I don’t know if you recall this, but Ericsson decided to sue Xiaomi in India at the end of last year because the China-based company infringed on Ericsson’s patents. Xiaomi was forbidden to sell specific versions (MediaTek-powered ones) of their handsets in India because of it, and the company decided to blame resellers for selling unauthorized handsets, and therefore infringing on Ericsson’s patents in India. Xiaomi even mentioned Xiaomishop by name, as the main culprit, though they’re not the only ones doing it, of course.
At the same time, Xiaomi has said that they’ll sue Xiaomishop because of this, and it seems like the reseller got scared of the lawsuit and decided to change their name. Xiaomishop has sent out an e-mail to their consumers recently in order to let them know that the name changing is taking place, and that the company will be called Honorbuy from now on. Xiaomishop’s new web URL is now honorbuy.com, and the company has even expanded the number of available Chinese devices, they’ve added some additional Meizu, Huawei and Xiaomi products to their lineup.
It seems like this name changing business won’t affect the company though, nor their selling of Xiaomi-branded devices. It is unknown at this point if Xiaomi and Honorbuy communicated at all, or did Honorbuy just got spooked and changed their name in order to avoid a lawsuit from Xiaomi without even talking to the company. It will be interesting to see if this new name will be enough to keep Xiaomi away, which seems unlikely considering that Honorbuy still sells Xiaomi-branded devices, but perhaps they reached an agreement with Xiaomi or something of the sort.
That being said, Honorbuy (formerly known as Xiaomishop) was a rather reliable reseller, at least from what we’ve heard from various sources. Have you had experience with them, or any other Chinese reseller for that matter? Let us know what your experiences are in the comments (what device did you purchase? did you have any issues along the way?), we’d love to hear from you, as usual.