[Investor China via Sina Tech]

If you’re one of the Xiaomi fans who preordered Xiaomi’s new Mi2 Android handset, you may not have to keep waiting too much longer. According to the company’s website, the first 50,000 units will ship out on October 30. The next round, of about 250,000 units, should be hitting doorsteps around China sometime in mid-November.

If you didn’t preorder, you can reserve a handset of your own via Xiaomi’s website, but you’ll have to pay 224 RMB ($35) for the privilege and who knows when devices preordered now will actually ship. Still, even with a 224 RMB preorder charge, the phones are likely to be cheaper through Xiaomi’s site than the inflated prices on Taobao will be once these things start shipping out and scalpers get their hands on them.

At this point, it’s hard to believe that Xiaomi is having issues manufacturing the phone in large quantities, so this delayed shipping schedule — which is exactly what the company did last year with the Mi1 — is clearly a case of artificial scarcity designed to boost interest. I’m not a big fan of artificial scarcity — from a consumer perspective, it sucks — but no one could deny that it has been hugely successful for Xiaomi so far.

Based on the Mi1, which was an excellent handset aside from its subpar camera, I expect the Mi2 to be more than worth the 2000 RMB ($317) asking price, and I expect to see the handsets selling for a good deal more than that on Taobao starting October 21st. In fact, you can already preorder the phone on Taobao if you’re willing to drop an extra $100-$200 on it.

This isn't a real photo of the device. But it might look like this. Hooray for groundless speculation!

The Chinese tech scene is full of rumors, but boy, this one is interesting. Sina Tech says that according to numerous sources it is in contact with, Xiaomi — the company that kicked off China’s cheap smartphone revolution last year with its M1 phone — has been working on a set-top box much like the Apple TV. Sources say the device is developed enough that it’s already in limited internal testing around the office. Video content for the device will reportedly come from China’s major internet video services, which I have to assume means Youku Tudou, among others.

An anonymous source at Xiaomi told Sina Tech:

Xiaomi is an internet company, and TV set-top-boxes will be using the internet [streaming] as a main selling point. As far as integration with the Xiaomi phone is concerned, it will have a feature like Apple’s Airplay.

We have contacted Xiaomi for confirmation or any comment they might have on this rumor, and will update if we hear back, although we don’t expect to hear anything conclusive. When you think about it, though, a set-top box would make a lot of sense, especially if Xiaomi could make one that relied primarily on 3G (or 4G) technology. Wireless service costs in China are quite low, and while not everyone has a computer or the internet in their homes, most people do have televisions. And if it had access to the vast streaming libraries of Youku Tudou and other major video players, an inexpensive Xiaomi set-top box could have a hugely disruptive impact on the market and accelerate the extent to which Chinese people are streaming their TV from the net rather than tuning in via satellite.

On the other hand, Apple — clearly one of Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun’s inspirations and a pretty successful tech company in its own right — still hasn’t really seen the kind of success with its Apple TV that most of its other products enjoy.

Then again, China is a very different market, and Xiaomi has proven with its smartphones that it knows how to sell here. Is a Xiaomi set-top box really coming, and if it is, can it really catch on? We’ll have to wait and see. But cynical though I am about some of what he says, I really wouldn’t advise anyone to bet against Lei Jun.

[via Sina Tech]

If you’re familiar with the Chinese tech scene, chances are you are also familiar with serial entrepreneur Lei Jun (pictured above). Recently, I had a chance to speak to him to learn more about his story as an entrepreneur, and about his latest venture, the disruptive phone-maker Xiaomi.

His journey goes back to 1992 when he joined software maker Kingsoft after graduating from Wuhan University. Kingsoft back then had just five or six people, but today the company has more than 3,000 employees. The company IPO’d in Hong Kong in 2007. While working at Kingsoft (HKG:3888), Lei Jun ran the site Joyo.com as a side project. Joyo started as a downloads website but later it became an online bookstore. Success followed, and Amazon subsequently acquired Joyo for a whopping $75 million in 2004 – now it’s today’s Amazon China, at Amazon.cn.

After Kingsoft went public, Lei Jun jumped full-time into angel investing which saw him invest in over 20 startups, including browser maker UCWeb, clothing e-tailer Vancl, and payments service Lakala. All of his investments targeted companies in the mobile internet space. Lei Jun says that from 2007 to 2010, he has overseen over 70 funding rounds among his portfolio companies. And through his angel investing experience, Lei Jun became familiar with many local and international investors which he says have helped greatly in what would be his next venture – Xiaomi. He tells me:

We got to know a lot of investors and know what they like and don’t like. Through many co-investments opportunities, we have built trust among these investors. So when it came to investing in Xiaomi, things were a lot easier.

The birth of Xiaomi

Through his experience as an angel investor, Lei Jun firmly believes the mobile internet would be the next wave. And he believed in the importance of creating a channel, through hardware, in the mobile internet industry in China. “A phone as a channel,” he emphasizes. That idea gave birth to Xiaomi on April 6, 2010, over a year before its first smash-hit phone was revealed.

The Xiaomi Mi2, unveiled this summer and set to launch later this month.

Xiaomi was inspired by Apple, and Lei Jun pays great credit to Steve Jobs who he believes has shaped how the world uses phones and the mobile internet. Lei Jun saw the opportunity to create a smartphone tailored for China, a hardware company which can ride on the mobile internet wave. Lei Jun tells me that Xiaomi is built on three building blocks:

1. E-commerce
2. The openness of the Android platform and Xiaomi’s own MIUI skin
3. Xiaomi’s fans

Regarding e-commerce, Lei Jun said Xiaomi could sell phones online without having physical stores, and that greatly reduces costs. The saved resources can be put into making better quality phones. Before Xiaomi launched the first-gen M1 phone, the attractive and versatile MIUI, an Android ROM, had already been in the works for a year and was already used by lots of keen Android tweakers who flashed it onto their phones. Lei Jun says that MIUI gained the recognition of Android fans across the world. Every Friday, there will be a new MIUI update to keep the Android ROM updated and fresh.

In the near future, Xiaomi aims to operate in different mobile operating systems, which may include Windows Phone,” said Lei Jun. But that won’t come too soon, he noted.

Feedback from fans about their perfect phone

Fans play a huge part in Xiaomi’s success. What Xiaomi has become today is largely due to fans’ feedback. For example, to test the upcoming Mi2 phone, Xiaomi invited over 1,200 fans to provide feedback which the company could then learn from. For example, some users of the first-gen phone, the Xiaomi M1, didn’t know that the SIM card has to be pushed into the slot until a “click” sound is heard. In its revamped Mi1S unveiled this summer as a cheaper alternative to the new Mi2, Xiaomi has added in instructions to inform users that the SIM has to be pushed in. Lei Jun says of the company’s enthusiastic fans:

Most of the fans have ideas about their perfect phone. But many of them can’t do it because building a phone is tough. So they would give us feedback about the features that they think should be included in our next model. And if we incorporated that in our new phone, they will share the good news with their friends.

Besides providing feedback voluntarily, Xiaomi fans also serve as an echo chamber for the phone-maker. Lei Jun says that word of mouth marketing is perhaps one of the company’s best promotional channels. He describes Xiaomi users as people who are usually banded in a group. If one person starts using a Xiaomi phone, his or her friends would most likely start using it too. And in that way, the word spreads. Fans’ enthusiasm over Xiaomi was apparent when we attended the recent Xiaomi Mi2 launch event in Beijing. Fans paid to be there (the ticket revenue was donated to charity) and wore orange to show that they are fans of Xiaomi.

