China Unicom reportedly orders 2 million Xiaomi phones with MIUI

At least one carrier may be very excited about Xiaomi’s MI-One Android phone, sporting the community-authored MIUI custom Android ROM. According to MicGadget, China Telecom has ordered a staggering 2 million units of the new phone after an extremely promising pre-order period racked up 300,000 sales. The $315-equivelent phone is already on sale in China.

Colloquially known as “the MIUI phone,” the MI-One is notable for running an aftermarket customized Android ROM right out of the box. The MIUI family of ROMs has grown very popular over the last few months, spreading to many mainstream devices. It’s gained a lot of attention for its slick user interface, which blends elements of stock Android and the iPhone. With new releases every week, the core supported devices are extremely stable, and since the devs also publish their own open-source code, modified versions of MIUI make it on to even more phones.

Manufacturer Xiaomi is hoping that MIUI will help distinguish its phones from the myriad of Android handsets already popular in China, and if there’s any truth to the quoted “industry insiders” reports, it looks like they’ve definitely succeeded. So far as we know, the MI-One is the only phone in the world to launch with a community-modified version of Android installed. However, the new VOIP carrier Republic Wireless may be using CyanogenMod on its beta hardware.