Xiaomi is one of the two largest China-based smartphone manufacturers at the moment. This Chinese company is constantly battling with Huawei over market share in China, and is looking to branch out in the future as well. Xiaomi is currently selling their accessories in the US, but as many of you know, their smartphones aren’t available. A couple of days ago, US Mobile, a US-based carrier, has listed three Xiaomi-branded devices on their website. This resulted in quite a bit of reaction online, and tons of press coverage, some consumers were quite happy this has happened, and everyone immediately assumed US Mobile partnered up with Xiaomi, well… it turned out that wasn’t the case.
Xiaomi has denied partnership with US Mobile yesterday, and the carrier removed product pages from their site. Xiaomi has flat out said that US Mobile is not authorized to sell their devices, and that Xiaomi-branded phones won’t be available in the US that soon. It was just a matter of time before US Mobile reacts to this, and the company has released their official statement recently: “Here’s where we created a better experience for our customers. By partnering with third-party distributors who sell and ship the devices, US Mobile is able to offer our customers warranty and support on the devices locally in the US. Very simply, customers can call US Mobile’s 24/7 Customer Support team with any service related issue or send the phone back to US Mobile for repairs”. One more thing worth mentioning here is the fact that these devices did not support US LTE bands. Now, pretty much everyone assumed that US Mobile won’t be listing these devices on their site again, but it seems like they will. US Mobile released the following statement: “We will continue to work with our enabling carriers to try to certify these phones on their network. There is a process that we will have to make these phones go through. If we are successful, we promise to enable our distributors to offer these phones on our marketplace again”.
So, all in all, it seems like US Mobile is trying to certify the devices before they offer them to consumers again, which essentially means we might see them available for sale once again soon, presuming the certification process doesn’t create any additional problems. Now, it is also worth mentioning that US Mobile also listed one of Meizu’s devices along with the Xiaomi-branded phones, the Meizu M2 Note. This handset has also been removed from US Mobile’s site, but it seems like US Mobile plans to bring that one back as well, as soon as it gets certified.