Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi will put its 5.7-inch phablet on sale in Taiwan next week exclusively at stores of Far EasTone Telecommunications, the country’s third largest wireless carrier.
According to an announcement on Far EasTone’s website, the Mi Note will be available on July 28 for free if consumers subscribe to a monthly data plan of NT$1,799 (US$57.60) on a two-year contract. Xiaomi is scheduled to host a press event on Thursday to launch the Mi Note in Taiwan and reveal the phablet’s retail price.
The Mi Note is a high-end device that comes with a 5.7-inch full-HD display, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 2.5GHz quad-core processor, 3GB of RAM, a 13-megapixel rear camera, a 4-megapixel front-facing camera, a 3,000mAh battery and dual-SIM 4G LTE connectivity. The phone went on sale in China in March at a price of $370 for a 16GB model and $450 for a 64GB model, according to Xiaomi.
The company also launched a higher-end smartphone in China called the Mi Note Pro, which starts from US$531 for a 64GB model and features hardware improvements such as a 64-bit Snapdragon 810 processor, a quad-HD display, 4GB of RAM and LTE download speeds of up to 450 megabits per second.
The Beijing-based handset maker is known for its relatively low-cost but feature-rich line of smartphones that are popular in China, but patent restrictions are keeping the company from selling phones in mature markets, including the United States and Europe.
Valued at around US$46 billion, the four-year-old company hopes to sell 80 million to 100 million smartphones in 2015 after selling 61 million units last year.
Xiaomi announced on July 2 that it sold about 34.7 million smartphones in the first half of 2015, up 33% from the same period in 2014 but only a third of the way to its sales goal of 100 million devices.
Taipei-based research firm TrendForce said in a July 20 report that Xiaomi’s market share has been hurt by competition from low-priced smartphones and an overheating problem in the Mi Note products caused by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 chipset.
TrendForce estimated that Xiaomi, which replaced LG Electronics as the world’s fourth-largest smartphone maker in the second quarter with a market share of 5.9%, will ship 70 million smartphones globally in 2015.
Via: China Times
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