Mi Reader now available: Xiaomi’s Kindle alternative?

The Chinese tech giant Xiaomi finances many of its new products via crowdfunding via its in-house platform “Xiaomiyoupin”. For the equivalent of only $83 there is a product in the pipeline that could make reading enthusiasts sit up and take notice. Is Xiaomi’s “Mi Reader” an appropriate competitor to Amazon’s Kindle or Kobo?

Xiaomi Mi Reader for $145.99 at Geekbuying

Xiaomi Mi Reader: Ideal for travelling?

The Mi Reader comes with a 6 inch E-Ink display with a resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels at 212 PPI (pixels per inch) pixel density. The brightness of the self-illumination of the reader can be adjusted in 24 steps, so that every user should find the right brightness for himself. In addition, the display should be matt, so the user shouldn’t be bothered by reflective sunlight. The battery life of 14 days still has to be confirmed in practice, but would be a solid value.

Inside the eBook reader is an Allwinner B300 quad-core processor with 1.8 GHz and 1 GB RAM. These are values that are absolutely sufficient for a clean and smooth operation of an eBook reader. The operating system is Android 8.1 Oreo. In addition, there is a 1,800 mAh small battery and 16 GB internal storage space, which can be sufficient for storing up to 5,000 books (depending on which books of course). With a weight of 178 g, the eReader is light and easy to transport with its dimensions of 15.9 x 11.6 x 0.8 cm.

Listed as supported formats are TXT, PDF, MOBI, PRC, HTML, DOC, DOCX, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, PPT, WPS.

Also interesting for people outside China?

If the Mi Reader is also available for our regions, the price will probably be around $100. This would place the eBook Reader in a similar price segment to the current top dogs from Amazon and Rakuten (Kobo). In fact, the Mi Reader is not the first product from the eBook category: On Xiaomiyoupin there are already some models, but they have not made their way to us yet. After all, you can only order from Xiaomiyoupin with a Chinese residence.

But why the Mi Reader has a better chance of becoming internationally relevant: Xiaomi also sells Amazon Kindles in China (as shown in the screenshot above). But now Xiaomi’s own model is available. And Xiaomi brings almost every good product to international sales. Also the name of the product speaks for the fact that the tech giant is not acting half-heartedly here, so we will probably have our fun here in this country, too. It remains to be seen whether the operation of the small device will only be possible in English, or in the course of time also in other languages.

One for the road: The Japanese online company Rakuten has taken over Telekom’s shares in Tolino 2017 and is now producing Tolino and Kobo.

Is the Mi Reader interesting for you? Would you buy an eReader from Xiaomi?