CRI听力:Xiaomi Releases New Model

Xiaomi Mobile has officially released the second generation of its smartphone, the Xiaomi 2. With a quad core processor, the Xiaomi 2 can currently call itself the fastest smartphone on the market. Zheng Du is a smartphone reviewer at hiapk.com, a Fujian-based smartphone online forum.

"There is no doubt that the processor of the Xiaomi 2 is excellent, and no other smartphone in the market has chosen such a high performance processor."
Since its debut last August, Xiaomi Mobile phones have become extremely popular in China. The company received 300,000 orders for its phones within the first 34 hours after they went on sale. Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun promised that, with a 1.5-gigahertz dual core processor, the Mi-One phone would run at a speed faster than that of most well-known brands.

But Zheng Du says although the company's hardware is not top-notch, the smartphones are exceptional when it comes to playing videos and games.

"Performance in decoding videos and compatibility with mobile games are the basic criteria people will be looking at when reviewing a smartphone. Xiaomi uses chips from Qualcomm Company, a perfect choice for Android-based smartphones, which are highly compatible with all kinds of games. Asphalt 6 was the most popular game at that time on smartphones. Aside from Xiaomi, no other 2,000-yuan smartphone can run the game so well."

Zheng says other unique Xiaomi features have been raising eyebrows among smartphone users, including the MIUI operating system, which combines the company's own applications, and Google's Android-based operating system.

"Android is an open platform. You can change configurations and make modifications to a large extent, but it's a sophisticated task. MIUI makes it more user-friendly by highlighting settings that used to hide behind complicated setting menus."

Xiaomi recently acquired the team behind the third-party messaging app, MSNLite. One possible motivation for the acquisition is that Xiaomi, which also makes the mobile-oriented Whatsapp-like group-messaging app Miliao, wants to give that app some desktop support to make it more like Apple's Facetime.

For now, Xiaomi's co-founder and CEO Lei Jun says the MSNLite team will work at the company's Beijing headquarters, and it's likely that the MSNLite app will morph into the Miliao PC app.

For CRI, I'm Zhong Qiu.