Indian customers are really happy with Xiaomi. While things may look a bit different once you tap into their social media pages, the Chinese smartphone maker seems to have figured out its way pretty well into the minds and hearts of Indian smartphone buyers.

Come the 16th of July, the company will be holding an event in China, one that could be for the announcement of the much awaited Mi 5 flagship smartphone.

The launch will be massive and Xiaomi will once again send shivers down the spines of Samsung, Micromax and many other manufacturers as another flagship from a competitor is unveiled.

Still then, its not much of headache for them. This is because flagships are not important for Xiaomi, its the budget smartphones that are.

Take the Xiaomi Mi 4i. The budget buster, was announced globally in India and went on sale in India pretty quickly. Now head back a few months to the Xiaomi’s own flagship the Mi Note. There is no sign of the device ever since its launch back in January with an expected launch sometime by the end of Q3 (or may be even later).

In fact, even the Mi 4 reached Indian shores a good 6 months after its July launch back in 2014. It is still selling in India, for an ultra-low price tag, depreciating the value of Snapdragon 800/801-based handsets like the Nexus 5, Sony Xperia Z2, HTC One M8 and many more. Clearly, all of these have seen an upgrade by now.

On the other hand, manufacturers like Sony, LG, Samsung and many more do offer their smartphones up for sale pretty quickly. This group now includes Apple as well, when it shocked Indian buyers last year by showing up right in time for Diwali a month after its iPhone 6 launch. Flagship devices clearly, can only sell for a short time

With the expected launch of the Xiaomi Mi 5, we can now safely say that one can expect it to appear in India only after the Mi Note. So it is pretty far away.

As for Mi fans who are expecting a flagship Android device, they will have to look elsewhere as Xiaomi seems least interested in pushing out its flagships in India. This is until the last stocks begin rolling out, making them attractive to Indian buyers with a low price tag (its already half a year old by then). Qualcomm makes things even worse as the company keeps upgrading its chipsets every year in a spec-hungry Android market.

Tags : Mobile Phones, Android, Xiaomi