Is buying Xiaomi MI3 an right option!!!!
There has been a lot of buzz lately in the internet from a copycat(sorry.. truth it is) Chinese manufacturer Xiaomi lately that too after introducing their YEAR old flagship phone in India. Here I am to just throw some of my views over both the phone ,manufacturer and especially their political selling strategy. It must be noted that its my personal opinion and I am not trying to bias something is right and wrong.
Xiaomi(Pronounced as "Show me") the ruler of Chinese market for past few years with their explicitly ever popular MIUI (Pronounced as "Me You I") and their social network selling strategy. I am not here to tell you the history and geography of the company for that you have Wikipedia :P. we shall just head to the discussion regarding the phones. This people created a replica of Apple iOS in terms of looks in 2010 by the name of MIUI. The main aim of the project was to develop a skin similar to iOS on top of android framework to take advantage of android`s open-source. Those were times when iPhone`s were enjoying the position of "luxury phone" and people in china would be crazy to sell their kidney to buy one of those over esteemed gadgets. Thus MIUI was created and it became incrementally popular when they introduced a very cheap phone(look wise similar to iPhone) with awesome specs on 2011. since the code for MIUI has been outsourced people around the world were able to fix the issues that were arising in the MIUI system. Thus the birth of the copycat iOS by the name of MIUI. I have used MIUI on my HTC Desire S by 2011 and to the best part they were officially supporting for my mobile model and during every release lot of optimizations are made and MIUI was better than CM.
MI3
As Xiaomi`s usual release plan MI3 has been introduced in 2013 with top class specs and cheap pricing competing with flagship mobiles at that time and still its a phone which I used to call "Bang for the Buck". With the snapdragon AB chipset inside its one of the monstrous beast which can fight equally with nexus 5 in everything other than camera and the openness of development of nexus 5( n number of custom roms are available for n5 checkout XDA).Perfect for India (Indian`s minds)
Rather than saying MI3 is best suited for India I would say it completely matches Indian`s or Chinese minds in particular. Both want to buy something that is worth their hard earned money and usually they are worried about the warranty services that they would get since we Indians are not read to even take a glimpse of "Use and throw" culture which is pretty much popular in western culture and till this second all reviews I got or read from people/blogs are really good except for the non-availability of spare parts in some places. Making this much MOU in a new country in such a short period is really something big even big time players will take a step back. But with competitive market and after sale support they really got into Indian`s head.Everyone just used to keep on boasting about how good the phone is and how mature MIUI is. But I am a kindoff person who sees smart-phone at a different angle rather than the normal uses which the causal user used to use I am a kindoff guy who wants to shell out all the cents I have invested over the gadget. so em gonna list out all the cons I am seeing in this phone or XIOMI phones in general.
1. Kernel is not open sourced ~ Its open but its not
You would have heard MIUI is a open source, to be true its not. The UI part available is open sourced but the Kernel part which can help us tweak our device and can be a channel for a lot of development of AOSP or CM based roms is not open sourced. Even though MIUI is matured still it is resource hungry to be short its not as fast as it is supposed to be. So for power users its a very big OFF.2. Runs an old operating system and inefficient use of hardware
I do believe that if a smartphone developer says that it is their flagship phone people like me have some expectations and the big thing of all is the latest OS running in their phone. Android fans would be aware that android version 4.4.4 is the latest but still MI3 runs on 4.4.2 and there is no word about android L being in works. If kernel would have been outsourced we might have got this solved but external after market ROMS. This phone is strictly NOT XDA friendly.In specs everyone might have seen that they are using Sony`s camera and I hope people have been wondering why the photo clarity is not good when compared to other Sony smartphone cameras. This is because the image optimizing coding is not so perfect with Xiaomi usually once the RAW image is captured with the smartphone camera it undergoes processing which involves applying various filters and correcting the colours and saving them in a much smaller file size. This part has not been properly taken care of by Xiaomi.
3. Dumps the old to India way out of time , no events as in china
MI4 launch has been scheduled in less than a month and now they have launched MI3 in India. It is fine that usually companies wont be launching their flagship products in new countries immediately and other than that they will just make a trial launch of their old product to see the reception to launch their latest flagship product and this is the strategy adopted by MI3 also and they even followed the social media based advertising a s usual but the hard part is usually in china while launching their products they use to have events like popcorn event or a meeting but they have treated India less by not conducting any such meetings and the only silver lining they did was Hugo delivered some of the units in person. I do hope XIOMI to spend some money in India.4. Selling strategy
Last but not least their selling strategy, I know many buyers would have been frustrated on seeing that the phone went OFF stocks in seconds actually this is the selling strategy used by XIOMI everywhere they create demand by selling less units and we people strive hard to get the ones which is tough to get and they use a normal human brain to their advantage by making it available less they are making their product premium and once it is premium it gets easy advertisement and finally they were able to sell more than what they could have sold by releasing a bulk of units.And finally to summarize everything even though mi3 being an wonderful phone restricting the numbers available and creating a demand is a far worst strategy from a customers view.
