Xiaomi Mi Reader: A Strong Competitor to Kindle?

Xiaomi Crowdfunding for Mi Reader on Nov 18

On November 18, Chinese Tech company Xiaomi launch the Mi Reader on its crowdfunding platform "Xiaomi Youpin", where the company financing for some of its new products. Similar to Amazon's Kindle and Rakuten's Kobo, Mi Reader is an ink-screen E-reader.

Xiaomi Mi Reader crowdfunding was ended at the same day, with 46,887 people took part in it. For those who are on board, they can get the Mi Reader at a discount (CNY 579, approximately $82.40) and enjoy a 6-month free membership of Duokan (an E-book reading app). The product will be shipped in China a month later.

Though there's no news about Mi Reader selling outside China yet, I assume Xiaomi will make Mi Reader internationally as the company always tries to sell their products overseas. Once they do it, will Kindle or Kobo be threatened? In next section, we will take a good look at Mi Reader and Kindle's tech specs and features.

Xiaomi Mi Reader VS Kindle

Amazon has 3 levels of Kindle, Kindle, Kindle Paperwhite, and All-new Kindle Oasis. The prices are $89.99, $129.99, and $249.99 respectively. Here we will compare Mi Reader to the entry-level Kindle as they have the relatively close prices.

We can easily observe the similarities and differences through this chart. Mi Reader and Kindle, they have the same size of display and their weights are pretty much the same, too.

By comparison, the internal storage of Mi Reader is 4 times bigger than Kindle's, which means that Mi Reader can hold up more than 5,000 books. Also, Mi Reader has better screen resolution and front light. In fact, the 24-level front light feature is something worth mentioning. It wows me at the first beginning. This feature allows you to adjust the front light in 24 levels to find the comfortable brightness that fits your eyes.

Kindle still using the old-fashion way to do the charging but Mi Reader adopt Type-C now. This can be a lot more convenient for Android users since now more and more Android phone model use Type-C.

As for the format, Mi Reader supports 13 formats and Kindle has 14 formats. Numbers speak nothing here. The biggest difference here is that you can listen to Audible audiobooks on Kindle but not on Mi Reader. For many audiobooks fan, this is the first question they will ask about Mi Reader.

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To Sum Up

Of course, Mi Reader is a budget-price and cost-effective E-reader with larger storage and higher resolution. However, don't forget that Kindle is backed by the one of biggest content provider Amazon. It's easier and convenient to acquire English book resource with Kindle. If you value hardware more, Mi Reader can be better for you. If you care more about book resource, just stay with Kindle.

Rick Lee has written about business and consumer technology for nearly 25 years. He is the author of more than a dozen books.