Xiaomi to debut on Flipkart in India: The phones and tablets to expect

Leveraging on the booming Indian smartphone market, Xiaomi is the next Chinese company to begin its operations in India. While we’ve known the company’s plan to enter India right from the beginning of the year, it is now rumoured to start its Indian journey by teaming up with Flipkart to launch two smartphones from its vast convoy.

The company has come a long way since it launched the first smartphone in 2011. It is quite popular in mainland China, with operations in Malaysia and Singapore, and has expansion plans in India and Indonesia, among others. The company is also believed to have hired Manu Kumar Jain, who was the co-founder of e-commerce website Jabong.com to kickstart its operations in India.

Let’s take a look at the mobile products to expect from Xiaomi:

Redmi Redmi is the company’s low cost smartphone that is rumoured to enter the Indian market soon.  The Redmi sports a 4.7-inch 720p IPS display. It comes powered by a  1.5GHz MediaTek 6589 quad-core processor processor coupled with 1GB RAM. The 4GB internal storage can be expanded further using microSD card slot. On the camera front, one can expect an 8-megapixel rear snapper and a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera.

Mi3

Mi3 is the company’s best selling device that was launched in September last year, and is now all set to enter India. It sports a slightly  larger 5-inch 1080p IPS display. The smartphone has two variants – one running on Nvidia Tegra 4 processor clocked at 1.8GHz and another with Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 SoC. The latter is said to be made available for the Indian market, coupled with  2GB RAM. It comes fitted with a 13MP rear camera and a 2MP front camera.

One can expect a slew of connectivity options like Bluetooth, NFC and Wi-Fi. Form-wise, the television unit comes with an 8.4mm bezel as well as 2mm to 4.8cm thickness dimension. All of this will be fuelled by a massive  3,050mAh battery.

MiPad

We can also expect company’s 7.9-inch MiPad to reach the Indian shores soon. TheVerge describes it as a “plastic iPad mini for Android lovers.” It comes with a 7.9-inch screen size featuring whopping 2048 x 1536 pixels of resolution. The customised UI also mimics iOS 7.

Available in 16GB and 64GB models, some of its features include Nvidia’s quad-core ARM Cortex-A15 processor, 2GB of RAM, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 8MP rear and 5MP front-facing cameras. All of this fuelled by a massive 6700mAh battery. Take a look at the tablet in the video below:

MIUI It’s not just the devices that set the company apart, Xiaomi also has a customized UI called MIUI built upon Android. Xiaomi phones are among the first batch of devices to come with such customization.  Today, users can choose from a plethora of themes for almost everything from homescreen to boot images.

One of the changes in MIUI is the lack of an app drawer, but the UI is highly customisable with individual themes for icons, fonts, animation, lockscreen etc.

Last year in October, the company founder and CEO Lei Jun had clarified that it doesn’t choose to shift away from the Android operating system for its products, so the phones in India will definitely have Android.

Reinforcing the company’s ambitions to outsell more expensive offerings from Apple and Samsung, Xiaomi had said that it aims at selling 40 million handsets in 2014, more than double the number it sold in 2013. The expansion into the Indian market seems to be a part of Xiaomi’s this plan.

It should be noted that the company is known for its competitive pricing which has helped it achieve huge sales numbers. In plans to enter the Indian market with an even more aggressive pricing. So, wait and watch out for an official announcement now.