Should be popular with budgerigars
According to Google Translate Xiaomi (小米) translates as millet. No stranger than Apple(R), I guess.
Xiaomi - the fastest growing mobile phone manufacturer - is now Number Three in China and setting its sights on the top spot. The company has said through its blog that it sold 26.11 million phones in the first six months of the year and has set a target of 60m phones for the full year. The figure shows extraordinary growth …
"looks like they're not innovating much yet, just churning out me-too phones"
And that's likely the way it will be for quite some time. It's the PC market all over again. Their innovation will be that they can do what the big boys do for 2/3rds or even 1/2 the price.
They'll pout about the derivative accusations all the way to the bank.
I own a Chinese phone, it does everything a smart phone should at a fraction of the price of a Western phone, plus it came with a lot of extras that a Western phone maker charges for - protective case, screen protector, car charger, headphone dust plug, keyboard pen, dual SIM, uSD USB adapter ....
Mines a pint of Pearl River please!!!
The interesting thing is that this seemingly unknown handset maker is selling a lot more Android phones than the entire Windows Phone ecosystem does combined.
I found numbers indicating that Nokia sold 8.8m phones in Q3 2013 and 8.2m phones in Q4 2013, and that was 92% of all Windows Phone sales (source).
If one does a bit of rounding, this should put the combined sales of all Windows phones at around 10m per quarter.
Xiaomi seems to have sold 26.11 million phones combined in Q1 and Q2 2014, so one could reasonably assume they sell around 13m phones per quarter.