By Herman Lai, posted Jul 14, 2011 at 9:39 AM, 878 views,

Xiaomi’s Ambitious Goal to Be The Next Apple in China (video)

There is a company based in Beijing called “Xiaomi (小米)“, who had an ambitious goal to become the next Apple in China, according to an anonymous source from Sina. Seemingly is because the president of the company is an Apple fanboy. We believe the company can be quite successful in China but definitely not good enough to beat Apple in the market, and we are going to introduce to you guys about Xiaomi after the break. Hope you like it.

Xiaomi focuses on developing software and mobile Internet operation for iPhone, Android and other next-generation smartphone. On July 8, the company unveiled a stable version MIUI ROM based on Android 2.3 and we have got a video that introduces about MIUI (from Xiaomi’s official website):

MIUI ROM is made by a group of technical fans in Android area. It is based on Android 2.3 and totally designed and optimized for Chinese users. Currently MIUI ROM is in beta testing phase. MIUI team will improve it by adopting user’s suggestions and provide OTA update every Friday.

Gallery: MIUI ROM

MIUI supports 11 types of smartphone including Nexus One G5, HTC Desire G7, MOTO Milestone, HTC HD2, HTC Desire HD, Nexus S, HTC Desire Z, Samsung T959, SAMSUNG i9000, MOTO Defy, SAMSUNG I897.

In fact, Xiaomi has been in China since last year, and this company has become noticeable when they launched their first trial version MIUI ROM, which attracted over 500 thousands of users from all over the world, including countries like UK, Germany, Spain, Italia, Australia, U.S, Russia, Netherlands, Switzerland, Brazil and of course China and some other countries as well.

Xiaomi’s vice president is the designer of MIUI, he had served as the general manager of Kingsoft and the director of Jinshan Design Center. Aside from that, the company over 100 people, is a team of experts and talented people from well-known companies such as Microsoft, Google, Baidu, Jinshan, Tencent and some other companies.

Must mention that Xiaomi will launch their own branding smartphone in the next month or so, and they are also planning to have pad and pod on schedule, which means they will have a series of product that looks like what Apple did.

So, why do we think Xiaomi can success in China?

We definitely don’t think Xiaomi can surpass Apple as we consider this is some kind of mission impossible. But Xiaomi does have an advantage in their smartphone selling price in comparison to Apple iPhone in China. China has a large group of people that cannot afford smartphone like iPhone, so the company can actually target on the middle class consumers by producing low-cost smartphone, and that is also what Apple currently trying to make (a lower price iPhone). With MIUI, it is very alike to the way that iOS works, and that’s why Xiaomi users like about MIUI. Moreover, Xiaomi will be working on mobile apps as well. At the moment, there are over 300,000 of MIUI lovers, will you be one of them as well?

Source: cnBeta, Xiaomi’s official website, Sina