I wasn't giving advice just discussing a interesting subject (for me) and making a prediction. The fastest android phone to my knowledge is the Xiaomi Mi 2S but there are more than one variant and even a 3S Mi. They are all faster than the Samsung S4 and why not, most of the best Phones are being made in China including Sony and Apple. I read that Samsung is in the process of building factories in China: so the technology and people are there. As far as my Acer goes I don't know but their service centre in South Africa is the same as for all other Acer products so I suppose the service would also be the same. It is not easy to get stock roms for most phones because they prefer that you do a OTA update. I did coincidently downloaded the latest stock rom with Android 4.2.2 before the phone arrived but when I got it, it was already updated. Yes you can root it but I am not interested. The stock rom is nearly identical to that of the Nexus 4 and I am happy with it.
Xiaomi is planning on going global soon. This is also the reason why they pulled Hugo Barra (head of product management at Google). Barra is also the first major non-Chinese employee at Xiaomi and this will be their start to expand beyond its root in a bid to become a globally recognised player.
His job is basically to take over all of global expansion for Xiaomi, which currently only builds Android phones for the Chinese market, using an innovative strategy of making high-spec smartphones at low-spec smartphone prices.
It also seems that he will be bringing his relationship from Nuance (where he worked prior Google) to Xiaomi, so we may see some really special software integrations here.
The guy, Bin Lin, who started Xiaomi were also a previous Google employee whom left Google to start Xiaomi with some key Google engineers and product managers. Seems that Bin wants to pull more key personnel from Google at the current stage. Interesting though is that Google is Xiaomi most important partner.
http://allthingsd.com/20130912/excl...-his-future-at-xiaomi-and-why-he-left-google/
Hugo Barra:
“The aspiration for the founders is that Xiaomi will become a global company that happens to be in China,” he said. “If I do my job right, in a few years, the world will be talking about Xiaomi in the same way that they talk about Google and Apple today.”
Movements like this are very important to us consumers as with the Huawei P6.
Why?
We will start to see customer orientated (quality) devices at the right price, that what we as the consumer want.
I don’t know the current status in market share that the Huawei P6 is reaping at the moment, but I guess that it growing against the high-end contract phones, would love to see statistics on this.