No IPO for at least 5 years

Xiaomi has so far sold 3.52 million units of its outgoing M1 smartphone and aims to sell over 5 million total units by the end of this year with the Mi2 soon available – a bit later this month – in the market. Lei Jun says that his company has already hit more than $1 billion in revenue and is expected to hit $2 billion by the end of 2012. He also claims that Xiaomi is perhaps the fastest company to hit $1 billion in revenue in just a year of full operations.

Xiaomi is already a profitable company and is looking to expand to Taiwan and Hong Kong in the near future. When asked about markets outside of Greater China, Lei explains:

We’re not thinking about other markets like India or Indonesia, yet. We want to stay focused on the Chinese market first before expanding.

Lei Jun has also communicated to all his investors that Xiaomi has no plans to IPO within the first five years of operation. He explained that the focus right now should be on building a world-class phone and business model around Xiaomi, and not worry about the exit just yet. Plus, the recent Facebook IPO has shown the negative side of being a public company. Figures and statistics have to be revealed to investors and the public, which he believes will distract from the company’s focus on building a great product.

Will Xiaomi expand into tablets? The answer is “No,” says Lei. He feels that the tablet is a very competitive market already thanks to Apple’s iPad. He pointed to the recent iPhone 5 launch event whereby Apple’s CEO Tim Cook revealed that the iPad has cornered 68 percent of the tablet market share, with 91 percent of all tablet web traffic coming from the iPad.

When asked about Xiaomi’s greatest barrier, he explains that integrating software and hardware with a beautifully crafted mobile phone design is always the greatest challenge. To overcome that, Xiaomi’s core team members include people who previously worked at Motorola, Google, Microsoft, and Kingsoft. Plus, the team also has the network of contacts to attract more quality talent moving forward.

To date, Xiaomi has raised $347 million in total funds – the series C of $216 million was revealed this June – and the company is already profitable. But Lei Jun insists that Xiaomi still has a long way to go before it can become a world class product which can compete on the world stage. Things are looking great for Xiaomi and most people in the Chinese tech industry will agree that its selling-like-hot-cakes phone and mobile platform is a force to be reckoned with.

A teaser image from Qihoo of its quad-core phone, which will be unveiled tomorrow.

The Chinese software company and search engine Qihoo 360 (NYSE:QIHU) doesn’t want to let the upstart phone-maker Xiaomi get all the glory for making China’s cheapest quad-core smartphone – and so Qihoo is set to launch its own, for even cheaper, at an event tomorrow.

The quad-core Qihoo phone has already been teased in photos posted to social media by Qihoo CEO Zhou Hongyi (pictured above). And it has been priced at a rock-bottom 1,499 RMB (US$237) for what’s believed to be an unlocked device – that’s a good bit cheaper than Xiaomi’s upcoming Mi2 which has already been unveiled and will ship sometime next week for 1,999 RMB.

But Qihoo’s approach to its smartphones is quite different to Xiaomi’s. Qihoo doesn’t badge its phones and instead relies on its OEM partner – as seen with the company’s first Android-based smartphone, the dismally-named AK-47, which was manufactured by Huawei. And so the as yet unnamed Qihoo quad-core phone is made by a manufacturer that pretty much no-one has heard of before, called Deovo. It has a 1.5GHz Tegra 3 processor that has as many cores as cows have stomachs, and a 4.7-inch screen at 1280×720 resolution. It’ll run a fairly lightly customized version of Android 4.0, perhaps with a bunch of Qihoo’s apps pre-installed – such as its Android anti-virus apps and its mobile browser.

Other markings (pictured below) on the Qihoo device indicate that it’ll be a special for China Mobile (NYSE:CHL; HKG:0941), the nation’s biggest mobile telco, and so it must be a TD-SCDMA 3G phone – and so not compatible on China’s other two networks, or pretty much anywhere else in the world.

Xiaomi has sold just over three million of its first-generation budget Android smartphone, so it’ll be a tough task for any other Chinese manufacturer to usurp that kind of pulling power. Nonetheless, these kinds of well-localized and very attractively priced China-brand smartphones really ought to be worrying the likes of HTC and Samsung.

[Source: Sina Tech; and more photos from CNbeta - articles in Chinese]

The Qihoo quad-core phone will actually carry Deovo and China Mobile logos (Image: CNbeta)

To refresh your memory, the Xiaomi Mi2 promises the punch of a Samsung Galaxy SIII but without taking such a big bite out of your wallet. It has a quad-core Snapdragon S4 (APQ8064) processor to power the MIUI-skinned Android 4.1 (Jellybean) phone, and a a 4.3-inch screen at 1280 by 720 pixels giving it a pixel density of 342PPI (higher than that of an iPhone 5). The Android buttons are part of the hardware, not the screen, so you still get useful things like haptic feedback – and more screen real estate. The price? 1,999 RMB (US$316) unlocked and contract-free.

Customization is, I reckon, a large part of Xiaomi’s success. Chinese phone users – despite their love of Apple products – generally don’t like to be locked down, and the freedom and ease of homescreen customization is integral to MIUI (the ROM familiar to Android tinkerers, and which was created by Xiaomi back in 2010). As customizable as Android is, MIUI makes it a lot easier to theme your phone in a thorough and fairly consistent way, like with the nifty Angry Birds number below:

How is it so easy? Why, there’s a theme store:

Plus there are quite a few things in there to serve as a separate ecosystem for Chinese users away from the Google way of doing things – there’s a separate Xiaomi app store and the company’s own MiDrive cloud storage service.

Xiaomi has nicely schooled the major manufacturers in how to put the current version of Android in a new smartphone as it ships. Are you watching, Motorola, Sony, et al?

As you’ll notice in the image above, MIUI goes for a light grey-white interface with orange accents, in contrast to the Tron-like blue-on-black of stock Android 4.0 and 4.1. But the aesthetics are similar, and on the whole MIUI is quite faithful to the now good-looking (but formerly fugly) Google mobile OS – and it looks all the better for remaining (aside from some of those cluttered themes) quite minimal and spare.

Benchmarking the Xiaomi Mi2

Benchmarks can be a thorny issue, so we’ll need to await some second opinions on the Xiaomi Mi2’s speed, but the three tests that Leiphone conducted – Antutu, Quadrant Advanced, and Qualcomm’s own Vellamo – showed the quad-core Mi2 flying along. In the Vellamo test, Xiaomi’s new flagship phone outpaced the HTC One XL by a healthy margin.

Hit the Leiphone link for plenty more hardware photos and MIUI 4.1 screenshots.

[Source: Leiphone - article in Chinese]

It was a little over a year ago that Xiaomi opened the first round of preorders for its first handset, the M1. The 300,000 available units sold out in 34 hours. But a year later, has Xiaomi still got the magic? We’d say yes. This morning the company opened a round of orders for its Mi1S, an upgraded version of the Mi1, and sold 300,000 units in just four minutes and 12 seconds. Seriously.

