Stop me if you’ve heard this one before….
A company releases a phone with great specs for a budget price and demand far exceeds supply, leading to the internet version of a pigpile. Nope I’m not talking about Google’s Nexus 4. This time the device causing the chaos is Xiaomi’s MI – Two.
The Chinese company, best known in the US for their MIUI ROMs, is currently on their second iteration of their flagship “MI” line. The phone itself boasts some pretty impressive stats and that’s not to mention that it comes in at a very affordable 1999 Yuan or $318 US. So it’s easy to see why this is such a hard phone to come by.
Here are the specs:
- 4.3 inch screen 720 x 1280 pixels
- 16/32 GB versions
- 2 GB RAM
- 8 MP Rear Camera with a 2 MP front shooter
- Android 4.1
- Qualcomm APQ8064 Snapdragon S4 Pro
- Quad-core 1.5 GHz Krait
- Adreno 320
As recently as last week the only way to get this phone was a pretty funky method of having to earn community points in their forum and trade those points up for a number. Only then were you given the actual opportunity to purchase the device which of course sold out almost instantaneously leaving many people even with numbers lacking the phone.
This last batch of sales however, they kicked it up a notch by eliminating the points system altogether and throwing the phone up for grabs in a Nexus 4-esque free for all. I’m sure you can all guess what happened next. The phone sold out in four minutes. A whopping 1.3 million orders went through for the minuscule amount of 50,000 devices that were available. Now the 1.3 million “lucky” people have to hope their number gets called again in another lottery for the chance to purchase the MI – Two.
I don’t know who did it worse Google or Xiaomi. One thing’s for sure is that both of them generated a ton of interest by making their flagships tough to get – whether intentional or otherwise. I suppose you can say that the Chinese consumers at least know where they stand. Unlike over here where we sat around waiting for an email saying whether a packing slip was created or not. The one thing we do know for sure is that people are knowledgeable enough to know a great deal on a phone when they see it and are still willing to put up with the hiccups…for now anyway.