Happenings in Aug 2015

Squeezing time to blog is difficult, but I just do what I can.

Movies:

Have seen ‘Inside Out’ and ‘MI5 – Rogue State’ recently, Pixar produced a great one this time. The movie was entertaining though it didn’t hit me until I read reviews afterwards. My sons couldn’t get into the movie much, but my wife found that surprisingly deep in content. I think the creativity is superb giving the subject matter and the way of presentation. Certainly, a keeper! MI5 is good too, I like the third one since and I think this one is quite entertaining from start to finish. The female lead is pretty good, something like an equivalent of Tom Cruise in it, not very pretty but very decent for the part. The villain looks a bit funny, I don’t know why his look really reminds me of Tim Cook?! J

Travel:

Spent 6 days in Osaka and have a day trip to Nara last week. A happy trip overall with the whole family. To be honest, I was very tried everyday, but it wasn’t any worst than before. Foods can be better, but certainly much better than the SG trip earlier this year. Didn’t do much shopping, except surprisingly few clothes from GU for myself. I wish the kids are older and would be able to appreciate culture part more, though the Lego Center, Kid science place are fine for them. The Universal Studio was actually more for me and my wife! The Harry Potter land was really amazing, the ride as well….There weren’t too many tourists from the PRC, so the tourists’ places aren’t too packed. Love the day in Nara, the temples are good, but surprisingly the best meal during the trip wasn’t the crab dinner, but the largely veggie lunch in the temple yard, very refreshing!

Gadget:

Haven’t brought it yet, but I’m about to buy a NAS first time and would install that at home DIY. After experiencing the HORRIBLE LOSS of data that I’ve in a freaking Seagate hard disk this year, lost few hundred GBs of MP3 that I collected last few years, damned! I would need to prevent any further loss in my other hard disks, just able to partially rescue most of my photos in another, thank GOD! So, the setup of the NAS is imminent, just need to find time to buy it and install it, most likely QNAP TS251C would be the one, though Synology DS214Play is also good. Let’s see…

With the huge loss of my MP3 collections, I just don’t have the mood to construct my iTunes library anymore. Also, listing to podcasts have occupied my audio entertainment times, I’ve not listened to any music for months! However, given the Apple Music hype, I did the alternative: registered Spotify instead, cuz the prior doesn’t have a free version, I’m not gonna pay for anything in case I forgot to discontinue the free service after 3 months. Well, the free Spotify version is fine and good enough, particularly when I just don’t have the time to be very picky for customization or constructing my playlists. Just looking back the when we still listen to vinyl and cassettes, I thought MP3 would be quite ultimate, just couldn’t expect streaming would potentially takeover until I tried it on myself to see the beauty of it. I think every music delivery format has its fans, more options the better.

The World:

The refugee crisis in Europe is sad. But, for being a fan of conspiracy, it is just the result of the force behind all those chaos. Those who suffer are mostly Muslim and Africans, they are the ‘targets’ of the conspiracy behind. What can we say……

China just has another military parade to commemorate the 70^th anniversary of the deficit of fascism?! The purpose of the show is largely for domestic reason. I just feel that ‘self-reflection’ is more important than all the ‘empty’ words and propaganda, if anyone really for peace-keeping. As a side note, my older has started asking me questions about world events as I was watching time on TV. He recently was quite interested in the anniversary of end of WWII, the Japanese invasion of China, etc. He asked me who the face on Tiananmen Square is? Well, I answered him with comment, I think that raised more questions in his head than before, which would be a good thing down the road. ….

iPhone 6, 6+, ApplePay and Apple Watch

Long time no blog! I’ve let the dust to settle down before sharing my 2 cents of thought.

iPhone 6 and 6+

Apple finally bows down to competitors to make bigger phones. The hardware and specs are decent, not spectacular, and they don’t need to be for commercial reason. The design are still top notch, better than its competitors, all it needs indeed is to make consumers feel that iPhone is still a premier product that deserve premium price. The chip and sensors are marginal upgrade from 5s, expected. My view is that iPhone 6 and 6+ are probably the beginning of the end of hardware renovation for iPhone. Cuz, what more can Apple does? Unless they make a hologram, minority report types of projection, etc. Otherwise, that’s pretty what we will see in years to come. i.e. 6s would have the same physique, 7, 7s, from round edge back to sharp edge, may be Sapphire glass, liquid metal be used for materials. Maybe Apple will make color metal cases, etc. That’s pretty much what the incremental change it would make. Size will stay for at least next few years if not permanent. What really would change are internal, upgraded sensor, chip, battery and the killer iOS. That’s about it.