Of course, part of the reason Xiaomi phones sell out so fast is that the company only sells them from time to time, intentionally creating an artificial scarcity and the “cool” factor that comes along with having a phone most people can’t get because they didn’t make it through the ordering process fast enough. It is a testament to Xiaomi’s appeal, though, that one year in, this strategy hasn’t gone stale or put people off the product. In fact, if the comparative numbers are any indication, people are far more interested in Xiaomi now than they were a year ago. Now that’s some solid hype!

Xiaomi’s real focus right now isn’t the Mi1S at all, but rather the Mi2, the true successor to the Mi1. That phone won’t be available until next month, but judging from the enthusiasm at its announcement, it will likely sell quite quickly, too.

[via Xiaomi Weibo]

The China Internet Conference (Day 2) kicked off in Beijing this morning with Lei Jun, the founder and boss of Xiaomi, the upstart phone-maker. He was sharing specs and highlighting what’s awesome about the upcoming Mi2 phone. The information is pretty similar to the previous launch keynote.

In addition to that he also shared the secret to Xiaomi’s success in seven Chinese characters. I have quickly translated them just so entrepreneurs can keep them in mind while building their respective empires.

• 專注 – Focus on the things you do
• 极致 – Gung ho
• 口碑 – Reputation
• 快 – Quick to develop and launch into market

Fun. That’s the one word that I would use to describe the continual online wars in China. The most recent is between Baidu and Qihoo’s new 360 Search. Sometimes the Chinese tech scene sounds like a never-ending stream of smack-talk.

Here’s a list of eight wars in just the past year or so, listed in reverse chronological order:

1. Qihoo’s 360 Search vs Baidu, Google, Sogou

This week the search wars are pretty much dominating the tech media headlines. Qihoo dropped a bomb by launching its own search engine which is now thought to have 10 percent of the Chinese market share. That’s in just one week since its launch!

2. 360Buy vs Suning vs Gome

The price war between 360buy, Suning, and Gome could well be a fake war for the sake of publicity. I still suspect it is.

3. Qihoo’s CEO vs Xiaomi’s CEO

This war of words (and products too, after Qihoo unveiled a budget smartphone to counter the Xiaomi M1) looks very real given that Qihoo’s CEO Zhou Hongyi has made quite a name for himself in wanting to compete (or have a spat) with most other Chinese internet leaders.

4. Suning vs anyone selling electronics

The brick-and-mortar retailer has been aggressive in pushing into e-commerce where there’s much more growth potential.

5. Dangdang vs 360Buy

Yes, electronics sure are a hotly-contested sector!

6. Tmall vs anyone selling electronics

Though not the most profitable sector, the country’s biggest online retailer, Alibaba-owned Tmall.com, has been cutting prices on its own electronics portal, hoping to take chunks out of the market share of many rivals, such as 360Buy, Dangdang, Suning, and Gome’s Coo8.

7. Tencent vs UCWeb over mobile browsers

China’s biggest web company, Tencent, pushed into mobile browsers, allegedly breaking a contract partnership with UCWeb, makers of the popular UC Browser. That went all the way to the courts.

8. Tencent vs Qihoo over anti-virus

But the biggest and most bruising tech war ever might have been this one, from back in late 2010 over PC-based anti-virus products. It was lengthy and it got very ugly very quickly.

Of course, amidst all that there has been lots of interesting and healthy competition – some of it without needing any smack-talk! Tell us your favourite China biz wars in the comments.

[Image source: Quickmeme]

So after a long journey to the Beijing 798 Art Zone, I’m finally here, sweaty with tired thighs from all the walking and finding. But it was worth it, thankfully. Now straight to the Xiaomi Mi2 launch event: the specs that we reported earlier were correct. Qualcomm’s new quad-core Snapdragon S4 (APQ8064) chip will be inside the new Xiaomi Mi2 phone. The entire launch event felt sort of like an Apple keynote; and maybe that’s what Xiaomi was going for.

There are fans roaring and cheering whenever co-founder and CEO Lei Jun flashes pictures of the new Xiaomi phone, slowly fleshing out its specs. I have had a lot of conversations with folks here today and they all agree that Xiaomi has real fans. That’s all talk, of course, but now I’m seeing it for real. The atmosphere is warm, heated with an amazing zeal as people grab pictures. See my snaps below:

Specs!

The Xiaomi Mi2 will be slightly smaller, sleeker, and thinner than before (Lei Jun says that the phone is designed for Åsian hands to hold it in comfort). It’s not as wide as the Samsung Galaxy SIII. The rear camera has also been upgraded to an f2.0 27mm lens.

The screen has grown to have a 4.3-inch screen at 1280 by 720 pixels, giving it a pixel density of 342PPI – so it should in theory be sharper than an iPhone.

Lei Jun did show some pictures taken with the new Xiaomi Mi2 phones to show off its camera capabilities. It looks awesome; almost hard to believe. The camera shoots at 8 megapixels and has 1080p HD hi-res snap capabilities on both the front and rear cameras so users can do video calls much more easily. Lei Jun says that with the front camera, ladies can use it as a mirror. In fact, there will even be a mirror app for that!

Other capabilities include wifi display (allowing you to share images/screen with your smart TV), a gyrometer, a pressure/altitude gauge, bluetooth 4.0, and HID, etc. Next, Lei Jun claims that, in a stable wifi connection, Xiaomi’s download speed could go up to 42 Mbps which he says is faster than iPhone 4S. That’s HSPA+.

Android 4.1 & MIUI

Xiaomi Mi2 will be the first Chinese-made phone on Android 4.1 Jellybean that’s not stock – it’s skinned with the MIUI ROM. MIUI also gets a Chinese name: 米柚. Today also happens to be MIUI’s second birthday. Miui 4.1 will have a voice assistant like Siri (powered by iFlytek) as featured in the newest Android update. Plus there’s voice dictation. It will also have its cloud services where you can save your images, videos etc in the cloud – that’s the MiDrive app we profiled recently. Xiaomi Mi2 will still be able to customize your case color and also what’s inside MIUI, as with the first-gen phone. MIUI will also allow bigger text which Lei Jun jokingly says is good for elderly people in their 40s!

MIUI will have a “freestyle desktop” interface. That means it allows you to design your phone homepage style. You can swipe left, right, up, down to access what you have customized, allowing users to have a totally different way to design their phone interface and how they use it. That’s a lot more flexibility than in standard Android.

As for its own group messaging app, Miliao, Lei Jun said that on August 8th there were one million people online on Miliao at the same time. Miliao will also have a PC version which means it’s competing with China’s ubiquitous QQ instant messaging – and with Tencent’s other product, the Weixin/WeChat messaging app.

And how much would it cost? 1,999 RMB (US$313) for everything, folks. At this, the crowd roared. But… it will only become available this October. And for fans who bought tickets for today’s launch, they will enjoy a useful 199 RMB discount.

Honestly, the phone looks like an iPhone but it’s uniquely built for the Chinese market – and with a lot of support from its Chinese fans of course.

Check out the ever-so-cool 3D promo video of the Xiaomi Mi2 and MIUI below.

Here’s the first official image of the new quad-core beast. Its rear looks a bit too much like the Meizu MX 4-core with its white plastic rear dominated by a large and centrally-positioned camera. There’ll likely be some fallout and social media bitchin’ over that similarity later:

An 8MP camera will be on the back, with a 2MP webcam upfront:

The screen will expand from the 4-incher on the Xiaomi M1 up to 4.3-inches. No specific resolution is mentioned, but it’s clearly stated that the screen will hit 342PPI, making it more pixel-rich than the iPhone 4S (326PPI) and the new Samsung Galaxy SIII (306PPI):

Xiaomi says it reached nearly $1 billion in revenue in the first half of 2012 just on the strength of its one model of phone, so there’s a lot riding on its successor.

