Xiaomi to go quad core with iPhone challenger Much-hyped Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi is set to launch the follow-up to its hugely popular iPhone rival the M1 next week, with rumours swirling that it will be the first device to run Qualcomm’s powerful quad-core APQ8064 Snapdragon chip. Xiaomi rose from virtual obscurity a couple of years ago to make an unprecedented …
Long before they released the M1, they were releasing free versions of their (Android based) MIUI OS for multiple existing devices. New releases every week (with user feedback/bug reports) helped polish the OS until it was at a stable enough state to launch on their own phone. Not a bad strategy - thousands of testers for free.
It was by far the best OS I had on my HTC Desire and I am currently running it on my S2 and can't see myself switching any time soon.
The UI is smooth, aesthetically pleasing and there is a design consistency across different apps which holds the whole OS together really nicely. It's like iOS in that regard. I just don't get that with the default android OS (mind you, I haven't got Jelly bean, yet)
I had assumed that one of the reasons that it was successful is that they had better integrated Pinyin and better adapted the screens for Chinese script going top to bottom. Interesting to see your comment that it has merits beyond this - are you using it for primarily latin script or chinese? Do you think it would have a market outside China (and maybe Japan, given they use the sama character set)?
I use it in English. There is a site that releases a new MIUI Rom every week, translated into about a dozen different european languages.
Would the actual M2 phone have a market outside China? Is that what you mean? That's a tough one - If the hardware exceeds or even matches what's on the market right now, then yes (as the price would be lower than htc/samsung).
The trouble is that MIUI team actually goes out of its way to support popular new devices, so you can have MIUI OS on nearly any hardware you want.
I think he meant it could be an interesting alternative to, say, cyanogen, to use on western handsets.
You could then buy a pretty decent handset, that has been released one or two years ago, and has been abandoned by the manufacturer (plenty of samsung models spring to mind) relatively cheaply, and have a nice modern looking smooth os running on it. It would be a nice geekish project.
Please excuse the bad form of replying to myself.
I just checked out their site, and an *obvious* model for this project just jumped out: motorola milestone 3 (I'm one of those sad sad people who loves hardware keyboards.)
The choice would be between this and CM, and I don't think it's clear which one is "better" (if we can even ask this without objective criteria.)
Totally with you on this.
I reckon the useful life of my htc desire was extended by about a year thanks to MIUI (made it so smooth and the UI was lovely). As I say, the whole UI experience is more consistent than Cyanogen (though ironically the base for MIUI on the Desire was actually cm7).
If I was to advise someone on a budget on a phone today, I would say get a second hand s2 and stick MIUI on it.
oh i dunno...straight MIUI on the s2 is pretty sluggish, chiefly because they base it on the samsung sources with all that entails. I'd recommend cMIUI instead, which is a version of MIUI based on the CM9 sources - way quicker - hit a button and something immediately happens instead of 2 seconds later. I believe it's just the galaxy nexus MIUI sources shuffled about a bit.
Only trouble with it is the USB dock audio output doesn't work on cMIUI...otherwise I'd be using it myself.
MIUI is lovely though, it has to be said.
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