Xiaomi is perhaps the most talked about manufacturer here at GizChina, but what a lot of our readers might not know is that Xiaomi only made one product in its first year into operation — MIUI. Yes, they didn’t make a phone until they were into their second year since foundation!
It was a rather interesting ploy, which we now know as an extremely successful one. MIUI, back then, was offered to a lot of Android devices, with the ROMs maintained and developed by Xiaomi engineers. A lot of you might remember flashing MIUI on your first Android phone (as I do, on my good ol’ LG Optimus One).
Gizchina News of the week
Xiaomi today announced that the very ROM (or OS, whatever you like to call it) has now managed to gather a total of 100 million users. A combination of eye candy, and some genuinely handy features make MIUI popular among power users and simplicity freaks alike. The software has also been instrumental in keeping Xiaomi alive in the market; the company is known for selling its devices at near-cost, and then making money off services from its MIUI ecosystem, including themes, cloud based services, etc.
Xiaomi is also starting to grow its footprint outside of just Asia, and the first step it has taken is towards the US market.
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Yash, you really need to pay more attention to image optimization. The photo that goes with this news story (the close up of the mi4 screen) once again is 425kb for a 650×433 png. If for some reason you absolutely must use png (I don’t see the need) a simple image optimizer can bring it down to under 300kb with no loss in quality but I recommend going the jpg route in which it would only be 80kb. No, I’m not dissecting GizChina’s coding but simply clicking on the link and watching this page load one with graphic design and web developing talent can clearly see the problem.
Thanks, that does make sense. We’ll look into it 🙂
It’s not limited to your posts but actually a lot of the posts on gizchina have this same issue. Take the new Mi Note hands on story, it’s title image (again, png) is 773kb which could and should be only a 100kb jpg.
These large title image sizes get carried over to the slideshow on the home page. I don’t know how many hits gizchina gets but with these unneccessary file sizes gizchina could be wasting gb’s of bandwidth from it’s hosting provider, not to mention the readers money (for those not on unlimited data plans).
I’m a big fan of MIUI, ever since I bought my first Xiaomi M2S. I do however feel somewhat deserted by Xiaomi, as they continue their focus on the Asian markets and their neglect of the western markets. Don’t get me wrong, I understand their motivation behind this, but it saddens me.