Gadgetory

hey guys and leverage here at Mobile World Congress 2016 in Barcelona I am supposed to be talking to Hugo Barra from Xiaomi but he is yeah hey lad hi sorry I'm running a little bit behind everyone loading for me 5 so you know it's been a busy day this is uh this is the ninebot meaning it's actually one of our products it's right now only available in China but I figured I would bring one along with me helps me get around you don't call the hover buddy this is not a hoverboard to be clear this is an eyeball good but that's not what we're here to talk about we had talked about the me five but also it's it's a menses occasion for you guys because you're at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and you're primarily Chinese company so first I wanted to let you guys introduce yourselves like who is yummy tell the world about Soze sure first of all thanks for coming here and for having us so show me it's an interesting company that's a combination of hardware software services as well as ecommerce so we started off as a company making and mobile operating system called me UI which is built on top of Android and it's been around for almost six years now it was a very first thing we did a year after launching new UI we launched our first phone and the thought there was simple how can we get new UI into the hands of as many people as possible so we have always been thinking about hardware as a distribution vehicle for the software software which includes platform services which of course we monetize so think of us more as an Internet company a mobile Internet company that monetizes on digital content advertising instruments and then ecommerce is our sales job in fact it's our own e-commerce we are the third largest e-commerce company in China and we only sell our own products through that channel yeah that allows us to sell direct to consumer we have a direct relationship with a consumer we don't have intermediaries so we don't have to pay commissions and so on and so forth so all of it supports this one business model which is to be a mobile internet company let me ask you you mentioned that your hardware store isn't built into the phone and that's a big deal for you but also browsing around the interface there I noticed that your serve Google's Play Store in there that's right which doesn't figure in China in China is your biggest market so in a roundabout way what I'm trying to get at is you have the Play Store on there because this isn't just a phone for China we know you have India's the second market and you said there will be other markets and then the crowd kind of laughed because you're hinting at something more and I think your presence here at MWC is hinting at something more and something more global so can you tell us more on that front sure so to be clear on Google Play and Google services we are very close partner of Google's and we distribute GMS as we call it in every market outside of time yeah which is wherever they are available we don't include Google's apps in our China build right so what we're what we're playing with here today is our international build which is what goes to India and all these other markets of course our main focus for me five are our existing markets including India and other markets you know Hong Kong Singapore etc etc there's quite a few of them because those are the markets were already present we already have fans they are clamoring for this product and of course we have other markets on our radar screen but it's far too early to make any statements you know me five is not launching outside of our of our core markets but we're starting to keep our eyes open we're starting to build our brand we came to NWC as a global platform because we're building up to an eventual launch and we have no idea when it will happen still working towards that really very very very sharply focus on a few markets or no especially India but one day one day yeah one day Europe one day the United States hopefully it will get to both of those it's just too early to tell me okay and and I actually don't know I am not withholding information but it's it's too early in the process to even be able to predict when it might happen I understand well just from my perspective I feel like you've had a successful debut here at MWC you've wowed a lot of people you impress me and I felt often talking about the phone because we already did a big hands-on video and people can go and see it on the verge calm internet so me five you know Xiaomi has heard this reputation which you're not happy with I'm sure for copying Apple products but you know I look at this phone and there is none of that like you've done your own unique industrial design you did a whole excellent presentation you know we love the fact that he got really geeky and down into the details if anything it reminds me more of Samsung's designs with the Galaxy series so yeah tell us a little bit about how you came came up with the design you also said it took you two years to put it all together yeah so the story started thank you for saying that by the way it is actually very touching to hear that I'm from own industry expert like yourself it started with me note which was a 5.7 inch flagship that we launched almost exactly a year ago romina which was me know was the first phone the first smartphone to introduce a 3d curved glass back design which some phones this year have but to be very clear that was a design that we need to reduce last year with me notes the other thing that we had with me note was this notion of even though you have a very thin body slim body you can still have a flat camera that's flush you know on top of the the rear part of the device and it's also tucked in on the corner so the the main design lines for me five are the ones we introduced we mean of course we made them better but we also had to work extra hard to fit it all into a much smaller form factor so this you can safely now say is our signature design right it is curved 3d body in fact there's a ceramic version which are holding right there the way that we integrate the camera it's not sticking out it's not in the center of the device it's very very elegant and I think people are really gonna start to look at phones out there and say huh that looks like a xiaomi phone really I do believe that I do believe that this is going to happen because we are pioneers with this particular kind of design we're already seeing it this year yeah I mean I am not aware of Sherry's recognition in China I don't spend that much time in China so I'll take your word for that on the ceramic playing around with it it feels a bit more substantial than the class version pursue the dimensions of it are unchanged and this is going to be a pro model so that comes with 128 gigabytes of storage yeah 4 gigabytes of RAM but otherwise it's unchanged is there anything about the ceramic material that makes it different other than the fact that it just looks different so it's if you look at the hardness moss scale the ceramic the zircon ixora m'q that we're using is an 8 diamond is of course a 10 it's the hardest on that scale and but still is only a 4 glass regular glass is somewhere in between but ceramic is much much sort of more resistant to abrasion than any of the other materials it's more expensive to make and you can imagine how expensive heavy even a 3d surface like this would be especially more so with Zurich it's 75% more expensive but it's also takes a lot more work to make it the process takes hours and of course there's the first time we're doing it so we are hoping that we're going to perfect it and perhaps make it cheaper for future models but you're right it just feels pretty unique and that's the thing like you just described a very involved process but even this the pro motto is something like 350 that's right which is crazy to us and and I think is from a Western perspective I think I've been speaking for a lot of our readers when I say that we want that price and we want that quality and those materials and everything else yeah just somewhere where we can actually buy it so I mean that builds up to really the final question we want to ask of you which is what should we expect from gem in the future so I think first of all you're going to continue to see us taking a leadership position in areas where perhaps people weren't expecting us like mobile phone design industrialism this is just one product this year it's our first flagship of the year we have more products coming I think they're gonna continue to raise the bar when it comes to design in many ways it takes a couple of years for a company that's not even six years old to get to the point right where it has a rhythm it has a pace I've pushed a lot of people around internally over the last couple of years to really find a design language because we want to be the scene as an industry leader in every way including design I think we're finally getting there well that's a good season thank you very much again here you go thanks what thanks for having you want to go for right okay I'll just lean forward slightly