ApplePay

The killer for Apple, as I mentioned in many posts before, is its ecosystem of hardware, software and services.  ApplePay is surely the latter one. It is not a very innovative thing, it just as most of other Apple’s services incorporated in its ecosystem, just works! The most important thing is the lure of banks and merchants to buy in this services and to become an industry standard in next 2-3 years. Apple doesn’t need to do much but getting fee from every transaction! That will ensure a new stream of cash flow. I’m pretty sure ApplePay will succeed given it simply makes payment easy. This service will do if not more than the iTunes App store to Apple, 30% charge on Apps. Apple just opened a gold mine!

Apple Watch

I’m less a skeptic of this product than many naysayers. To be honest, for both iPhone and iPad, my first purchase of them were happened to be the 3^rd gen of the products. I want an AppleWatch, but I don’t need one, at least for now. So, as usual, I will stay tune to let Apple fine tuning this product before I hop in. What are current problems or issues that I have with the 1^st gen AppleWatch? Yes, many spec have not been released, but the following suspicions at the moment would still be largely believable.

Battery – nightly charge is no good. Sure, I nightly get my iPhone recharged, shouldn’t matter to recharge another thing. But, it should be going reverse, to have better iPhone battery so I don’t need to recharge it daily. Watch is smaller and so does its battery, but people would expect a smaller screen size shouldn’t consume a lot of power that requires daily recharge. Yes, a magnet recharger is nice, but what matter is the other end of the recharger that it is connected to - Still a bulky backup portable battery! Apple gotta do something about it, be it to be recharged remotely or via kinetic action or something. Stay tune to Apple to acquire some small companies that can do those things in next year or two.

Size – the belts are nice, I’m sure 3^rd party dealers will do much more than that. Stay tune to Louis Vutton, Gucci, etc to come up with their belts for AppleWatch in next year or two. The problem of the watch itself is that it still looks a bit bulky! It looks too thick! I would say that it will definitely be improved by in next gens as a major selling point by Apple, the only roadblock is the battery. A tough case to crack!

I think the UI is innovative with those circle icons, but it would demand learning and memorization by users to recognize which icon is which. Also, I’m not sure if it is easy to spot the right icon for people with big fat fingers. The digital crown is nice, would want to see more details about that. The watch can do wi-fi. I’m not sure if I would buy in the map feature that it shows in keynote. The screen is simple too small and if it has to work with iPhone, why don’t I just take the phone out and look at it? Also, about the use of Siri, I’ve concern of the audio volume. The health sensor is a nice touch, ApplePay indication is nice too, but I think Apple is still waiting for a killing app to drive its sale. Anyway, I’m pretty sure I will buy an AppleWatch…in few years.

Chinese URL

Just came across a very interest article about Chinese URL.

In case the article will be gone in future, I just copy that below:

The Secret Messages Inside Chinese URLs Decoding 4008-517-517.com 

By Christopher Beam

An American friend living in Beijing once said she refused to communicate with anyone whose email address consisted of a string of numbers, such as 62718298454@163.com. This made sense to me at the time—why make email addresses as difficult to remember as phone numbers? But I soon realized that issuing a blanket ban on number-based communications would mean cutting off just about every single Chinese person I knew.

In the U.S., you really only have to remember two long numbers, ever: Your phone number and your Social Security number. In China, you’re constantly barraged by digits: QQ numbers (QQ is China’s most popular chat service), email addresses, and even URLs. For example, the massive online retailer Jingdong Mall is at jd.com or, if that takes too long to type, 3.cn. Check out 4399.com to see one of China’s first and largest online gaming websites. Buy and sell used cars at 92.com. Want to purchase train tickets? It’s as easy as 12306.cn.

Why the preference for digits over letters? It mostly has to do with ease of memorization. To a native English-speaker, remembering a long string of digits might seem harder than memorizing a word. But that’s if you understand the word. For many Chinese, numbers are easier to remember than Latin characters. Sure, Chinese children learn the pinyin system that uses the Roman alphabet to spell out Mandarin words (for example, the word for “Internet,” 网络, is spelled wangluo in pinyin). And yes, Arabic numerals (1-2-3) are technically just as much a foreign import as the Roman alphabet (A-B-C). But most Chinese are more familiar with numbers than letters, especially those who didn’t go to college. To many, “Hotmail.com” might as well be Cyrillic.

