Xiaomi: China’s big Apple rival isn’t worth getting excited about (yet)

Xiaomi, the third-largest smartphone maker in the world, is coming stateside, but not in the way pundits expected. The company announced at a conference Thursday that its e-commerce website, Mi.com, could start selling products to U.S. customers in five months. Surprisingly, smartphones will not be among them — at least, at first. Instead, Hugo Barra, Xiaomi’s Global VP, suggested the company might start with items such as a recently-launched pair of headphones and its popular external battery pack, the latter of which sold 15 million units in 2014. The company has…

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