Xiaomi sells it's first batch of 100,000 WCDMA Red Rice (Hongmi) phones in 4 minutes

Chinese Xiaomi has been getting some air time lately, mostly thanks to the excellent price to quality ratio their smartphones offer. Starting with the Xiaomi Red Rice (Hongmi) a few months ago, the company started something of a craze in its homeland, due to the phone's satisfying specs sheet and and an affordable price tag of about $130. In exchange, you're getting a 4.7-inch 720p display, a 1.5GHz quad-core MediaTek MT6589T chipset, a gig of RAM and an 8MP shooter. A deal most any would say yes to.

But, there's a problem, especially when international would-be buyers are involved. For starters, Xiaomi is keeping to its home market for the time being, and isn't offering its phones to the wider world. Those can only be had through resellers, at sometimes considerably higher prices.

Worse yet, the Xiaomi Red Rice initially launched with 3G support only for China's TD-SCDMA network, meaning no speedy internet access in Europe or the rest of the world. Luckily for international fans, however, Xiaomi finally made an WCDMA-compatible version of the phone just a few days ago, and the demand has been high enough that a whopping 100,000 units were snatched in just 4 minutes and 5 seconds, according to the manufacturer. Of course, these were all meant for China's only WCDMA telecom – China Unicom – but it's fair to say that a bunch of those will slip into unknown lands.

On the bright side, Xiaomi has since gotten Google's VP of Android product management, Hugo Barra, on board of the company, and the murmurs suggest that the company might be working on an international expansion. Looking at Xiaomi's flagship – the Mi3 – it's easy to see why one might be excited about the prospect of a wider availability.

source: CNET Asia