Xiaomi’s Second-Gen Mi Band Rumored To Feature Alipay’s One-Touch Payment Solution

Thursday, April 2, 2015

Xiaomi’s Second-Gen Mi Band Rumored To Feature Alipay’s One-Touch Payment Solution

Xiaomi has unveiled a slew of devices as part of their fifth anniversary event a couple of days ago. The company has showcased a couple of smartphones, some smart gadgets and the 55-inch UHD Mi TV 2. This China-based smartphone OEM is currently the number one smartphone manufacturer in China, and it seems they have huge plans for this year. They already released quite a few products since the year started, and there’s lots more to come. Xiaomi intends to sell 100 million smartphones by the end of 2015, it will certainly be interesting to see if they can achieve that, and if their expansion plans will move forward as planned.

One of the devices that Xiaomi is expected to announce rather soon is the second-gen Mi Band. Xiaomi’s current Mi Band wearable (pictured above) is an incredibly cheap piece of technology, and if you’re interested in finding out more about it, check out our full review. Previous rumors claimed that the Mi Band 2 will feature a display, unlike its predecessor. That being said, some additional news surfaced regarding Xiaomi’s upcoming wearable. This new info says that Xiaomi is working with Alipay in order to include the one-touch mobile payment in the Mi Band 2 package. How would this work? Well, a smartband would have to be connected to a smartphone in order to function, of course. The payment option would activate when the user comes near any of Alipay’s clients, without the need to enter a password or anything of the sort. This sounds like a really good idea in theory, it remains to be seen if Xiaomi actually manages to pull this off.

This report also claims that the Mi Band 2 will use the industry standard encryption methods in order to offer secure payments. We’ve already seen quite a few attempts to standardize such payments in the market, but that hasn’t happened yet. Xiaomi could help out with that, at least in Asia. If they manage to pack in such a feature in the second-gen Mi Band and keep the price really low, people might actually use the mobile payment solution. Keep in mind that this is just a rumor at this point even though there are some leaked images to go with it.