The digits in a domain name usually aren’t random. The Internet company NetEase uses the web address 163.com—a throwback to the days of dial-up when Chinese Internet users had to enter 163 to get online. The phone companies China Telecom and China Unicom simply reappropriated their well-known customer service numbers as domain names, 10086.cn and 10010.cn, respectively.

Digits are even more convenient when you consider that the words for numbers are homophones for other words. The URL for the massive e-commerce site Alibaba, for example, is 1688.com, pronounced “yow-leeyoh-ba-ba”—close enough! Those digits can just as often have individual meanings. The video sharing site 6.cn works because the word for “six” is a near-homophone for the word “to stream.” The number five is pronounced wu, which sounds like wo, which means “I.” The number one is pronounced yao, which with a different tone means “want.” So the job-hunting site 51job.com sounds a lot like “I want a job.” Likewise, to order McDonalds’ delivery online, just go to 4008-517-517.com, the “517” of which sounds a bit like “I want to eat.” (An English equivalent might be the old radio jingle, “How many cookies did Andrew eat? Andrew 8-8000.”)

This kind of number-language has become an infinitely malleable shorthand among Chinese web users: 1 means “want,” 2 means “love,” 4 means “dead” or “world” or “is,” 5 means “I,” 7 means “wife” or “eat,” 8 means “get rich” or “not,” and 9 means “long time” or “alcohol.” The numbers 5201314, for example, mean 我爱你一生一世,or “I will love you forever”; 0748 means “go die”; and 687 means “I’m sorry.” (See here for more examples.) Chinese has plenty of other number-based slang, such as erbaiwu, or “250,” which means “idiot,” or “38,” pronounced sanba, which means “bitch.” And of course there’s the association of certain numbers with good or bad luck, and the subsequent demand for addresses and phone numbers with lots of 8s (“get rich”) and minimal 4s (“die”). Back in 2003, a Chinese airline paid $280,000 for the phone number 88888888.

Why don’t Chinese web addresses just use Mandarin characters? Because that’s a pain, too. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which sets the rules for web addresses globally, has periodically hyped the expansion of domain names to include non-Latinate scripts, but Chinese web sites have yet to take full advantage. Some devices require a special plug-in to type in Chinese URLs, and even then it takes longer to type or write out characters than to input a few digits. Plus, for web sites that want to expand internationally but don’t want to alienate foreign audiences with unfamiliar characters, numbers are a decent compromise.

Still, the numbers/letters divide is emblematic of the Internet’s built-in bias: Even more than two decades after its birth, it’s still a fundamentally American system. (Sorry, Tim Berners-Lee.) ICANN is an American non-profit corporation, though the U.S. recently agreed to hand it over to a “global multi-stakeholder community” in 2015. ASCII, the character-encoding scheme that was long used on most web pages, is short for the “American Standard Code for Information Interchange.” In 2012, the United States refused to sign an international telecommunications treaty, supported by both Russia and China, that would shift the Internet away from its current U.S.-centric form of governance. In other words, the structure of the Internet is a constant reminder of American digital hegemony, from WiFi standards to GPS. Even the “.cn” at the end of Chinese URLs comes from the English word for China, not the Chinese word for China. You can’t blame other countries for wanting to tell the American 250s to 0748.

我爱你一生一世要学就多学一点
0 字部 
019425 你依旧是爱我 
02746 你恶心死了 
02825 你爱不爱我 
03456 你相思无用 
0437 你是神经 
04517 你是我氧气 
0456 你是我的 
04567 你是我老妻 
0457 你是我妻 
045692 你是我的最爱 
0487 你是白痴 
0487561 你是白痴无药医 
0564335 好无聊时想想我 
0594184 你我就是一辈子 
065 原谅我 
06537 你惹我生气 
07382 你欺恶怕善 
0748 你去死吧 
07868 你吃饱了吧 
08056 你不理我啦 
0837 你别生气 
08376 你别生气了 
095 你找我 
098 你走吧 

1 字部 
1240 最爱是你 
1314 一生一世 
1314925 一生一世就爱我 
1372 一厢情愿 
1392010 一生就爱你一个 
1414 意思意思 
147 一世情 
1573 一往情深 
1711 一心一意 

