In the third quarter of this year, Xiaomi returned to the third place in global mobile phone shipments after a lapse of four years. Therefore, at the site of the Xiaomi Developer Conference, Lei Jun and the executives were extremely confident.
Xiaomi, which has clarified the “mobile phone + AIoT” strategy, moved into a new park, and Xiaomi finally ushered in the fourth developer conference in its own territory. On the first day of the conference, Xiaomi had a technical parade. And technology is also the fundamental reason why Lei Jun believes that Xiaomi has achieved counterattack.
Which technologies have been shown?
First of all, there is a grand tour of those Xiaomi technologies that you have used or seen.
For example, the image part, 120x zoom, 100 million pixels, magic sky, telephoto macro…
Charging part, 120W wired charging, 80W wireless charging.
Screen part, primary color screen, variable refresh rate, under-screen camera, etc.
These technologies are based on R&D investment. According to Lei Jun, Xiaomi’s current R&D team has more than 10,000 people. In 2021, Xiaomi will recruit 5,000 engineers in ten fields, accounting for nearly 40% of Xiaomi’s current total employees.
In addition to the technologies that have been released, Xiaomi also brought some technological upgrades at this conference, including brand new technologies.
Camera imaging technology, this time Xiaomi has brought a new technology, that is, “retractable large aperture lens technology”, using a vertical retractable optical design, which claims to achieve a 300% increase in light input. Of course, this technology is still in a fairly early stage. It has not been announced when and which product will be installed.
Xiao Ai upgraded to version 5.0. According to Cui Baoqiu’s introduction, Xiao Ai’s global users use more than 100 million times a day, the cumulative number of wake-ups is 61.7 billion, and 228 million Xiao Ai devices are activated.
The Xiao Ai students who upgraded to version 5.0 have several major improvements, such as collaborative wake-up and response, conversational active intelligent voice, customizable voice, multi-modal fusion interaction, and more educational aspects. content.
UWB (Ultra Wide Band) is a technology that runs through the entire conference. Simply put, this is a communication technology suitable for high-speed wireless access in dense multi-path places such as indoors. The system is low in complexity and transmits signals. It has the advantages of low power spectrum density, insensitive to channel fading, low interception ability, and high positioning accuracy. Currently on AIoT, the function that Xiaomi implements is to point the mobile phone to which home appliance, and the corresponding control panel will automatically pop up on the mobile phone, without the need to search in the App. Of course, based on the advantages of this technology, the imagination space is huge. Xiaomi also showed a function that automatically unlocks when approaching the door lock, and the phone can act as a car key.
In addition to the technology on specific products, smart manufacturing is also a word repeatedly mentioned at this Xiaomi Developer Conference. At the previous Xiaomi press conference, Lei Jun had already introduced this “unmanned factory” which is still under construction to the outside world. On the spot, Xiaomi showed a demo of the smart factory, which can automatically complete the testing of the motherboard. According to the on-site staff, the current millet manufacturing plant in Yizhuang can simultaneously assemble 500 mobile phones per hour, and plans to reach 1,000 units per hour without interruption. When Lei Jun introduced the factory in the morning, he mentioned that there are currently more than 100 engineers here, and in the future, he plans to realize completely unmanned automatic production.
As of the end of June 2020, more than 16,000 patents have been authorized worldwide, and more than 3,200 patents related to 5G standards.
Which ecology is open?
The so-called developer conference is to serve developers, and this means ecology and openness. In addition to specific technologies, Xiaomi’s developer conference also brought some new developments in ecology and platforms.
The developer conference means the establishment of ecology, and ecology means openness.
A more specific example is the imaging aspect. This time Xiaomi announced that it will open up three capabilities, including:
1. The imaging capabilities (including hardware and software) are open to third-party apps;
2. Mobile phone image processing capabilities are open to AIoT;
3. The devices are open to each other to form a “compound-eye camera” that captures the same image in multiple directions.
In other words, in the future, you will be able to use the capabilities of Mi mobile phone cameras in third-party apps or Mijia devices other than mobile phones.
