BEIJING: Xiaomi recently teased the unveiling of a new product for its March 31 Fan Festival on its online forum.
Multiple reports suggest one of those products will be a smartwatch with a round display and brushed metal build, running on a customized version of Xiaomi’s MiUI operating system rather than Google’s Android Wear.
“Lei Jun, CEO of Xiaomi, will be having a conversation with some invited domestic tech media and launching new Mi products on 31 March,” the company said in its post. A Xiaomi spokesperson could not be reached for comment.
Xiaomi invited its forum readers to vote on how many products they believed the company would unveil on Tuesday, and the majority, 62%, said it would be more than three.
While Xiaomi’s stable product has been its Mi smart phones, in the last year it has jumped rather boldly into a variety of product lines: it’s released an air purifier, a smart TV, a phablet called the Mi Note and a $13 fitness tracker called the Mi Band.
Lei unveiled the Mi Band in July 2014 at a press conference, prefacing it to the dismay of Apple fans with the presentation’s only English-language slide saying, “One more thing.”
Given Xiaomi’s tendency to ape many of the design and product trends set by Apple and Samsung, it seems probable that Xiaomi has been looking into bringing out a smartwatch to rival the roll out of the Apple Watch in China from April 24.
Xiaomi also launched a blood pressure monitor in September 2014 after investing $25 million into Silicon Valley-based iHealth Labs and its possible the company has worked on integrating some of the sensor technology from that division into its latest wearable gadgets.
Other reports suggest the company will also unveil a new, mid-range Smartphone, rumoured to include a 12-megapixel rear camera, 2GB of RAM and run on a version of MiUI that’s built on Android 5.0.2 Lollipop.
