Xiaomi India Partners With SmartBox For Automated Delivery; May Soon Launch Surge S2!

Picture this. You have ordered the latest smartphone from your favourite e-commerce portal. But you miss the delivery because you were at the office and nobody was home or you had to be at someplace else at the last moment. Many of us have faced this situation at one time or the other. So how can we ensure that we can receive our deliveries at our convenience?

Enter Smartbox. Quite simply, it is a smart locker which can hold your deliveries until you can pick it up at your convenience. It is India’s first and only Automated Delivery Terminal service!

Xiaomi India recently announced their tie-up with Smartbox to reduce the hassles of missed deliveries. Xiaomi is also ready to launch their own homegrown chipset, the Surge S2, at Mobile World Congress 2018 which will be held next month at Barcelona next month.

Xiaomi India Partners SmartBox For Hassle-Free Deliveries

Xioami India has now made it easier to receive your deliveries from any shopping you do on www.mi.com. It has partnered with Smartbox, which is India’s first automated delivery service platform. When you make a purchase on Mi India’s website or Mi Store app, you will be given an additional delivery option of ‘Smartbox’ based on your location. As of now, Smartbox has a presence in two cities, Delhi/NCR & Bengaluru.

Smartbox is planning to increase their presence in more cities across India. When you select Smartbox as a delivery option, your purchase will be delivered to a Smartbox digital locker nearest to your location. You then have 72 hours to pick up your purchase at the location. You can access your designated locker with a unique OTP which is sent to you in an SMS.

You can also pay for your purchase at the Smartbox with your credit or debit card as well as with BHIM or Paytm. Xiaomi has added more value to their shopping experience by providing an option for their users to pick up their purchases at a convenient location which is safe and accessible.

Xiaomi has said in a press statement,

“The end-to-end smart offering gives Mi Fans a service that fits into their lifestyle with the aid of technology,”

Xiaomi has shared a few numbers about Mi.com on the occasion;

• Mi.com gets over 25 million unique visitors every month.
• It has over 1 million daily active users.
• The Mi Store app has over 20 million app installs and more than 10 million organic downloads.

So, it makes complete sense for Xiaomi to offer this added convenience to its users.

How Does Smartbox Delivery Work?

It is a fairly simple process to get your purchases delivered to your nearest Smartbox digital locker.

1. When you add and check-out your purchases on Mi.com or the Mi Store app, you will be prompted for a delivery location.
2. Select your delivery address or add a new one if you don’t have any.
3. If there is Smartbox delivery available for that address, the Smartbox dialogue box will be displayed.
4. You can select the Smartbox nearest to you and complete the check-out.
5. You will receive an order confirmation message from Mi.com along with a message from Smartbox which will have your pickup OTP.
6. When your purchase is delivered to the Smartbox, you will receive a message requesting you to pick it up within the next 72 hours.
7. That’s it. If you have already paid for your order, all you have to do is enter the OTP and retrieve your purchase. If you have selected the COD option, you can pay at the location with either your debit/credit card or through BHIM /Paytm app.

Xiaomi May Launch The Octa-Core Surge S2 At MWC 2018

Not many people know that Xiaomi had launched their own SoC, the Surge S1, back in February 2017. It was a mid-range chipset which did not make it to India in any of its smartphones.

Now, it is being speculated that Xiaomi might debut their second chipset, the Surge S2, at the Mobile World Congress 2018 being held at Barcelona next month. The Surge S2 will be more powerful than its predecessor. It will be as powerful as Huawei’s HiSilicon Kirin 960 chipset, which was their flagship for 2017.

The octa-core Surge S2 is expected to be manufactured using TSMC’s 16nm process. It will feature four Cortex A73 cores clocked at 2.2 GHz, and four Cortex A53 clocked at 1.8GHz. It will be paired with the Mali G71 MP8 GPU and will support UFS 2.1 storage and LPDDR4 RAM. It may miss out on CDMA support though.

The Surge S2 might make it into the Mi 6X and M1 A2 smartphones. It is all speculation at the moment. The MWC 2018 is almost here. Things will definitely be clearer by then.

Lets us just wait and watch.