The Xiaomi Redmi is a phone which kicked off the low-cost smartphone wars, and the Redmi 2 is the phone to continue the battle with slight redesign and the same 699 Yuan price tag.
Available in China from the 9th October, think of the Xiaomi Redmi 2 as a slight upgrade rather than a whole new phone. At first glance it is the bright colour options (white, green yellow and pink) which has the new phone stand-out from the older Redm, but closer inspection reveals a few more details.
The Redmi 2 has a more rounded design, slightly less bezel at the top and bottom of the display and is actually thinner and lighter than the original (133g, 9.4mm). A design change sees SIM card installed via a sim tray rather than removing the rear of the phone. This might actually tell us how Xiaomi managed to make the Redmi 2 thinner while packing in a slightly larger 2200mAh battery, perhaps the rear is none removable (we will have to confirm this).
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Just like the Redmi 1S the Redmi 2 has dual sim support with both SIM’s offering 4G network compatibility on FDD-LTE and TDD-LTE networks. That larger battery also gets a fast charge option which Xiaomi claim to charge 40% quicker than before.
Up front the Xiaomi Redmi 2 comes with the same 4.7-inch 720p display as the Redmi !s, with a 2 mega-pixel camera up front and 8 mega-pixel F2.2 snapper around the rear. Under the hood Qualcomm provide a Snapdragon 410 chipset, which oddly enough only has 1GB RAM to play with! 8GB memory can be expanded upon with SD cards of up to 32GB.
For me the major upgrades on the Xiaomi Redmi 2 are the faster charging and the slightly smaller body, but with the same camera, screen and RAM specs as the original Redmi 1S I can only imagine users of the Mediatek version of the Redmi to be contemplating the upgrade.
For full details of the Xiaomi Redmi 2 head over to the official product specifications page here.
[ Via Soyacincau ]
What about Gorilla Glass? Still second generation or newer?
There don’t even have Gorilla on the first gen of Redmi, basically is a hoax. Be sure buy along a tempered glass and apply on top of it.
Not much of an upgrade ay
The back cover can be removed. I can confirmed it because I do know read Chinese. The back cover also is matte finishing according to below graph.
http://cdn0.soyacincau.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/150104-xiaomi-redmi-2-official-01.jpg
I’m owner of the old redmi 1s – big disappointment for this second round one – even for this price i won’t bother even to consider to buy it – i will go for meizu m1 note… something bigger, fresh and upgraded
Will Meizu m1 note be getting lollipop ?
Eventually, yes
I prefer buy Meizu m1 not for 200$ instead of buying redmi 2 for 170$ .
It’s honestly not bad considering they didn’t change the price. It’s literally just a slightly upgraded Redmi, not an entirely new phone. Instead of bumping up the specs, they upgraded what was necessary and improved on other things like design, battery life and LTE. I’d love to give it a try.
I think if you don’t already own a Redmi 1S or if you have the Mediatek Redmi then it is worth it.
Only 1 GB of RAM? This the most ineffective way to save a few bucks on the retail price. I’m oké with the 720p screen, considering that it’s only 4.7″ in diagonal (which I consider an advantage compared to the many phablets the market is intruding to us) and as long as storage can be expanded with a micro sd-card, you don’t hear me complaining either but be honest, 1 GB of RAM is so 2013.
9th Januari available in China (instead of October as mentioned in this article…)
Are you sure with the “Dual LTE” feature?
Or does it just mean that it has FDD-LTE and TDD-LTE?
Because on the Xiaomi Website you can’t find anything about it.