We stayed on quite late at the event today, got on an interview with Hugo and check out the company’s latest and greatestAndroid tablet. Let’s get on with the interview down below.
Interview with Hugo Barra
1) We understand that Xiaomi focuses a lot on user experience and attempting to introduce a complete ecosystem for the brand, are you planing to introduce all Xiaomi products into Malaysia?Hugo: Definitely, we want to try bringing all Xiaomi products into Malaysia if possible!
2) How do you intend to educate consumers about Xiaomi products? Though MIUI could be straightforward, it has too many features to cover and consumers will be happy to know that.Hugo: We’ll have MI Homes set up soon, which is a place where customers can go over to purchase accessories for their MI devices and get them repaired. While they’re there, they can also seek for our trained staffs to learn some of the great tips and tricks on our devices.
3) How do you want consumers to perceive Xiaomi products? As we know over here, many of them are still regarding Chinese made products as cheap without value.Hugo: We are going to change that perspective, and that will start with our global branding, we simply call it MI instead of Xiaomi to make the brand to be easily pronounced and sound global, we even spent lots of cash to purchase the Mi.com domain to make things simple for customers. We do what we are best at and try to focus on making the best purchase and after sales services, and that will slowly change people’s perspective about our products. I also believe that this is also a challenge for our competitors here.
4) Are you thinking of introducing value added services of your own into the market one day? As we know MIUI is a platform of its own, so you definitely must have some unique services to differentiate yourselves from the competition, such as music streaming and video on demand services.Hugo: It’s possible and we can work on that in the future, in terms of providing multimedia content, our challenge is definitely at the licensing part, which every country will have different regulations that we’ll need to comply.
5) Do you think MIUI can be an operating system of its own one day? No doubt its relying on Android’s core at this point of time, there’ll be definitely be one day that the company could work out on its own proprietary platform.Hugo: That would be too much of an effort, Android is a very flexible platform and allows us to customise MIUI to suit our user base, and it would not make sense for us to move to that direction as it would be very difficult to maintain and control a platform.
6) Let’s talk about localisation, we still find the experience of MIUI very ‘Chinese’, are you going to introduce Themes API locally?Hugo: Yes, we’ll be using the MIUI forum for that, give out guidelines on creating themes for the devices.
7) Now on to Mi TV 2, will you bring in the TV and partner with local content providers so that users can purchase a total solution (TV+Service) from it?Hugo: We would certainly like to partner with content providers if there’s any possibility
Xiaomi Mi Pad First Look
You can simply call it an iPad Mini with Retina Display rip off, however our experience with the tablet doesn’t feel like one, MIUI is just simply MIUI, even though there are still traces of iOS on it, but the company has certainly made a very respectable tablet UI for the Mi Pad. The Mi Pad is the first Android device to run on an NVIDIA K1 Kepler chip and comes with 2GB of RAM, 16/64GB of storage.
It has screen where you get tablet optimised widgets, pretty much like Magazine UX on Samsung’s recent tablet devices. however on the Mi Pad, it doesn’t fill up the whole screen, which we feel that the company could’ve done more in this aspect to make full use of the resolution.
The Mi Pad has an 8MP BSI sensor camera, we aren’t allowed to take image samples unfortunately, but early tests on the camera seem to reveal a lot of noise, which we believe it would be improved at a later time.
The Mi Pad has stereo speakers at the bottom of the device, and the back certainly feels ‘unapologetically plastic’. The speakers are really loud and clear.
It does look a bit bulky and cheap on the side, there’s the power button and volume rocker.
Xiaomi is working hard to bring this monster in to our market really soon, so stay tuned for more updates coming soon!