2 字部 
200 爱你哦 
20110 爱你一亿年 
20160 爱你一万年 
20170 爱你一千年 
20184 爱你一辈子 
2030999 爱你想你久久久 
2037 为你伤心 
20475 爱你是幸福 
20609 爱你到永久 
207374 爱你七生七世 
20863 爱你到来生 
20999 爱你久久久 
220225 爱爱你爱爱我 
230 爱上你 
234 爱相随 
235 爱上我 
240 爱死你 
246 饿死了 
246437 爱是如此神奇 
25184 爱我一辈子 
25873 爱我到今生 
25910 爱我久一点 
259695 爱我就了解我 
259758 爱我就娶我吧 
2627 爱来爱去 
282 饿不饿 
2925184 爱就爱我一辈子 
296 爱走了 

3 字部 
300 想你哦 
30920 想你就爱你 
309420 想你就是爱你 
3013 想你一生 
31707 LOVE(把BP机倒过来看) 
32012 想念你的爱 
32069 想爱你很久 
3207778 想和你去吹吹风 
330335 想想你想想我 
3344 生生世世 
3399 长长久久 
356 上网了 
35910 想我久一点 
3731 真心真意 
39 THANK YOU 

4 字部 
440295 谢谢你爱过我 
4422335 时时刻刻想想我 
4457 速速回机 
456 是我啦 
460 思念你 

5 字部 
505 SOS 
507680 我一定要追你 
510 我依你(我已来) 
51020 我依然爱你 
51095 我要你嫁我 
51396 我要睡觉了 
514 无意思 
515206 我已不爱你了 
51620 我依然爱你 
51820 我已不爱你 
518720 我一辈子爱你 
51920 我依旧爱你 
51930 我依旧想你 
520 我爱你 
5201314 我爱你一生一世 
520*10000 我爱你一万年 
5203344 我爱你生生世世 
52094 我爱你到死 
521 我愿意 
5230 我爱上你 
5240 我爱是你 
52406 我爱死你了 
526 我饿了 
5260 我暗恋你 
530 我想你 
530184 我想你一辈子 
53207778 我想和你去吹吹风 
53406 我想死你了 
53517230 我想我已经爱上你 
5360 我想念你 
5366 我想聊聊 
5376 我生气了 
53719 我深情依旧 
53770 我想亲亲你 
53782 我心情不好 
53880 我想抱抱你 
53980 我想揍扁你 
540086 我是你女朋友 
54033 我是你先生 
5406 我是你的 
5407 我是你妻 
54064 我是你老师 
54074 我是你妻子 
54086 我是你八啦 
5420 我只爱你 
54335 无事想想我 
543720 我是真心爱你 
54430 我时时想你 
5452830 无时无刻不想你 
546 我输了 
5460 我思念你 
5490 我去找你 
54920 我始终爱你 
554528096我无时无刻伴你左右 
555 呜呜呜 
55646 我无聊死了 
556520 我不能不爱你 
558 午午安 
55926 我有多无聊 
5620 我很爱你 
562059487 我若爱你我就是白痴 
5630 我很想你 
564335 无聊时想想我 
5670 我要娶你 
570 我气你 
57350 我只在乎你 
57386 我去上班了 
57410 我心属于你 
574839 我其实不想走 
57520 吾妻我爱你 
576 我去了 
5776 我出去了 
578 补习班 
58 晚安 
584520 我发誓我爱你 
586 我不来 
587 我抱歉 
5871 我不介意 
592 我好饿 
59240 我最爱是你 
59420 我就是爱你 
59430 我就是想你 
59520 我永远爱你 
596 我走了 
5976 我到家了 

6 字部 
609 到永久 
6120 懒得理你 
6785753 老地方不见不散 
6868 溜吧!溜吧! 
687 对不起 

7 字部 
70345 请你相信我 
706 起来吧 
70626 请你留下来 
706519184 请你让我依靠一辈子 
7086 七零八落 
7087 请你别走 
70885 请你帮帮我 
721 亲爱的 
729 去喝酒 
7319 天长地久 
737420 今生今世爱你 
73748096 今生今世伴你左右 
73807 情深怕缘浅 
740 气死你 
7408695 其实你不了解我 
745 气死我 
745420 其实我是爱你 
7474074 去死去死你去死 
74839 其实不想走 
756 辛苦了 
765 去跳舞 
7678 吃饱了吗 
770880520 亲亲你抱抱你我爱你 
7731 心心相印 
7752 亲亲吾爱 
775885 亲亲我抱抱我 
77543 猜猜我是谁 
77895 紧紧抱着我 
786 吃饱了 
7998 去走走吧 

