miniddy7的部落格

By SHEN JINGTING shenjingting@chinadaily.mini storagecom.cn Xiaomi Corp has done it again —but this time even faster.All 100,000 units of its latest l ag- ship smartphone, the Mi-3, sold out in 86 seconds.Beijing-based Xiaomi, which recently hired Google Inc’sformer vice-president Hugo Barra, announced its third- generation Android mobile device last month. The company said the Mi-3 is the world’s i rst smartphone running on Nvidia’s Tegra 4 quad- core chipset and has superb func- tionality.But thousands of potential cus- tomers were let disappointed as they sat in front of their computer screens ready to place an order as soon as business opened on Tuesday.The 16-gigabyte version of the Mi-3 sells for 1,999 yuan ($323.96).Xiaomi opened online sales of the handsets at 12 noon and announced all had been bought in less than a minute-and-a-half.Zhou Dandan, a white-collar worker in Beijing, said she logged on to the Xiaomi website 10 minutes before sales started. It took her two to three minutes to successfully log on the oi cial site because the sys- tem was slow, presumably because thousands were also trying to log on, keen to get their hands on the keenly priced device.On the stroke of 12, she pressed the buy button but the website just showed a countdown image. At 12:08 pm, it informed her that her pur- chase attempt was unsuccessful.“I phoned oi cials from Xiaomi, asking them whether I can manage to get a handset. But they said even Xiaomi staf have to purchase hand- sets online and strictly adhere to the ‘first come, first serve’ rule,” Zhou said.Although Xiaomi will of er a sec- ond round of sales next Tuesday, Zhou said she is pessimistic about getting a handset online and expects to wait a few months to buy one from a telecom carrier ol ine outlet — by which time an even newer model may be available.Mark Hughes, a foreign journal- ist who lives in Beijing, saiself storage he had heard a lot about the Xiaomi smart- phone and had a strong interest in getting an Mi-3 handset.“The latest device seems to be extremely good, according to reports — and cheap compared with the iPhone and other smartphones.Also previous successful Xiaomi smartphone models led customers to believe the Mi-3 would not disap- point,” he said.Hughes shares the views of a group of people who believe Xiao- mi is manipulating the market — a similar tactic said to be used by US- based giant Apple Inc. “h ey build up anticipation, keep the shipping numbers secret and stir up custom- ers’ interest,” he said. “It’s an old trick, playing on people’s psychol- ogy. It gets the device talked about and people get obsessive. Rumors circulate and its quality gets talked up and up.”Xiaomi denied it was deploying so-called “hunger marketing”. Liu Wei, a spokesman for Xiaomi, said the company does its best to satisfy people’s demand but its produc- tion capacity cannot keep up with demand.“Because of the imbalance between demand and supply, it is easy for people to be under the illu- sion that we are deliberately creating a show,” Liu said.Mobile phone scalpers, who developed the art of selling Apple’siPhones at prices higher than the oi cial i gure at er buying them in bulk, sometimes overseas if they had already gone on sale there, are now sensing a new business opportunity with Xiaomi smartphones. In Bei- jing’s Zhongguancun area, famed for its high-tech wares, scalpers are asking for an additional 500 yuan on average for every Mi-3 device they sell.Xiaomi’s competitively priced phones are highly sought at er. Every batch that is released regularly sells out fast, often within 30 minutes.At the end of July, when Xiaomi announced its most affordable smartphone yet, it attracted more than 7 million reservations and sold out its i rst batch of 100,000 units in just 90 seconds.mini storage