Xiaomi will make its debut in India via Flipkart, the online retailer which boasts of being the only way you can officially get your hands on any of the Moto phones first-hand, if you live in the country. And the Chinese manufacturer who is behind some interesting smartphones such as the Redmi, Mi3 and Mi4, plans to reach these shores soon enough.
Confirmations from multiple sources reveal that Xiaomi will bring its Redmi as well as Mi3 into India and sell them exclusively through Flipkart. We should be keeping an eye out for their launch in the mid-July to mid-August period. Manu Kumar Jain will be heading the company’s India operations and the pricing strategy will obviously be aggressive. We could expect the Mi4, Mi2S, iPad mini rival – Mi Pad and others, to show up after that too.
Xiaomi has proved that China can do good hardware and not just popular product rip-offs or assembling of gadgets for the likes of Apple, Samsung, Microsoft and other brands. The Mi3 is the company’s flagship smartphone featuring a 5-inch 1080p screen, 2GB of RAM, a 2.3GHz Snapdragon 800 processor, a 13MP camera with a Sony sensor and 16GB internal memory.
Just for the record, the OEM is reported to have sold 100000 units of the Xiaomi Mi3 in China in less then one and a half minute. The Xiaomi Redmi that Flipkart will be vending will be a relatively cheap handset with a 4.7-inch 720p panel, 1GB of RAM, a quad core MediaTek chipset (to keep its price low), dual SIM slots, an 8MP snapper and 4GB ROM.
Also see: Xiaomi’s low cost Mi Pad is a plastic-fantastic Apple iPad mini challenger
BGR.in notes in an exclusive story that the Redmi and Mi3 may be nailed at around Rs 8000 and Rs 15000 in India, since these are what their retail tags read at in Singapore. The OEM may also depend on Flipkart for pushing out a variety of accessories including its 10400mAh battery power bank.
Flipkart may possibly have only small numbers of the Xiaomi Redmi and Mi3 units in stock at a time, and you might have to wait for new shipping dates. Xiaomi is known to release its products in phases, probably owing to its stretched supply chain, but it never has trouble getting them sold.
UPDATE: The Xiaomi Redmi Red Rice and other phones from the company can already be purchased in India through sources other than Flipkart.