8 字部 
8006 不理你了 
8013 伴你一生 
8074 把你气死 
8084 BABY 
809 保龄球 
82475 被爱是幸福 
825 别爱我 
837 别生气 
8384 不三不四 
85 帮我 
85941 帮我告诉他 
885 帮帮我 
860 不留你 
865 别惹我 
8716 八格耶鲁(日语混蛋) 
881 拜拜唉 
8834760 漫漫相思只为你 
886 拜拜罗

 

Spritz

Not feeling well these days, physically I think I need to start some workout to improve my blood circulation, perhaps, via that certain hormone will be released to make myself feel better. Psychologically, I felt a bit drained, work load honestly is not killing me, but the pressure and uncertainty, and attention/effort demands from all fronts just make me feel exhausted! So, the combination of stress on my body and mind just drive me to a point that I have to something about it…quick!

Well, getting back to the topic that I wanna talk about: Spritz. What is Spritz? Well, you can google or wiki it, so I’m not gonna copy the introduction here. However, I’m actually very very excited about this product!

As an owner of tons of ebooks, I certainly believe that my collection is valuable, many of them are great books that I really wanna read them, but I just can’t find time to do so. Spritz can’t help me in time-management, but once I can squeeze time to read, which I promise myself that I will do. Spritz perhaps will be the ‘Holy Grail’ in catching up my readings. I love reading, but I can’t read as fast as I hope, for a book with meaning, like some self-help books, I would probably read 50 pages in 2 hours. Certainly, for some leisure book or novel, I may read faster, but I don’t want to rush for the sake of finishing a book without really enjoying it. So, if Spritz can help me to achieve both, it would be the best thing happen to me since my purchase of the iPad. I will do a bit more research, testing it out and see how that will go. 

Just for reference here: http://www.spritzinc.com/

Details matter, it’s worth waiting to get it right

As one of the remembrance of the late Steve Jobs’ 59^th birthday, Tim Cook cited ‘Details matter, it’s worth waiting to get it right.’ in his Twitter account. Of course, that statement also has a double meaning to get back to those who criticize Apple under his regime hasn’t release any new blockbuster products since iPad in 2010 which Steve Jobs was still running Apple. 

I think this statement actually is more meaningful than the other one ‘Stay hungry, stay foolish’ when I read the story of the Galaxy S5 that Samsung released yesterday. That phone, along with the Gear 2, Gear Neo, and Gear Fit, seems to me as ‘half-baked’ products that if they were made by Apple under that statement of ‘Details matter, it’s worth waiting to get it right’, they just won’t be released! That’s it!

It’s not like that those products are bad, leveraging what works before, i.e. S3, is understood. However, the fact is that they can do better!  I think the new S5 as the flagship phone for Samsung is not even on par with iPhone 5S, let along Apple will have its iPhone 6 coming out in about 7 months. The only better thing about S5 is the dust and water resistant capability that I would like to see Apple to adopt in its future products. Other than that, most other features are more like grimmicks to me. I would not say Apple’s products never have grimmicks, but they are usually tagged with a killer feature and I don’t see S5 has any killer feature. I would suggest people who look down on Apple now should go to buy its stock. Since the biggest criticism of iPhone is its screen size and iPhone 6 will certainly address that, given the lackluster S5 in comparison to iPhone 5S, iPhone 6 will more likely to triumph over Samsung and taking back some market share from Samsung. On top of the higher margin of iPhone among most smartphones, and Apple’s recent purchase of its own stocks in the market, Apple shareholders should have a happy 2015 1Q. That’s my prediction for now.

I think Apple is right to take its time to see how the market receives the Samsung watches and the new generation of smart wearable from Pebbles, Fit bit, etc., before releasing iWatch. Since those companies and products don’t come with the aura of Apple brand, and Apple has done it before that it release market disruptive products that are not necessary new, but an improved version that the market wants. I think iWatch will be another one. Cuz, I think it is not just a new product per se for Apple, but it will be a carrier of another lines of new business, be that in health and fitness, security and identification, games and device control, payment, etc, that branched out of the iOS eco-system, the sky is the limit.

As a side track thought, personally I really like the touch ID feature of iPhone 5S, it makes my life easy. I use it and appreciate it much more than Siri which I rarely use.  Lately, I do think of a scenario that shows the downside of the touch ID. Friends or just people around an drunken iPhone 5S owner can actually access his/her phone easily by simply holding his/her thumbs to unlock his/her iPhone 5S. It is actually less secure than before when a password is needed. So, I guess  it would be better for an iPhone 5S owner to turn off the Touch ID feature before going to drink if he or she doesn’t want to give out whatever on his/her phone to people around him/her in few hours. Cheers!