Hit the link for a few more sneaky snaps. Our own Willis Wee will be at the Beijing launch event which kicks off at 2:30pm local time.

[Source: Micgadget]

The makers of China’s hottest homegrown smartphone, Xiaomi, has made a curious acquisition in the form of the team behind the third-party messaging app MSNLite. The financial details of the deal haven’t been revealed, but Xiaomi’s co-founder, Huang Jiangji has confirmed that it has occurred, and described the Microsoft MSN clone as the best MSN client software [1].

One possible motivation behind the acquisition is that Xiaomi, which also makes the mobile-oriented, Whatsapp-esque group messaging app Miliao, wants to give that app some desktop/PC support to make it more like Apple’s Facetime.

MSNLite is popular, reportedly having millions of users. It’s a desktop app that started development in September 2010. With such a generic and odd name (and copyright-infringing too?), it’s hard to search for, but I eventually tracked it down to Hada.me.

For now, says Xiaomi’s co-founder, the MSNLite team will come work in Xiaomi’s Beijing HQ, and adverts will be dropped from the MSNLite app. It’s likely that the MSNLite app will morph into the Miliao PC app – or the team of geeks it has acquired will make a separate app for that purpose. The Miliao.com homepage says that it has 17 million users for its mobile messaging app, putting it behind NHN Line’s 50 million and WeChat’s 100 million.

[Source: QQ Tech - article in Chinese]

The Xiaomi M2 seems to have been stripped bare by a Chinese registration document.

It’s proving tough to keep China’s most-anticipated homegrown smartphone under wraps. The next-gen version of Xiaomi’s hit Android-based phone is due to launch, we now know, next Thursday (August 16th) in a Beijing art gallery. Apart from that, Xiaomi has teased the eco-friendly packaging. The rest, admittedly, is a mix of detective work and hearsay.

[UPDATE one day later: Of course, it's possible this is an update of the current phone and not the new flagship model].

For some impressive sleuthing we look to Engadget, which seems to have found the shiny metal plastic ass of the next Xiaomi phone in a regulatory filing (pictured above). The current Xiaomi M1 lacks any front-facing camera, so its heartening to see that the next iteration will have a webcam up front. Engadget’s Richard Lai also spotted three separate filings for the next Xiaomi phone, including one that’s CDMA. All of which points to Xiaomi once again working with two of China’s three mobile telcos to produce special versions of the next phone. One of the WCDMA ones will be China Unicom’s (NYSE:CHU; HKG:0762) special edition, while the CDMA one goes to China Telecom (NYSE:CHA; HKG:0728).

Other than that webcam, the filings would suggest that the Xiaomi M2 – if that’s indeed its name – will be similar to the original version that was launched last summer. After looking at a weirdly two-tone Xiaomi prototype last month, we’re not sure if we’re disappointed or relieved.

Leaked Specs?

Meanwhile, over at GizChina, some possibly leaked specifications take us into less evidence-based territory. These include, along with an unhealthily large dose of salt and MSG:

• 4.5-inch IPS display
• 1280 x 720 pixels screen resolution
• 12MP camera on the back
• 5MP camera upfront
• Quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro (APQ8064) processor

…OK, I’ll stop there. A basic grasp of economics suggests that that’s not all achievable in a bugdet/mid-range smartphone. But it’s a nice bit of wishful thinking. I think my speculative specs, including the crisp 1.2MP front-facing cam that’s found in the Asus Nexus 7, are a lot more realistic.

So, until August 16 rolls around, the Chinese regulatory filings suggest that we’ve already seen the next-gen Xiaomi phone, and now we just need to see its specs and price tag to judge whether it can replicate the success of the first phone by selling well over three million units and netting the startup company nearly $1 billion in revenue in just six months.

Oh, you tease! Xiaomi shows the eco packaging for its next-gen phone - but not the phone itself.

After the success of the first China-made Xiaomi phone, the follow-up is very eagerly awaited. It’d be no exaggeration to say that the next-gen Xiaomi phone will be, to China, like a new iPhone launch, the second coming of Christ, and Elvis riding down Shanghai’s Bund on the back of a T-Rex – all rolled into one. OK, that’d be a gross exaggeration. But the wait is almost over as the startup Xiaomi company is this morning teasing its next phone which looks set to launch later today. With the Weibo hashtag “Xiaomi Phone 2,” the Beijing-based firm has just teased the packaging for the new phone (pictured right), describing the box as “exquisite” and “environmentally friendly.”

[UPDATED one day later: Turns out the reveal might well be on August 16, and Xiaomi was just going for some long-running viral marketing with its box photos].

Gadget blog GizChina notes that Xiaomi founder Lei Jun has also been tweeting out cryptic teasers on his own Weibo account. Referring to the first-gen phone’s moniker, he wrote: “Xiaomi M1 + Xiaomi M1 = ……” My algebra is pretty lousy, but the answer could well be “M2.” Aside from that, Xiaomi seems to have done a fairly good job of keeping its new model under wraps, though we have seen a purported leaked protoype in blurrycam shots.

A Xiaomi representative didn’t immediately respond to our query about any launch event today, so we’ll watch Weibo closely for any more teasers or announcements.

Last week, Xiaomi claimed that it raked in nearly $1 billion in sales revenue in 2012 H1 from its sole smartphone model. Earlier in the year Lei Jun revealed that they’d sold three million units of the Android-based device in total up to that point.

Leaked photos of a prototype Xiaomi M2

This week saw Xiaomi announcing officially that it’s making boatloads of money, but it has also seen numerous rumors emerge about the impending mid-August launch of a new model Xiaomi phone, predictably called the M2.

First, GizChina translated a leaked report from Xiaomifans.com about the new phone, which it said would feature a 720p screen and a quad-core processor while maintaining its predecessor’s 2000 RMB ($317) price. Today, TechWeb is running a report citing its own internal sources that seems to confirm the phone’s basic specs, but suggests that the phone will actually be priced at 2499 RMB ($396). The TechWeb report also suggests the new phone features a back-mounted camera similar to the iPhone 4S’s, although whether or not it’s exactly the same camera or just the same size sensor isn’t clear.

Xiaomi, of course, isn’t commenting on any of these rumors, but it’s hard to believe that isn’t where the leaks began, especially since none of the leaked photos features the front of the phone, making it difficult to tell whether or not Xiaomi has added a front-facing camera for video chatting to the M2. I’m guessing the lack of photos means they haven’t added it but don’t want to draw attention to that fact; that, however, is pure speculation on my part.

Will the real phone live up to our speculative spec list? It’s hard to tell from rumors alone. But with all sources agreeing on a couple things (quad-core processor, mid-August launch date), it seems likely that we’ll be getting some official news about the much-anticipated handset soon.

Xiaomi, the young Chinese company that has shaken up the smartphone world with its keenly-priced M1 smartphone (pictured above), has announced that it raked in 6.05 billion RMB (US$957.46 million) in sales revenue for the first half of this year. Being a private company – barely more than a startup, founded back in 2010 – Xiaomi doesn’t need to reveal such figures. But its founder, Lei Jun, is something of a showman who has effectively whipped up a lot of hype for the single Android-based phone that it makes by teasing out its secrets.

