The smartphone market in India is spicing up, yesterday Tom wrote an article detailing OPPO’s deal to sell their smart phones through Amazon India, and today one of their local rivals,Xiaomi, have announced their plans to sell their Redmi Note smart phone in India exclusively through FlipKart.
The Redmi Note is Xiaomi’s answer to Samsung’s Galaxy Note series of phones, except where the Note has been sold at a premium price, the Redmi Note is noticeably more friendly to the consumers wallet while still providing a fairly high level of hardware. As with many budget-priced smart phones, a MediaTek CPU is used, in this case its the MT6592 Octa-Core which is clocked at 1.7GHZ, with graphics being handled by the Mali 450GPU. 2GB of RAM is included, with 8GB of internal storage as standard that can be augmented by up to 32GB via the use of a Micro-SD card.
The 5.5-inch display has a resolution of 1280 x 720, and has a 312 ppi, and thanks to the IPS technology, you can count on good viewing angles of 178 degrees. Xiaomi haven’t skimped on the cameras, they’ve place a 5MP sensor on the front on the phone on selfie duty, with a more than decent 13MP on the rear along with an LED flash that is capable of capturing 1080p video at 30fps.
The Redmi supports 2G GSM 900/1800/1900MHz and 3G WCDMA bands 900/2100MHz, WiFi bands 802.11 b/g/n and has Dual-SIM support, which comes in handy when trying to juggle work and personal SIM-cards. A suitably phablet-sized 3100 mAh battery is included that is also removable. Rear panels can be purchased in a variety of colours. Finally, the Redmi weighs in at 199 grams (about 31 grams heavier than the Note 3) and has the following dimensions: 154 x 78.7 x 9.45mm, so you are probably going to feel the heft of the Redmi in your front pocket.
Software wise, the Xiaomi Redmi is running MIUI v5, which is based on Android version 4.2 Jelly Bean. In case you haven’t used MIUI before, while it’s based on Android, cosmetically it has similarities to iOS. Basically, Xiaomi have created a ‘fork’ of Android, applying their own customisations on top in order to differentiate themselves from other Android manufacturers.
The Redmi is priced at Rs 9999 ($166) and should be available sometime in August via FlipKart, which seems a lot more bang for your buck than the HTC Desire 616 Dual-SIM that has a price tag of Rs 16,999 ($299). Let us know if the Xiaomi Redmi floats your boat or not in the comments below or at our Google Plus page.