Yes, you read that right. One Vivek Chauhan started a petition tagging Xiaomi, Redmi and the company India MD Manu Kumar Jain asking them to reduce the base price of the phone to Rs 20,000. He has invited people to sign the petition, which was started on Change.org. At the time of writing this story, 3,346 people have already signed the petition with the number likely to increase in the coming days. Further, people are also seeking a price cut on the 6GB RAM and 128GB storage variant.
The petition mentions that high cost, in addition to the random popping up of ads, is “not acceptable.” Xiaomi has been open about monetising its OS by serving ads to users. At the launch of the K20 Series, the company had said that it wouldn't have ad-supported monetisation. “For a premium series, like the K-series, we are kind of looking at a different model here where these will not have ad-supported monetisation,” Anuj Sharma, Head Of Marketing, Xiaomi India, had said. Later, Jain got involved and said that the company would continue to monetise the OS in different ways, that is, via Mi Music, Mi video, Mi Pay, among others.
Last week, Jain had explained the pricing of the Redmi K20. For the record, the Redmi K20 is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 730 processor - the first device in India to have this chipset. Jain said that since the Snapdragon 730 is newer than other Snapdragon 700-Series mobile platforms, whose prices have depreciated, the K20 is priced higher than those phones.
“Snapdragon 730 is the third-fastest chipset from Qualcomm, it's the latest one. When you buy a chip early on, something like this, it's a lot more costly. If you go to buy 730 two years down the line, it would of course be much cheaper. Right now people are basically comparing it with other 700 series phones, where the price has depreciated over the last 15-18 months. The Redmi K20 would be a lot more expensive, just the raw material is a lot more expensive,” Jain had said. You can read the full review of the Redmi K20 here.