No new actual sales unit figures have been provided, however. We’ve reached out to Xiaomi HQ in Beijing and will update if they’ll divulge some more solid numbers for how many of the 1,999 RMB ($316) phones they’ve shipped. The most recent stat making the rounds is three million Xiaomi M1s sold in total, but that number dates back well over a month. The company has recently revealed that it sold 700,000 units in May alone.

Xiaomi wrapped up $216 million in funding back in June, which effectively valued the upstart company at $4 billion – which would be half of troubled Nokia’s current market cap.

The Xiaomi M1 is – following the now de rigeur annual product cycle for mobile devices – due for a rebirth next month, when the second generation phone should be revealed, with a likely September rollout onto shelves. The M1 will be a tough act to follow.

[Source: CNbeta - article in Chinese]

The Xiaomi M1 will be a tough act to follow. But the phone is nearing its 1st birthday, and so it's time for the next iteration...

In the space of just one year, the Chinese startup Xiaomi has gone from being the maker of an Android-based ROM beloved of Android tweakers to a smartphone brand that’s worth an estimated $4 billion after its recent third-round funding. And it has done all that, in the hallmark style of Apple’s minimalism, with just one phone: the Xiaomi M1. It is selling, the company has said, at the rate of 700,000 per month. It might have impressed at the time of its launch back in August of last year, with 1.5GHz of power behind a very pretty Android skin for just 1,999 RMB (US$317), but the smartphone landscape changes quickly and it’s now time for a refresh. Time for Xiaomi’s difficult second coming.

To compete with the new breed – that Xiaomi itself inspired – of phones and mobile platforms from Chinese web companies, the Xiaomi M2 (if that’s what it’s called), needs an impressive second incarnation. Here’s what I reckon the next model should be packing in terms of specs and pricing:

• Processor – Snapdragon S4 dual-core MSM8960 @ 1.5 GHz

This one puts Xiaomi in a quandary. If it’s bound to chip-maker Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) and its Snapdragon series, then it has no quad-core option available immediately – presuming that the M2 will be unveiled next month, exactly 12 months after the original. That leaves rivals like Meizu able to win the bragging rights about making China’s quad-core flagship. But no matter. The dual-core Snapdragon S4 already used in the likes of the HTC One X will do just nicely as an upgrade. AnandTech reckons it’s a beast. The Qualcomm Adreno 225 on the system-on-a-chip would serve nicely as the GPU as well.

• Storage – 8GB onboard storage + MicroSD slot

Chinese users love flexibility, so a MicroSD card slot is a must for expandability. But, hey, that’s a way for the company to save a few bucks. The M1 has a mere 4GB out of the box, so at least bump that up to 8GB for the new model.

• Cameras – 5MP on the rear, 1.2MP front-facing

The M1’s 5MP camera is not great, so it really ought to swapped out for a better one of the same resolution. 8MP is not needed. The M1 doesn’t even have a front-facing one, but that has got to change. Also, the front-facing camera has to be dragged into the 21st-century, now that we’re using more and more video calling and the popular WeChat group messaging app will soon support it too. So we actually want to see the person we’re talking to, not an image that looks like it’s from a 90’s computer game. A pretty impressive 1.2MP front-facing webcam (same as in the new Asus Nexus 7) will certainly do the trick, making it a lot better than the iPhone 4S offers.

• Screen – 4.3-inch superLCD

I think four inches is sufficient, but some people like more of a handful [1]. Anyway, so long as Xiaomi improves its lackluster Sharp-sourced LCD screen, then that’d be nice. But lets say that the pressure to supersize is too much, so 4.3-inches is sufficient. SuperLCD would be fine as AMOLED can be lousy in the bright sub-tropical sunshine that most of China gets. How about Android’s onscreen buttons? I don’t think they’ll go down all that well with the target audience, and Chinese consumers would rather stick with the three haptic buttons that give some useful tactile feedback. Also, in a country that’s either really hot and humid or arse-achingly cold for half the year, users want to minimize the amount of time they’re forced to use the touchscreen.

• Battery – 2,000mAh

The old M1 has a pretty generous 1,930mAh battery, so there’s not much space to squeeze in any more. Hopefully battery efficiencies can be worked into its Android-based OS instead.

At least this one is guaranteed accurate: it's the new MIUI v4 (Android 4.0) look, as shown in the 'People' app.

• New software – Android 4.0, MiDrive file storage, new services

It’s time, finally, for Android 4.0. I think the very newest 4.1 would be nice, but that’s not too likely. Just last week we covered the unveiling of Xiaomi’s new cloud storage service, MiDrive. Being a web company as much as a hardware maker, it needs more things like this to compete against solid services from Baidu and Shanda on their own phones. Other new apps to expand its platform would be great. With so many young users, how about a music-streaming service? And perhaps a deal with Evernote to get the Chinese version pre-installed.

• New hardware – NFC

Let’s not leave Xiaomi owners out of the fun of using Google Beam to send stuff to others with NFC-equiped Android phones, or using it to check-in with Jiepang at a bar that has NFC stickers on the wall. Plus, it might then finally take off as a form of cash-less payments in China. It’s an opportunity for Xiaomi to make some nice partnerships too.

• Price – 1,899 RMB

How much for this evolution of Xiaomi’s iconic phone? I’ll throw my hands up in the air now and say that this theoretical spec sheet for the new model has been done for fun, without referencing a bill of materials for all its upgraded bits and pieces. But no doubt Xiaomi is now somewhat trapped in a minuscule profit margin corner after its first phone. It cannot really come out and say “…And the price of our new phone? It’s, uh, higher than for the last one.” No. So the price has to remain the same, or come down a jot. Let’s say 1,899 RMB ($301) for the new Xiaomi M2. Although some numbers remain the same (eg: 1.5Ghz), there’d still be plenty to tout: a lower price; NFC; a larger screen; a sweet webcam, and Android 4.0.

In addition to all that, we reckon that the M1 should get a minor face-lift and then be drafted in as a cheaper alternative to the all-new model. That way, Xiaomi can still compete at the cheaper end of the market against new competitors like the Shanda Bambook phone and dumbly-named Qihoo Battleship who want to push prices down to near 1,300 RMB ($206). That’d also make very low-end devices from Baidu and Aliyun look like a bad deal when they’re only a few hundred RMB cheaper but, relatively speaking, way underpowered. It’d be quite a double-whammy if the original Xiaomi M1 can go on living for the new price of 1,099 RMB ($174) from next month.

What do you make of Xiaomi’s challenge with a new model? Will we see it for real next month? Perhaps list your own desired specs in the comments section.

Xiaomi execs including Lei Jun with folks from Inventec in Taiwan

According to a Techweb report quoting “Taiwanese media,” Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun has announced that a Xiaomi phone will launch in Taiwan late this year. When contacted, Xiaomi PR representatives confirmed that Lei Jun was in Taiwan and that he was researching overseas markets, but didn’t confirm or deny that Xiaomi has plans to launch a phone in Taiwan later this year.

Still, there’s little reason to doubt the news, as Lei Jun has previously mentioned in public his plans to bring the phone to Taiwan sometime in 2012. What’s not immediately clear is whether the phone Taiwan gets will be the M1, which has been available in China for nearly a year already, or whether what goes on sale there will be a newer model.

