Xiaomi's latest flagship device was unvieled today, a super-thin, 5.7-inch phone sporting a fresh design, powerful camera and lazy, copycat name. The company has managed to brush aside "Apple rip-off" rumors with its latest device, but why did they have to co-opt the name of Samsung's popular devices? This is like getting within sight of the finish line and then pulling over to inject some steroids just in case. But hey, they seem pretty confident about it:
Xiaomi had a product named the "Note" before, but it wasn't the company's main flagship device. During the product release event, CEO Lei Jun even went as far as to explicitly compare his company's "Note" to Samsung's, as well as to the iPhone 6:
Xiaomi has set up the Note to directly compete with the iPhone 6 Plus. Compared to Apple's product, the Xiaomi phone has a bigger screen and is lighter and thinner:
The phone will retail for RMB2,229, significantly less than the iPhone 6 Plus' staggering RMB6070. That said, we're not sure who was asking for a phone bigger than the iPhone 6 Plus, a device that already appears comically large in, say, hands and pockets. Lei Jun assured conference-goers that this size was compensated for by the device's extremely thin bezel (plastic space around the screen) but it still clocks in at a few millimeters wider than Apple's behemoth.
As far as we're concerned, the highlight of the entire conference was when Lei Jun showed off a copy of Xiaomi's patents to the whole crowd, a kind of nod-and-wink towards the copyright accusers out there. Samsung apparently never patented the "Note" name in China.
Keep on chugging, Xiaomi. Those 'literally the best' phones aren't going to make themselves but please, please invest more than 10 minutes into thinking up the name for the next one.
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