Xiaomi may be a young company but it was quickly established itself as one of the top smartphone manufacturers in China. It began to expand beyond China this year. The company famously hired Google’s Hugo Barra back in 2013 and put him in charge of its global division. After expansion to a number of Asian countries this year, it looks like Xiaomi has set its eyes on North America for 2015.
Speaking with Android Authority at the Indonesian Cellular Show, Barra confirmed that “We will start working on North America next year… It’s in the pipeline.” In fact, he made the same claim on stage at the event earlier in the day, confirming that this was not a misunderstanding. With no official plans yet, it’s likely though that Xiaomi’s North American debut will happen later in the year.
Xiaomi will face a tough market in North America. Barra is well aware of this fact and expects that they’ll need to change customer perceptions that heavily subsidized flagship devices selling for US$200 and up are in any way better than Xiaomi’s devices. “I believe in the future, people will be less and less tolerant to unnecessarily overpriced devices,” he said, adding that Nexus users are a good example of users, “highly tech literate” in his words, will be among the first to see the value of XIaomi’s devices.
Barra expects that Xiaomi’s MIUI operating system, a custom version of Android, will be an advantage as well. With updates rolling out every week based on customer feedback and a heavily customizable interface, MIUI is also likely to appeal to that same tech-savvy crowd.
One of Xiaomi’s recent devices is the Mi 3. Powered by either an NVIDIA Tegra 4 or a quad-core 2.3GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 and MIUI, it comes with a 5-inch Full HD (1080×1920) display, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of internal storage, a 13MP rear camera and a 3,050mAh battery. It currently sells for under US$300.
Source : Android Authority