In addition to apparently making plans for a Taiwan launch, Lei Jun and his team are visiting suppliers and partners based in the area, including Hon Hai (the owners of key Xiaomi supplier Foxconn).

In browsing Xiaomi exec Lin Bin’s weibo account for this story, I also came across an interesting tidbit and a useful reminder for startups: successful startups don’t waste money. Accordingly, Mr. Lin apparently flew to Taiwan in an economy class seat. I feel certain that if he had wanted to, the company could afford to pay for business class accommodation. But why waste the money? Our hats are off to Mr. Lin here, and we hope other successful startups will take this display of frugality and modesty to heart.

Here comes yet another cloud storage service that’s geared towards smartphone users. The Xiaomi-owned MIUI team, which makes the Android-based OS in China’s Xiaomi phones and which also can be installed on many other Android phones, has just announced the launch of MiDrive on their G+ page. MiDrive will give 5GB of free storage, and will be “coming this week,” presumably tomorrow during MIUI’s weekly software updates every Friday afternoons.

MiDrive will be a new app, as pictured above and below, and will allow for cloud storage and syncing across multiple Android devices. It’ll also be accessible in the browser via pan.xiaomi.com (pictured below) for users in China. It’s not clear where there’ll be an international version of the web app for MIUI users around the world.

The MiDrive app, says the MIUI team, is a new feature only for MIUI V4 – the version that’s based on the latest Android 4.0. That’s bad news for Xiaomi phone users who’re still on Android 2.3, and will be left out of the cloud action for a while. We’ve reached out to the MIUI OS team, and hopefully they can clear up precisely how MiDrive will roll out. In the meantime, here are more screenshots:

[Source: MIUI ROM on G+]

Lei Jun, standing creepily in someone's basement in front of photos of Steve Jobs.

Lei Jun has always been an outspoken guy, but recently it seems the Xiaomi CEO and investor crossed the line into crazy during a recent interview with the Economic Observer. Questions about Xiaomi’s pricing, and whether it’s really priced at cost (as the company has suggested) are clearly getting to Mr. Lei, who had the tech CEO equivalent of a toddler temper tantrum when pressed on the issue by reporter Yan Wei.

When Yan asked how much profit Xiaomi’s M1 phone generates, Lei rhetorically asked his staff, “Isn’t that a rude question?” before repeating his assertion that the phone is priced at cost. When Yan pressed, pointing out that phones of similar quality were being sold for 1000 RMB ($158, half the Xiaomi M1′s price) Lei threw his phone onto the desk and said: “You are insulting everyone’s intelligence by comparing a first-class international brand to domestic products.”

First of all, someone on Xiaomi’s staff apparently needs to disabuse Mr. Lei of the notion that journalists are paid to be polite. Although I do have some questions about Yan’s reporting overall, the questions Lei Jun was asked were entirely appropriate and any reporter would have asked them. Lei should have answered them directly without getting indignant or throwing things.

His final comment also leads one to wonder if his grip on reality is slipping. Xiaomi may have garnered some international attention, but it is not an international brand at all, let alone a “first class” one. The phone is not on sale anywhere other than China at the moment, and although the company does plan to expand to Taiwan this year, any plans beyond that remain a mystery. Virtually no one outside of the Chinese-speaking community and the tech community has heard of the phone. Lei Jun may take his inspiration from the late Steve Jobs, but Xiaomi is not Apple. Net yet. In fact, it’s not even close. It is just as much a domestic product as any of the other cheap smartphones Xiaomi is now being forced to compete with.

One also wonders what, exactly, Lei was trying to say by suggesting it’s unfair to compare the pricing of an international brand to a domestic product. Does the Xiaomi M1 cost more because it’s a “first-class international brand”? If the phone is being sold at cost, what the hell does the brand have to do anything? Was Lei Jun inadvertantly admitting that the Xiaomi’s price has been raised beyond its production cost to account for its (non-existant) “first-class international brand” status? Before reading that sentence, I was fairly confident that despite his bluster, Lei Jun was probably telling the truth about the Xiaomi phone’s price. Now I’m not so sure.

As I’ve written before, I own a Xiaomi phone, and I really like it. I find it to be fast, reliable, and of excellent quality for the price. However, I find Lei’s behavior embarrassing, and I wonder if he’s aware that incidents like this will help ensure that Xiaomi never becomes a first-class international brand. Can you imagine the CEO of Apple or Microsoft flipping out and throwing something just because a reporter asked a basic question about a product’s pricing in comparison to competitors?

Even if Xiaomi is telling the truth and the phone really is sold at cost, it’s not like he’s being accused of something awful here. In fact, what he’s being accused of is making a profit. Granted, he’s also being accused of being dishonest with consumers, but that should be easy enough to resolve. How hard could it be to produce some receipts to illustrate the manufacturing and marketing costs for the Xiaomi? If he hasn’t been lying, he should find it quite simple to prove that, and if he has been, he’s going to have to face the music sooner or later.

We have contacted Xiaomi for comment, and will update this story when we hear back.

UPDATE 7/12 12:28: A Xiaomi rep has confirmed that the Economic Observer‘s coverage of this incident is highly dramatized and that while the quotes seem to be accurate, general tone and description of Lei Jun’s actions is not. For those curious, a full video of the incident is available here. Lei Jun does appear a bit agitated and does say that Xiaomi is a first-class international brand, but he doesn’t throw his phone. We apologize for the inaccurate information we originally reported.

[Economic Observer via Sinocism]

This year and last has seen a wave of smartphones and mobiles OSes being launched by Chinese web companies such as Alibaba (Aliyun), Qihoo, Shanda, Baidu, and Xiaomi. All those are very familiar names to web users in China, and the phones – some of which I recently looked into in detail – are pretty sweet. In fact, these represent a huge threat to hardware makers who’re currently doing well in China – namely Apple, HTC, Samsung, and Motorola. Hey, they might even threaten other Chinese phone-makers such as ZTE and Huawei.

Here are six reasons why I think these (mostly) Android-based phones from Chinese web companies could soon by depriving Samsung et al of tens of millions – and, later, hundreds of millions – of Android smartphone sales:

1. Cheaper - Starting with the dramatic Xiaomi phone launch that emphasised its 1,999 RMB (then $313) price tag with giant numerals, getting your hands on one of these is generally a lot cheaper than mid-range new products from the likes of HTC, Samsung, or Motorola. For example, HTC unveiled the Daren phone for China after the Xiaomi release, but it was a low-end, smallish-screen handset that cost a few bucks more than the dual-core Xiaomi with the four-inch screen. Motorola has been trying a bit harder to make models that are adapted to local consumers, but they’re not able to compete on price either. To make it even tougher, the new Shanda Bambook phone has taken dual-core, hi-res screen prices down to as little as 1,299 RMB.

2. Better pre-installed software - Being web and/or software companies, the makers of these new Chinese smartphones make some superb apps – light years ahead of what the hardware makers tend to pre-install. It’s all useful stuff from popular services – like Baidu’s Ting for music streaming, or Shanda’s Mknote for cloud note syncing – and none of the undeletable crapware that users have suffered in the past.

3. Brands are more recognizable and accessible - Allied to that last point, web companies like Alibaba and Baidu are well known, and feel a lot more familiar – and perhaps trustworthy – to consumers than the more abstract moniker behind a hardware maker like ZTE or Motorola.

