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OK, so lesson number one. Sadly this is why we couldn’t bring you any live tweeting. We were two floors down, deep underground, then we decended into a cinema which effectively made it three floors below ground. No mobile signal. No access to WiFi. DOAH!
This is the start of a big shake up. For all too long, the big companies with the cash (Apple and Samsung) have poured millions upon millions into advertising. They’ve got your attention, but they have to get some money back again to offset all that expenditure, plus they of course make a very good profit.
Now, with companies like OnePLus, Honor and Huawei pushing hard, it’s questioning the assumption that there’s only enough room in the market for two players.
Today, Xiaomi landed. You can learn more about exactly who they are here. But I’m glad we’ve got companies like this, because we need good smartphone manufacturers questioning the status quo.
Today I arrived at the Barbican in London and sadly missed all the free beer. Had to make do with a small glass of water. That was my first and only fail of the day though.
“Why did we pick the UK as the next market to enter?”, said Wang Xiang.
“It’s because we all love London, we love the UK”.
That’s good start. He then went on to detail the 8 year journey that has got them to this point.
“We want to make innovation more accessible, for everyone. We want people to enjoy a better life through our innovation. No matter their income levels”.
He showed how the company started and told us that, “We treat our customers as our friends. We listen to them, we work with them. Our users then hopefully become our fans”.
There was a big cheer from the assembled fans.
“We offer amazing product at honest prices. We have four pillars – innovation, design, quality and value for money.”
You do get a sense from them that they want to deliver more for less. This isn’t about cutting corners and producing cheap stuff. This is about quality, an attention to details and a belief that customers shouldn’t really have to pay a fortune for a decent smartphone.
Plus, they make a bold statement. They say that they will never exceed 5% net profit margin on their smartphones. That’s how finely they’re cutting things in order to bring you the absolute best price. So no, it’s not all about advertising and spending billions shoving the brand down your face, it’s more about delivering the quality and the tech you expect for a price that will surprise you.
Here in the UK they want the grow an idea called “Smart Life”. This will be accessible, easy to use and will improve your life. They do this with their Mi Home app. With this you control your “Smart Life” on your phone. You can set your Xiaomi automated vacuum to go off and clean, you can control the air quality, the temperature and so on.
Donovan Sung then took to the stage. He’s the Director of Product and Marketing ad Xiaomi Mobile.
He detailed the UK trail-blazing that the “Mi Fans” have been doing over the last few months – painting the town orange in order to promote the brand here. For me it was quite nice to see the colour coming back – it reminded me of the Orange mobile network here in the UK.
It’s received some rave reviews. This will be arriving now in the UK. It packs a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 CPU (an octa-core one running up to 2.8GHz), a Qualcomm Adreno 630 GPU, 6GB memory and 128GB storage. There’s a rear-mounted fingerprint sensor, Bluetooth 5.0, WiFi NFC, No microSD card slot.
More on the cameras in a minute though, because about this time we found out that the Mi8 and the entry level Redmi 6A were both coming to Three. That Redmi 6A is just £99 and has a 2GHz Mediatek quad-core Helio A2 CPU. It’s got an 18:9 5.45″ 720 x 1440 pixel screen with an 18:9 ratio. Your £99 will get you 2GB RAM and 16GB of storage with a microSD card slot. You get a 13 megapixel rear camera, a 5 megapixel front camera and, I must say, this wasn’t at all embarrassing to use when I tried it out in the demo area after.
I know I go on about this like a broken record, but £99 used to get you an utterly terrible smartphone.
TO BE CONTINUED…
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