Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi announced on Saturday that its popular Mi 3 flagship will go on sale in India on on Monday, or Republic Day. The company notes that limited units are available, on a first-come-first-serve basis.

Part of the firm's Republic Day offers (which includes the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4G being made available without registration this long holiday weekend - from January 24 to January 26), the Xiaomi Mi 3 will be available to customers who register their interest before 2pm IST on Monday.

To purchase the Mi 3, customers are asked to like the Mi India Facebook announcement post and share it with at least 3 friends, and then visit the dedicated promotion page on the company's India site at 12pm IST on Monday, and then enter the email address associated with their Flipkart account to register.

Users will have until 2pm IST on Monday to register with their Flipkart account's email address, and if they were fast enough (with only a limited number of Mi 3 smartphone units available), they will find the Mi 3 smartphone in their Flipkart cart at 5pm IST. Users can then proceed to check out the smartphone to complete the purchase.
The company is calling the sale the last chance customers will have to purchase the Mi 3 in India. The last time Xiaomi made the Mi 3 available for purchase in India was back in October, with 25,000 units made available to those users who had registered for at least five of the six Mi 3 flash sales held by the firm in India, but were unable to purchase the handset.

To be noted is that Xiaomi's 2014 flagship smartphone, the Mi 4, is scheduled to finally launch in India on Wednesday. For now, pricing and availability details of the Xiaomi Mi 4 smartphone in India are not known, however, following previous launches by the company, it is expected to be made available the following week on Tuesday - or February 3.

To refresh your memory, the Xiaomi Mi 3 is priced at Rs. 13,999 and runs a highly tweaked version of Android 4.4 KitKat, with the company's MIUI 5 skin on top. It features a 5-inch full-HD LCD display (1080x1920 pixels) offering a pixel density of 441ppi; a 2.3GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 (MSM8274AB) processor; 2GB of RAM; Adreno 330 GPU; 16GB of inbuilt storage; a 13-megapixel rear camera; a 2-megapixel camera, and a 3050mAh battery.

She was Eugenie Bouchard's childhood hero, but the Canadian will be out to ensure Maria Sharapova doesn't become her grand slam villain when the pair meet in the Australian Open quarter-finals.

Bouchard, who progressed with a three-set victory over Romanian Irina-Camelia Begu on Sunday afternoon, has never beaten Sharapova. In what is being dubbed the battle of the glamour girls of women's tennis, Bouchard will have to overcome a 0-3 record against the Russian, which includes the semi-final heartache at last year's French Open.

"I kind of just remember a grind," Bouchard said of the 4-6, 7-5, 6-2 loss to Sharapova at Roland Garros in 2014. "I didn't feel like I was playing great tennis the whole time. Sometimes here and there. But that's what it's about: trying to win and trying to always play better, get through it, even if you're not playing your best. I felt like I was close with her. She probably wasn't - we were both maybe a bit off. You're never really playing amazing. Maybe 10 per cent of the year. So I remember that, and I remember I had chances and stuff. I just remember a tough match. I was pretty disappointed after, so that's motivating."
Bouchard has often been compared to Sharapova since her breakout performance at last year's Australian Open. Sharapova is one of the most marketable sportswomen in the world, and while Bouchard still has a long way to go before reaching such heights, it's believed she is on a similar path.

However Sharapova, who was often compared to Anna Kournikova at the start of her career, said it was important to create your own identity. "I think we all want to go through our own paths ... when I was coming up, I was compared to Kournikova for many years in my career and still occasionally name always comes up in interviews and articles," Sharapova said. "That's just part of it, part of the game, part of the business. It's understandable. It is what it is. As I have said, I believe I was still a teenager, I don't want to be the next anyone. I want to be the first Maria Sharapova. And that's how I've been throughout my whole career. And we all want to create our own path and go through our own career. And we're all destined for some sort of thing. We work extremely hard at a sport, and that's what we want to be known for."

In three meetings, Bouchard has only managed to take one set off Sharapova. The 20-year-old won just two games in their first encounter in Miami in 2013, and failed to take a set at the French Open later that year. She did manage to win the first set in the semi-final at Roland Garros last year, but the experienced Sharapova finished strong to topple Bouchard, going on to win the tournament with a victory over Simona Halep in the final. But Bouchard has welcomed the clash with the world No.2, admitting she was going to be aggressive in her approach to the quarter-final.