By Anjana Menon

The world's biggest producer and consumer of rice, China, is feeding a different staple to the world. Sleek, responsive and inexpensive Xiaomi (Little Rice), is a Chinese smartphone, barely four years old, that has knocked Samsung off the top spot. At least, in China.Xiaomi's meteoric rise has pushed smartphones into the commodity zone forever. In this redefined marketplace, success will go to the fanciest screen at the cheapest price, or the Rolls Royce of handsets.Those in between are likely to end up as inglorious also-rans. In the last five years, the story of the smartphone has been fairly linear. It's been led by imitation, after Apple broke rank in 2007 and wowed users with a touchscreen interface so responsive, that it made toddlers technology savvy.Samsung, which until then, was struggling to find its oomph in the mobile phone space, plunged straight in with what Apple alleged was a cheaper "copy" of its phones. Since then, Samsung and Apple have ruled the top two spots for smartphones worldwide, but several me-too ones have forayed into their space, as the two companies slug in courtrooms and off shelves.Trouble is, Xiaomi has cracked the world's biggest mobile market, with freewheeling flair. Its latest offering looks flatteringly close to the iPhone, with an operating system called MIUI that works as smoothly as Samsung's Android.Its founder Lei Jun, mocked for aping the late Steve Jobs at product launches, is shipping phones at near manufacturing price, jettisoning high-end gadgetry into the low-price zone.It keeps low inventory and sells only online. It makes money mostly from its applications and add-ons. Hugo Barra, global vice-president at Xiaomi and a former Google Android senior hand, in a recent interview with thenextweb.com, countered queries on imitation by arguing that "design-arounds are stupid.Why would you design around something that is good, rather than making it better?… The world has to change, the patent system is flawed— we are not afraid to stand up and say that."It's a warning: if there is innovation, there will be imitation. In the smartphone zone, it means some will spend billions innovating while others will spending millions slightly improving.The ones innovating will obviously find it hard to sell their phones cheap, unless it is at a loss. In this environment, the next big thing will be a functionality that will change how we use our phones.So far, there are no indications that either Apple, the leader of innovation, or any other company has a far-reaching product to leapfrog to the next level. Most innovation we have seen is bells-andwhistles stuff, it's fatigued.As that innovation struggle continues, the game for now will be dominated by numbers and cost. In that light, Xiaomi's gain in China, even though that's a single market, is hard to ignore, just as much as homegrown Micromax’s rise in India. Xiaomi sold out 15,000 units in a two-second flash online sale.Together, the two countries are expected to swallow 500 million smartphones this year. Researcher IDC estimates 1 billion smartphones were shipped globally in 2013, or 55 per cent of all mobile phone shipments.It predicts that the bulk of the smartphone growth is coming in the sub-$150 (Rs 9000) market led by value-conscious users in the two countries. In countries such as India, where operators do not subsidise the cost of the handset by locking consumers to a contract, price is everything.It is this majority that will shape usage and technology development, be that in heavy consumption of video, or in making the phone the device that will control the technology in their lives. Some industry experts argue that the next big revolution in handsets will come when all storage and processing will be cloudbased making devices a glass and plastic interface, and inevitably more inexpensive.Until that happens though, those who fail to give the best in technology and price are likely to face the fate of the Finnish firm, Nokia. Nokia hung around as the world's biggest handset-maker for a decade, but exited the business by selling it to Microsoft in 2013.The company's failure was that it couldn't see the disruption caused by a rival technology early enough, making consumers power off and swipe to another screen. Samsung should know better. It stole Nokia's crown.(Anjana Menon is a New Delhi-based independent writer)