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.