In the Smartphone world, Xiaomi Mi3 is the latest sensation. I’ve heard about it after the record flash sale traffic on flipkart recently. Its priced at Rs 13999 with almost all features to be better than iPhone 5S. The only catch is, it’s a Chinese Mobile which is perceived in India to be a cheap commodity. Except for durability, every one around were going ga ga over this phone. As I’m currently using Blackberry Curve 8520, there has been an increasing need to upgrade to a Smartphone.
I wanted to give a try with Xiaomi Mi3 and came to know that it’s not easy to get, as there’s huge demand for it. There have been 5 flash sales in the past from Flipkart and there were over one lakh registrations for 10k/20k mobile lot in these instances. Flipkart server had also gone down owing to the huge demand. So I registered well in advance for the sale on 26th August 2 PM, along with couple of my colleagues. So we had 3 registrations in total.
We were in an important meeting around 2 PM and were tensed to quickly jump into flipkart site before 2 PM. Fortunately the meeting ended just before 5 mins and we rushed to our cubicles for trying our luck. We felt that flipkart was well prepared this time and the user interface was excellent. There was a stopwatch, capturing the countdown. The situation or the problem of huge traffic is similar to IRCTC Tatkal ticket bookings but could notice the huge difference between flipkart vs IRCTC way of handling it.
As the sale opening time arrived, there was huge buzz in our office. Almost all my team members were around our desks, cheering us to get hold of Mi3. One of the contenders, was well knowledgeable and he knew that Google chrome is the recommended browser. However on my system, Chrome doesn’t work at its best and so I preferred to use FireFox. The third guy was using Internet Explorer and was struggling to get to the Mi3 page itself. As the clock hit, 2 PM, I saw ‘BUY’ option and immediately clicked on it. So did the ‘Chrome’ guy. He got the phone first, as it immediately added to his cart. For me it gave ‘Congratulations’ message and went into progress mode. The Internet Explorer guy, tried to refresh the page exactly at the same time and in a fraction of second it said ‘Out of stock’. After couple of mins, the phone got added to my cart and everybody around, congratulated us. I was also told that once the phone gets added to the cart, we can relax and pay the amount in leisure. But I quickly made the payment too and completed the order. Now awaiting Xiaomi Mi3 which is supposed to be delivered by 02-Sep-14. Will be posting the SmartPhone review shortly….
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