China’s Xiaomi is doing very well for itself of late. It’s one of the largest forces in the Chinese mobile market and it is making inroads into other markets as well. The company makes everything from mobile phones to drones to laptops and electric bicycles and it makes them cheaply and well. But we could always do with things being a little cheaper.
Xiaomi has a plan to make their mobile devices cheaper and it starts by following in the footsteps of Apple, Samsung, and Huawei. Xiaomi has confirmed that they’re doing just that, by announcing their own line of mobile processors at the end of this month.
The company said, in a post on social media website Weibo, that their long-rumoured mobile chipset, codenamed Pinecone, will be formally announced on 28 February. The announcement will be taking place in Beijing rather than at MWC, where all the other smartphone news will be happening, but the upshot is that Xiaomi having control over its own chipsets will, eventually, result in even cheaper smartphones.
Just what sort of performance we can expect from Xiaomi’s first chipset isn’t confirmed but they’re sure to lead with their best foot forward. The first device to feature the as-yet unannounced Pinecone chips will be the Xiaomi Mi 5c (also known as ‘Meri’), according to rumour. The brain of the phone is thought to be an octa-core processor and there have been benchmark results sighted since last year. They’re… not brilliant but not bad either.