Early this morning (for those of us in the US), Chinese manufacturer Xiaomi announced a few new products. Among them were the Xiaomi 3 which we reported on this morning, and our readers loved the device. Xiaomi has become popular in China for their amazing events. The atmosphere this morning was like a concert of a sporting event. With members of the audience having glow sticks. But the Xiaomi 3 isn’t the real story here.
The real story is that former Google executive, who worked on the Android project for a few years, Hugo Barra made his Xiaomi debut. The event this morning got off to a rocky start for Hugo. The press forced him to flee the front row and move to a safer location away from the crow. These events seem quite the opposite of what we see here in the US. Hugo said “I believe it is now time the entire world to learn about Xiaomi.” Many of us have known about Xiaomi, and have wished that their products were available outside of China. For instance the Xiaomi 3 announced this morning would sell very well here in the US, especially for that pricing.
While Xiaomi isn’t the biggest manufacturer in China, Huawei and Lenovo still hold the lead in market share, they are definitely climbing up. Now with Hugo Barra on board, that is certainly going to help. Just a few weeks ago, Hugo and Google confirmed that Mr Barra would be departing Google and heading to Xiaomi. It was quite a shock to many of us, but AllThingsD also made it seem like it was something to do with his, now, ex-girlfriend (a fellow Googler) is now with Sergey Brin, one of the co-founders at Google. Of course, we don’t know if that’s the actual reason behind him leaving or not. But it is interesting that AllThingsD mentioned that.
I sure hope Xiaomi can come into the US with phones like the Xiaomi 3 or MI3. That thing is a beast and for only $400 for the 64GB, it’d be hard for even the Nexus to compete. How many of you would buy the Xiaomi 3 if it were available outside of China?