In terms of AIoT, Fan Dian, general manager of the IoT platform department, said that the number of connected devices on the Xiaomi AIoT platform currently exceeds 271 million, and the number of users with more than 5 IoT devices exceeds 5.1 million; the number of Works With Mijia open ecological enterprise development groups exceeds 3,800 . In order to upgrade the connection experience, Xiaomi has released the smooth connection technology. The new network equipment does not need to go through the traditional password input process and can be close to the mobile phone; the new Bluetooth-based connection protocol solves the fragmentation of gateways, Wi-Fi, and Zigbee. At the same time, in order to enhance the connection between mobile phones and AIoT devices, Xiaomi has launched the Xiaomi Second Sharing function, which realizes the “one touch transmission” function.
At the same time, Xiaomi has also launched several open source platforms. Open source is an inevitable existence for companies that emphasize technology today. It reflects a company’s technical strength and attitude towards technology to a certain extent.
MiNLP platform, the mobile natural speech understanding framework, currently outputs 8 billion services every day, upgrades four major functional sections, improves semantic analysis technology, and expands multi-modal understanding capabilities. It is expected to open the word segmentation module in the fourth quarter of this year.
Kaldi upgrade plan. Last year, “Father of Kaldi” Daniel Povey joined Xiaomi, and he also gave a public speech as the chief voice scientist of Xiaomi Group for the first time.
Mace 1.0 is released and Mace Micro is added, which can be used on AIoT with low power consumption and low cost.
The IoT software platform Xiaomi Vela, based on NuttX, can run on a variety of chip platforms and can open up fragmented IoT applications. Xiaomi also brought the Xiaomi Share Development Framework (Xiaomi Share Development Framework) for developers.
If you compare other large developer conferences, such as WWDC, Google I/O, etc., they will put the system, platform, ecology, and the introduction of developer assistance and incentive measures in the first place. This It is also the meaning of the existence of the developer conference. Xiaomi’s most influential platform is still AIoT, which is more open and it is imperative to attract more partners.
Xiaomi’s 2020
In 2020, the most important step for Xiaomi is to release a real high-end phone, the Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro and the Supreme Commemorative Edition, with limited shares, but it does raise the upper limit of the price of Xiaomi mobile phones by a big step. At the same time, the cost-effective task Redmi is also doing well. Among the top ten best-selling models in the world, there are four low- and mid-range Redmi models.
On AIoT, Xiaomi is the only company that takes into account a wide range of categories, product experience, and technology platform. For example, Baidu may have higher sales of smart speakers, and more and more manufacturers have established cooperation with Huawei HiLink, but there are still shortcomings compared with the Mijia platform. This is indeed Xiaomi’s best story so far.
IDC data shows that in the third quarter of 2020, Xiaomi’s global shipments of Xiaomi mobile phones were 46.5 million, an increase of 42% year-on-year, and it returned to the top three in global shipments after six years. This data, you must have seen a lot of Xiaomi executives sharing on the Internet. For this achievement, Lei Jun also summarized it as a “technical” victory.
In the entire developer conference, Xiaomi continued to emphasize “technology-based”. In the post-conference interview, Zeng Xuezhong, the new president of Xiaomi’s mobile phone department, also mentioned that in the past, Xiaomi may have been mentioned by the outside world. More impressions may be that mobile phones are cost-effective, but I hope that through the Open Conference, consumers can learn more about Xiaomi’s technology. .
The first day of this three-day developer conference is actually more like a military parade of Xiaomi technology. This is the foundation of Xiaomi’s “mobile phone + AIoT” strategy. To be honest, there are not too many new technologies that people can’t help but “wow”. The telescopic lens that has been placed in the status of One More Thing does not even have proofs. However, Zeng Xuezhong also mentioned in the interview that 2020 is a year for Xiaomi to inherit the past and the future. Perhaps in this special year, it is already a good result to be stable.
Of course, Xiaomi, which is growing against the trend, cannot be taken lightly. The dilemma of Huawei’s terminals has given rise to many opportunities. However, OPPO vivo is thinking about the share that Huawei may give up. In terms of going overseas, Southeast Asia vivo has captured a lot of territories. At the same time, OPPO and its sub-brand realme The volume of goods has also approached Xiaomi; in terms of AIoT, each company now has its own watches and TVs, and Huawei HiLIink has also taken advantage of Hongmeng.
I hope that “technology-based” Xiaomi can come up with more amazing new technologies at next year’s developer conference.