Recently China’s Xiaomi began selling a Qualcomm Snapdragon version of their Hongmi phone which boasts much higher performance to the original Mediatek model.
Xiaomi announced the 1.6Ghz Snapdragon MSM8628 version of the Hongmi designed to support China Telecom’s CDMA2000 and GSM frequencies. In addition to a processor update the new version of the Hongmi also get’s MIUI V5 based on Android 4.3 rather than Android 4.2.1.
Gizchina News of the week
The results are a much more powerful smartphone at the same budget 799 Yuan price point! The original Mediatek MT6589T model of the Hongmi is no slouch with Antutu scores of around 16,000, however the new Hongmi 1S is much more potent with benchmarks of 21,467.
Xiaomi will now be waiting for Qualcomm chip prices to drop so they can start upgrading their China Mobile (TD-SCDMA) and China Unicom (WCDMA) versions to the updatedprocessor.
[ Source ]
Its good news only because it will make the 6589T version drop in price. Maybe even less than 150$ from resellers.