Xiaomi has been a large success story in China. It was initially a group of people that made the very popular MIUI ROM for Android phones, and then they made a company to actually build and sell their own phones with their own MIUI ROM on them. Since then they’ve been coasting as a start-up, and have made billions of dollars in revenue.
Today, they are announcing another breakthrough product, but this time it’s not at the high-end, but at the low-end. It’s a $130 phone, that comes with specs that can usually be found in phones that cost $400 or more. It has a quad core 1.5 Ghz Cortex A7, a PowerVR SGX544 @ 357 MHz GPU, 1 GB of RAM, an 4.7″ 1280×720 IPS display, 8MP and 3MP cameras, and will arrive with MIUIv5 that’s based on Android 4.2.2. The phone scores a 15,000 score on AnTuTu, which again, puts it somewhere at the mid-range, but with a low-end price.
The storage of the device is a little small, and it’s kind of what you’d expect from a regular low-end phone: 4GB of storage only. But for most people that should be enough for their most used apps. It also comes with a microSD slot, so you can expand the memory and put all your photos and and music there, and save internal storage space for the apps. The battery is actually quite large for a low-end phone, measuring 2,000 mAh. Since it’s also using the very efficient Cortex A7 cores, the phone should be quite good in terms of battery life.
The phone will arrive in some interesting colors. The main one is red (which fits the Red Rice name), but they also seem to have it available in yellow, blue, green, white and black. This makes me glad that we are finally getting some colored smartphones in the Android market, and that more Android OEM’s are starting to adopt this trend. Google should also be at the fore-front of this trend with their imminent Motorola X, which was rumored to have up to 20 colors to choose from, and I’m sure will see more manufacturers doing this for more phone and tablet models soon.