4. Not pre-flashed - On a more obscure point, it’s worth noting that a lot of people in China buy grey-import phones that have been smuggled into China. They tend to be cheaper, having avoided import taxes. But then these “grey” phones almost always – especially for the easily tweaked Android platform – get “flashed” with a different ROM by some shady middleman who gets a cut for preinstalling some apps or third-party app stores on it. Needless to say, having random people who work outside of the law tweaking your phone is a very bad idea in terms of digital security.

5. More likely to get updates - As a corollary to that previous point, those pre-flashed phones will never get software updates from the manufacturer as they have been too heavily modified. But these new breed of smartphones will get updates. Xiaomi pushes monthly minor updates, and will eventually update its M1 phones to Android 4.0, and Alibaba has pushed Aliyun 2.0 to its customers.

6. Chinese consumers prefer unlocked phones - And it’s unlocked phones that the web companies are dishing out, avoiding the telco contracts (and telco crapware; see #2) that are not a popular choice.

What’s your take on these new competitors? Hit the comments, and add your own points in favor – or against!

These gentlemen would like to punch each other (Zhou on left, Lei on right)

China’s tech scene is not for the faint of heart (or those with a sense of propriety). The advent of Weibo, especially, has made it possible for CEOs to talk shit about each other more quickly and publicly than ever before, and more than a few choose to take advantage. Now their ranks include Xiaomi’s Lei Jun (who has always been an outspoken figure) and Qihoo 360′s Zhou Hongyi (himself a veteran of several public mudslinging incidents with other tech companies, most notably Tencent). The pair recently used their Sina Weibo accounts to batter each other with scores of negative posts, and the battle is ongoing. (In case you’re curious, here’s Lei’s weibo, and here is Zhou’s).

The fact that there’s a bit of enmity between the CEOs of two companies that are becoming competitors with the launch of Qihoo 360′s cheap smartphones isn’t entirely surprising. But why are these guys taking it to the streets and duking it out in public rather than just waiting to see whose sales numbers win the day?

We contacted Qihoo 360 for comment, but were unable to get its wiser-than-their-boss PR reps to talk on the record about Zhou’s fight. Is it a coincidence that this fight is happening now, just a day before the company launches a new smartphone together with Haier? This is just my own speculation, mind you, but probably not.

Of course, that doesn’t explain why Lei Jun is responding (and thus adding fuel to this already-viral fire). Luckily, Lei Jun explained that himself in an interview with Southern Metropolis. Primarily, he said, he chose to react because of Zhou Hongyi’s allegations that Xiaomi was making a massive profit. “A lie told a thousand times becomes the truth,” Lei said, emphatically denying that Xiaomi was making huge profits. “Of the phones on the market using the same processor [as the Xiaomi M1], Xiaomi is the cheapest.” He also said that Zhou Hongyi’s repeated assertions that the Xiaomi phone will drop in price was causing consumers to wait to purchase the phone.

Lei’s other issue was that Zhou announced Xiaomi’s successful funding and $4 billion valuation while the company was still in talks with investors, and hadn’t finalized anything. This made the negotiations much more difficult and nearly scared off Xiaomi’s investors. Although Lei told reporters he wasn’t angry about this, it sure seems like he is, but he waited until after the deal was finalized to react to Zhou’s comments publicly.

Whoever’s right or wrong here is pretty irrelevant, I think. This kind of public mudslinging makes the whole industry look unprofessional, and it makes the participants look like petulant children. This is especially true of Mr. Zhou, who seems incapable of going more than a few months without blowing up into some kind of high-profile battle with another figure in the tech industry.

In fact, this idiocy annoys me enough that I’d like to address Mr. Lei and Mr. Zhou directly: Gentlemen, although I’m certainly not a successful tech CEO, I think I can be of some help to you here. Please, just stop. Shut up, and let your products speak for themselves. If your phone is the better product, people are ultimately going to realize that. And if your phone isn’t the better product, shouldn’t you be focused on improving it rather than yelling at someone else on weibo?

[Southern Metropolis via Sina Tech]

Charlie’s Pick: Xiaomi Gets Dat Paper

I’ll take Xiaomi’s securing a giant bucket of money as my choice for top news this week, because it comes at a rather interesting time. Xiaomi competitors are coming out of the woodwork, and in fact, this week also saw three cheap domestic smartphones launched on the same day. Does Xiaomi’s new $216 million funding mean that it has nothing to fear from these competitors? Certainly not. But it’s further evidence that Xiaomi has a head start in almost every conceivable measure: funding, social media presence, buzz, and (most important) actual sales. If other players in this market want to catch up, they’re going to need some creativity or an even bigger war chest. I wouldn’t count on seeing much of the former, but the latter…well, we’ll see. Right now, though, it looks like Xiaomi’s game to lose.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I should probably admit here that I own a Xiaomi phone, but that doesn’t make me a Xiaomi cheerleader. After all, I also own an Apple computer, and I recently wrote a nice, long negative piece about Apple.)

Willis’ pick: A handful of Xiaomi for me too

Xiaomi’s funding news got to be my top pick for this week. We first covered Xiaomi July last year when it had its specs leaked and also raised its first round of funding at a $200 million valuation. Today, this Chinese company is probably valued at more than a billion dollars with its recent Series C round and achieving profitability along the way. All these are accomplished in just about a year. Its stunning growth is one that commands respect. Kai Lukoff of Techrice and Wandoujia made a recent comment which echoed my thoughts:

One good sign for the firm is that Xiaomi doesn’t just have users, it has real fans, in the same way that people are absolutely gaga about Apple products. Where iPhone is an amazing product + amazing brand + high price, Xiaomi is a good product + good brand (in China) + low price.

It’s true not just in China. Even in Singapore, folks who are closely keeping track of the China tech space are also gaga over the phone. The common complaint is that supply is so low that they can’t seem to get friends to buy them the phone at RMB 1,999.

Rick’s pick: Anonymous goes to Japan

I don’t really care so much about Xiaomi, so for me this week’s big news was the blow-back (or lack thereof?) over Japan’s new copyright law revision. Most of this, as you have likely heard by now, was from hacktivist group Anonymous, who swooped onto the scene to deface and bring down the web properties of certain offending parties in government and elsewhere. Strangely though, the group did make a bit of a hacker boo-boo of sorts, bringing down the Kasumiguara River Office, apparently confusing it for the Kasumigaseki government district. It was announced today that metropolitan police have launched a full probe, although I’m not sure what took them so long to roll into action as Anonymous made no secret about what it was doing (maybe they were reading Bloomberg?). In any case, while I don’t advocate the actions of Anonymous, I do hope that more people pay attention to this issue because it is deserving of more debate and discussion.

Steven’s pick: Flippin’ onto Android

For the sake of diversity, I’ll avoid picking Xiaomi’s funding as well – though it was enormously impressive; the biggest funding round in China since 360Buy’s last fundraiser – and instead select Flipboard’s launch of its “Chinese Edition” for Android. Yes, the localized version of Flipboard is already on iOS, but you can reach even more smartphone owners in China on Android. Plus, it’s fun to see an overseas startup do so well in China. It’s all too rare. Doubleplusgood, I really like using Flipboard on Android.

