Submitted by China’s Xiaomi only sells its smartphones and other devices in a handful of markets, but they’re big markets with large populations including China and India. So even though you can’t easily buy a Xiaomi phone in the US or Europe, we probably shouldn’t be surprised that the company is selling a lot of phones. In fact, with Xiaomi shipping 18 million phones in the third quarter of 2014, two different reports suggest the company just became the third biggest smartphone company in the world.
Xiaomi devices are surprisingly nice and inexpensive, from what I see in the web, but they come weighed down with “Miui”, a crappy wrapper around Android that tries to imitate iOS.
I have had my share of crappy software running on no-name chinese devices. Fantastic hardware power and a great potential that was blasted by unusable, unsupported and unmaintained user interfaces.
I may trust Apple, Goole or Microsoft, or even Sony, Samsung or LG, to write and maintain good UI software. But I do not trust Xiaomi. When they sell devices running stock Android, I will consider their products. “Miui”, they can keep.
i own Xiaomi Mi3 and use the stock AOSP rom.
http://en.miui.com/thread-44424-1-1.html
And as said by Hugo Barra, Xiaomi allows Rooting and dose NOT void warranty.
Hardware wise it is the one of best phone i have ever used.
Edited 2014-11-04 15:08 UTC
Excuse my ignorance, but can an AOSP ROM run Google software? Gmail, Play Store, Now, etc. Did you have to root the system and install AOSP yourself, or did it come installed?
1) I have to root it by myself. But it really easy if you follow instructions
http://en.miui.com/thread-45804-1-1.html
2) Current version(4.10..) of rom(based on 4.4.4) include Google play services and Google Play store. You can install all google apps from play store. You don’t need to flash Gapps like you do Cyanogenmod.
version 4.9 and prior do not include any google app or service.
And rooting do not void your warranty.
if you brick your phone, take it to service center and they will take care of everything.
this rom support both mi3 and new mi4.
i have only tested it on mi3 and it is way faster and smoother than MIUI.
I’m just wondering if Xiaomi has avoided paying extortion/protection payments to Microsoft to prevent being sued for patent infringement. Since they don’t seem to be interested in the US market, hopefully they can avoid paying the Microsoft tax. That would allow them to sell their phones cheaper.
Edited 2014-11-04 22:14 UTC
I read an article today that values Xiaomi at USD50 billion – as much as Sony and Lenovo combined.
Edited 2014-11-05 07:34 UTC