Comes on the heels of the launch of Moto E.
By Dileep Thekkethil
BENGALURU: The Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi has sent invitations to media houses in India for an event scheduled for March 12, which could see the unveiling of Redmi 2.
Xiaomi had earlier posted a puzzle contest on its official Facebook page asking users to find three keywords that could be hints of the company’s upcoming product. The invite sent today read “Taking it to the next level.”
The invite also says that the Vice president of Xiaomi, Hugo Barra, and the head of operations in India Manu Jain will be present during the unveiling of the new product.
The launch of Redmi 2 comes in the wake of Motorola launching the new Moto E with improved hardware. It should be also taken into consideration that after discontinuing Redmi 1S, the top Chinese smartphone maker was left with no products in the low-budget segment.
The puzzle contest posted by Xiaomi had words such as Snapdragon, QuickCharge and Expandable in it. These are some of the features that we can expect in the upcoming Redmi 2 as the newly launched flagship device of the company – Mi Note doesn’t support expandable memory.
Redmi 2 is a 4.7-inch HD display 1280 x 720 pixel dual SIM smartphone and is powered by a 64 bit-based Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 processor with Adreno 306 GPU coupled with 1 GB RAM.
Redmi 2 has an 8 GB internal storage capacity with an expandable slot that offer up to of 32 GB. The primary camera of the device hosts 8MP with LED-flash in addition to an upgraded 2 MP front camera.
Redmi 2 also support 4G LTE network with 4G stand-by on both the SIM cards. It also has connectivity features such as WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS and microUSB port.
The new Redmi 2 is backed by 2,200 mAh battery compared to 2,000 mAh in Redmi 1S.
The new Redmi 2 runs on Android KitKat OS on top of MIUI v6. The device, when launched in mainland, had 5 color variants, but we have to wait any seen whether the same colors will be made available in India.
Technical Specification of Redmi 2
- 4.7″ screen size, IPS display, 1280×720 resolutiton, 312 PPI
- 1.2 GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 64-bit processor
- Dual-SIM with 2 card-slots, standing by concurrently
- 1GB RAM, 8GB flash memory, expandable micro sd card slot of upto 32GB,
- Cortex A53 structure, 1.5 times faster than A7
- Adreno 306 GPU
- 4G LTE/3G, WiFi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0, GPS and 3.5mm headset audio jack,
- Dual-SIM 4G LTE (TDD/ FDD), connection speed up to 150 Mbps
- 2200 mAh Samsung Lithium polymer battery
- 8 mega pixel rear camera, 2 mega pixel facing camera
- 133g, 9.4 mm thick
- 5 colors for back cover
- MIUI 6
Interestingly, the puzzle also had a few other words hidden like Kepler, Tegra, and Nvidia, which are closely related the specifications of Xiaomi MiPad. MiPad of Xiaomi is a 7.9-inch device powered by Nvidia Tegra K1 SoC processor and Kepler GPU coupled with 2GB RAM. The device has 16GB/64GB internal storage, expandable up to 128GB using MicroSD card. The primary camera of MiPad is equipped with an 8MP camera and the front with a 5MP fixed focus camera.