Enricko’s Pick: Foxconn goes to Indonesia

I don’t own a Xiaomi phone nor is it available in Indonesia, so I won’t be choosing that one. I prefer to choose my news of the week closer to home. My pick would definitely be Foxconn’s plans to open its massive factory (or factories) in Indonesia. I know that as a developing nation, one of our main problems would be unemployment. Why is it bad? You know the Jedi saying, unemployment leads to lack of money, no money leads to crime, and crime leads to suffering [1]. One million jobs in Indonesia would reduce its unemployment rate by one seventh! [2]. It will definitely be a stepping stone for us to kick the unemployment rate right in the face! I only hope that they open the factory outside of Java Island though; it’s getting pretty crowded here already, and some other regions need this boost even more.

China’s web companies want to go mobile. And to that end, many are creating their own phones that carry their own mobile platforms, serving as a vehicle and a showcase for their own apps and services. The likes of Xiaomi, Baidu, Alibaba (with its Aliyun OS), and Shanda are pioneering this, and many more will follow.

So let’s take a look – see our colorful graphic below – at five homegrown mobile platforms from China that are packaged in their own hardware. The afore-mentioned four web companies are on the list, and I’ve thrown in Meizu as well, since it has transformed itself so well in the past couple of years, and is building an ecosystem of its own too. Scroll down below the table for a summary of why they’re significant, and why both local and global handset makers – from ZTE to HTC, Huawei to Motorola – should be very, very worried about the consumer familiarity and brand pulling power of these affordable smartphones.

After all, telcos and old-skool handset makers have a tendency to fill their smartphones with bloatware and other crap. But these new devices from the more savvy web companies come brimful of apps that look great and which you’d actually want to use for, say, music-streaming, group messaging, or cloud notes syncing.

Here’s our table, comparing the five hot phones spec-by-spec:

Meizu MX (dual-core)

Looking at the cheaper dual-core model, not the newer 4-core version, the Meizu MX was launched with Android 2.3 and Meizu’s attractive Android UI skin, which will soon by updated to the more evolved Flyme OS that Meizu is building as its ecosystem. As such, it has the Flyme cloud backup service and its own app store. Here’s a review of the MX dual-core from Engadget.

Shanda Bambook phone

Launched on June 6, the Bambook smartphone is the first ever phone from Shanda (NASDAQ:SNDA; FRA:RZP), makers of the Bambook e-reader. It’s also based on Android – though the older 2.3 – and comes with neat cloud apps and supports Shanda’s Yuncheng e-book market.

Aliyun OS – represented by the Haier Zing

Aliyun OS is the big play for mobile and mobile commerce from Alibaba, the country’s e-commerce giant. Launched last summer, it is not based on Android, places an emphasis on web apps, and is also loaded with useful – and mostly cloud-oriented – apps. It’s a tough sell, though, up against so much competition. Earlier this month, Haier (SHA:600690; HKG:1169) stepped in as a new hardware partner with the cheap Haier Zing.

Xiaomi M1

Xiaomi has had the biggest sales – and social media – success with its first-ever phone, the M1, generating huge buzz and really selling people on the idea of a good-looking, well-localized way of enjoying Android. Now looking the oldest of the bunch, Xiaomi is surely due to unveil a new version later this summer. It is also due Android 4.0 – replete with MIUI overlays – soon, and I’m surprised it hasn’t gotten an official update from MIUI (also a Xiaomi venture) yet. See our video review of the Xiaomi M1.

Baidu Yi – represented by the Changhong H5018

Baidu’s (NASDAQ:BIDU) Android-based OS is a showcase for its many social and practical apps, and it now has two very different phones to carry it. At the higher end is the Dell Streak Pro D43, while a cheaper option comes in the form of the newer Changhong model which costs a mere 850 RMB ($135). Admitedly, its lower specs – it’s the only one in the line-up to have a sub four-inch screen – make it look a little odd in this company, but I reckon it has more of a chance of gaining traction than the Dell model.

Note that the brand-new Qihoo AK-47 (such a dumb name) is excluded for now, but will be featured when we update this table later in the year. Netease might have its own contender by then too. Stay tuned!

Qihoo 360′s oddly-named AK47 handset went on sale for the first time ever via Tmall and 360Buy and sold out within two hours. Tmall reported it sold 1,000 of the handsets within the first ten minutes of the sale, but beyond that, it’s not immediately clear how many of the handsets were sold.

Shanda’s dual-core Bambook also launched yesterday, but apparently the official Bambook website had some problems, and as a result, Shanda hasn’t been able to gloat about share any of its sales figures.

Finally, e-commerce site Beidou launched a preorder for its dual-core Little Pepper handset (pictured above). The preorder appears to be ongoing, so if you’re looking for a dual-core smartphone running Android 4.0 that costs $110, you might want to check it out.

Not to be outdone, reigning cheap domestic smartphone king Xiaomi also held a prize giveaway yesterday to attract more users to its site.

In short, the cheap domestic smartphone market here is getting pretty full, pretty fast.

[Beijing Times via Sina Tech]

The Xiaomi M1 - so far, the company's only phone.

It has just been announced by Lei Jun, founder and CEO of the disruptive startup phone-maker Xiaomi, that the company has secured a staggering $216 million in third-round funding. The financing was agreed to over the weekend, he said, but would not reveal who led this newest funding round.

This confirms earlier rumors we reported upon which suggested a major round of funding that effectively values the company at $4 billion. Yes, that would efectively make the Chinese startup – which so far has only one phone model, the Android-based M1 (see our video review) – worth about half of Nokia, and nearly as much as the troubled RIM. That earlier rumor suggested that DST was leading the funding this time, but we’ll have to wait for that to be confirmed. Yuri Milner’s DST was a more minor participant in the last funding round.

In the past, IDG and Morningside have led the series A and B rounds. The first was worth $41 million, while the second round totaled $90 million.

Lei Jun also revealed today some interesting stats from Xiaomi, saying that it has sold 70 million Xiaomi phones up to the end of 700,000 phones last month alone, and that it has so far generated over a billion RMB ($157.11 million) in revenue, making profits that amount to just over 100 million RMB ($15.71 million). The company is due to unveil its much-anticipated follow-up to the M1 sometime this summer or autumn.

As for the path forward, Mr. Lei told Chinese media that, “Copying Apple is no way to go,” and suggested that mobile commerce is one path that the company is looking into.

We’ll update if we get more on this developing story – especially if the investors are named.

[Source: Sina Tech - article in Chinese]

Things have been going quite well for Xiaomi since the launch of its M1 phone last year. Although there have been murmors of less-than-satisfactory customer service and a few build quality issues, the Chinese market has shown intense enthusiasm for the M1; so much so that this winter Xiaomi also entered into a partnership with China Unicom to distribute additional phones via that company.

Does that make it worth four billion dollars? My colleague Willis wrote last month about how it was at least a billion dollar company. I’m not sure. But for what it’s worth, I’ve heard a lot of people over the last year suggest they’d like to invest in Xiaomi — many seem to agree the company is onto something. And for what it’s worth, I haven’t experienced any problems with my M1 handset since I bought one last December (despite having inadvertently knocked it off our table and onto the floor too many times to count). But that’s all anecdotal. The number does seem a bit high…

@niubi @ChinaGeeks If so, that values Xiaomi at almost half of Nokia (9.77B) and about 80% of RIM (5.26B).

— Will Moss (@imagethief) June 5, 2012

What do you think? Xiaomi is certainly doing well, but is the company really worth four billion dollars?

[via Sina Tech]