Xiaomi Hinted That Dr. K Sivan Of ISRO Should Switch From A Samsung Phone To A Redmi

Xiaomi India announced that it would be the very first smartphone brand in India to support India’s home-grown NavIC, an alternative for GPS.

Manu Kumar Jain, global vice president of Xiaomi went on Twitter to make public the integration along with a picture of him presenting a new Redmi K20 to Dr. K Sivan, ISRO’s chairman.

Interestingly, the phone does not feature NavIC technology but many Twitterati have spotted what Dr. K Sivan was using, a Samsung Galaxy Note 8. You can see it poking out of his shirt pocket in the picture below.

So if you wonder why Xiaomi’s global vice president gave Dr. Sivan a new K20 phone while he already had a flagship smartphone, the picture might be the answer.

By giving him a brand new Redmi phone, Manu Kumar Jain might want to tell Dr. Sivan to switch to their smartphones, especially when Xiaomi is now the first smartphone vendor to supports ISRO-devised NavIC technology.

The meeting with ISRO’s chairman is also the perfect opportunity for Xiaomi to showcase its Redmi K20 phone.

The Chinese phone manufacturer’s integration of NavIC tech to its smartphones is possible with the R&D effort of Qualcomm, ISRO, and Xiaomi itself. In January, Qualcomm introduced three new chipsets with support for the technology, the Snapdragon 720G, Snapdragon 662, and Snapdragon 460.

Xiaomi’s integration with India’s home-grown GPS’s alternative is followed by Redmi’s announcement that it would too, launch smartphones with support for NavIC in the near future.

When it comes to navigating, what pops up in most people’s minds is GPS but little do they know that it is not the only system in the world. The European Union has its Galileo, China has BeiDuo, and Russia uses GLONASS.

NavIC system uses eight satellites, seven of them for timing, location, navigation, and positioning and the other is for offering messaging service.

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