You may have remembered that Hugo Barra had left Google last year to go over to China and work for Xiaomi. Today, Hugo announced on his Google+ their new Redmi smartphone which is a rebranding of their Hongmi line for non-Chinese markets. The Redmi is going to be selling for $130, and has pretty good specs, considering the pricing.
The Redmi will be featuring a 4.7-inch IPS 720p display, 1.5GHz quad-core processor, 1GB of RAM, 4GB of on-board storage with a microSD card slot, 8MP camera on the back that can do 1080p video, along with a 1.3MP front-facing camera. It also runs MIUI v5 on-board, which is quite popular for Chinese OEMs to throw on their devices instead of stock Android or their own custom skin.
According to Xiaomi, the Redmi will be debuting in Singapore. At this time, availability is unknown for other markets. But if Xiaomi wants to do well with the Redmi, they are going to need to get this device in more markets. At $130, this is definitely a good buy, but the wildcard here is we don’t know how support is going to be from Xiaomi. Will we see updates? Will we get warranties on the Redmi? etc. It’s definitely a big competitor to the Moto G, the specs are relatively the same aside from storage and the camera. But the Redmi is about $50 less than the Moto G, which is pretty crazy. I’d love to see Xiaomi come into the US and definitely compete with Motorola and others for the budget phones like this. Right now the only really good budget phones out there are from BLU and the Moto G.
The Redmi, for $130 unlocked, would you pick one up if it were available in the US? Be sure to let us know in the comments down below.