Xiaomi is China’s number one smartphone manufacturer at the moment. This company has released a number of smartphones this year, but they like to dabble in pretty much anything tech related. Xiaomi has also released some smart TVs, a couple of fitness trackers, smart air purifier, smart scale, and so on. Interesting enough, this company has also become a MVNO quite recently, after partnering up with some carriers in China. That being said, we’ve started seeing some reports that Xiaomi is developing their very own laptop offering as well, and even though those rumors sounded off at first and Xiaomi has denied them last year, this year that seems more of a reality, read on.
You might wonder what changed this time around, well, Xiaomi has partnered up with Inventec, a Taiwanese notebook manufacturer. Inventec’s chairman, Richard Lee, has actually confirmed that they’re working closely with Xiaomi, and that the company’s very own laptop will ship in Q1 or Q2 of 2016. Well, Xiaomi is apparently going all out this time, as the company has reportedly hired one of Lenovo’s ex employees. This Chinese tech giant didn’t hire just any employee, they’ve hired a former Senior Official from Lenovo’s Laptop Business, at leats according to Lao Yao, the Secretary General of the China Smartphone Alliance.
This is not the only piece of new Mr. Yao has shared with us though, he has also noted that Xiaomi might offer MIUI on said laptop offering. This would mean that MIUI is becoming a computer software as well. We still don’t know if Xiaomi intends to offer a Windows-powered variant of this laptop. but according to previous rumors, they sure do. This sure is an interesting development. The expertise of Lenovo’s ex Senior Official could certainly benefit Xiaomi, and we’ll find out in which way in a couple of months. We’re still waiting for Xiaomi to go official and releases some info when it comes to all this, the China-based smartphone OEM has been relatively quiet when it comes to their laptop and tablet offerings. Speaking of tablets, Xiaomi is also expected to release the Mi Pad 2 fairly soon, so stay tuned for that as well.