Thoughts on few recent tech news – Facebook/Whatsapp/Samsung/Xiaomi

For a person who pays attention to the tech field, there are just so much going on recently that I can’t really help but wanna share my 2 cents of thought about some news items:

Facebook’s acquisition of Whatsapp – Well US19billion sounds like a huge amount, and indeed it is, but some news critics are really right that it is a rich tech company using its high price stock to make this purchase. The actual cash portion is mere US$3billion. That’s still a lot! I don’t know whether this purchase justifies the cost, but I think it makes sense as of now. Being an active FB user myself, I can’t recall if I’ve ever used FB Messenger. Whatsapp is my message app of choice and I like it very much. I don’t know how FB can make money from me down the road, but the 450M client base is certainly attractive. If FB can’t build its own and it can afford it, this purchase makes sense since it instantly expands its kingdom to become dominant in mobile communication field. Just coming in today that, Whatsapp will add feature to allow users to make voice call in next quarter, that would make it in direct competition with Skype and Viber. Perhaps, next phase will be video call like Facetime, or group video conference call even. That would be very nice! Meanwhile, I would imagine FB will imitate what Tencent is doing with WeiSin down the road, to develop something in mobile commerce. Just stay tune.

Samsung Galaxy S5, Gear 2, Gear Neo and Gear Fit – Just announcement of these products by Samsung doesn’t really surprise me much. The biggest selling point of S5 is the finger print reader integration with Paypal. That would be nice and I think Apple would do the same in near future. However, the phone itself doesn’t wow me in its form factor, the flat back with leather feel is nice. But it seems to me as 50% effort of only working on the back but nothing change on the front and edge, unless Apple, HTC when they revamp their form factor, they real show they dare to do it over. The water proof ability for S5 is nice as well, but the grimmick thing of adding a heart-rate sensor to the phone itself is kinda weird. I don’t wanna press my phone to my heart all the time, ever!  Android 4.4 is a given, no surprise there, look and feel of the screen has changed a little bit. As I’m not an Android user, can’t comment on that. The usage of Tizen on smartwatch should get Google thinking that perhaps S6 or S7 down the road would be using Tizen rather than Android. It is so obvious that Samsung doesn’t want to be bounded by Google. I don’t know much about Tizen, but I think it would still need few years (if it ever can) to catch up Android or iOS, provided that Samsung’s phones will still being sold really well. I think it is gonna be quite interesting, if Google and Samsung go for a split, would that benefit Apple? 

The release of Gear 2 is normal, given the poor reception of Gear 1. I still don’t know if it will do much better than Gear 1. Don’t know how the Gear Neo will be positioned, a strip-down version of Gear 2? Gear Fit with heart-rate sensor is surely going a head-on with iWatch. I think I would need to know a bit more before I would think this is gonna be good or not. Certainly, its integration with Galaxy devices would help and going for the health/fitness sector as a start is a safe bet. Apple is thinking the same way, but I think Apple would do a bit more as a late comer. The Gear Fit belt looks a bit cheap to me, though it is exchangeable, it is plastic anyway! It’s my first impression of the product. I’m not sure how that horizontal and vertical bouncing view of the UI works with the pedometer. Would it make users to bend  necks to read the screens? 

Xiaomi Redmi – This phone is sold quite well in its existing market, given its price and spec combination. However, I still don’t see it as the next Samsung or Apple as some critics might think. Xiaomi’s sale is based on price, it means that it can’t profit from a higher margin. Indeed, no one does except Apple. Secondly, it uses Android. I doubt it will have its own ‘Tizen’ anytime soon. So, its neck is holding by Google. Thirdly, everybody is trying to build its own eco-system. Microsoft is trying, but it is a distant 3^rd. Apple succeeds. Google…well, after it sold Motorola to Lenovo, it doesn’t look like it wants to emulate Apple to have an OS-hardware-Services ecosystem. Samsung is trying to build one, and I doubt Google would let it succeed. So, when it comes to Xiaomi, though they have a so-called charming CEO, I think it can only go as far as what PRC government protective strategy would allow it to go.  It would well sell tons in China which by no mean a huge market, but I doubt it will make a significant dent in US/Europe.