In 2013 Chinese phone maker Xiaomi launched the Redmi, a low-cost smartphone with mid-range specs. This year the company is following it up with the Redmi 2, an even better phone that still has a low price.

The Redmi 2 will sell for about $112 in China, but the phone sports a 64-bit CPU, a 720p display, and dual-SIM 4G LTE support.

redmi 2_04

The new Redmi 2 has a 4.7 inch, 1280 x 720 pixel IPS display with 312 pixels per inch, a 1.2 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 quad-core processor with Adreno 306 graphics, 1GB of RAM, and 8GB of storage.

Update: Xiaomi has announced an updated version with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage. 

It has an 8MP rear camera, a 2MP front-facing camera, and a 2200mAh battery.

The phone runs Google Android software with the MIUI 6 user interface, and Xiaomi will offer 5 different color options for the back cover.

Last year’s model also had a 4.7 inch, 720p display but some models had a slower MediaTek processor while others had a Snapdragon 400 chip.

Xiaomi’s phones may not be available in the US or Europe yet, but the company sold more than 61 million smartphones in 2013 in China, Singapore, India, and a few other markets. The company hopes to expand to new markets in the coming years.

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14 replies on “Xiaomi introduces the Redmi 2 smartphone for $112”

  1. can you stop telling us about technology that is only available 12000 miles away from the uSA…who cares about china

  2. Well, it’s much more like a face-lift than an upgrade. It seems to have MIUI6, something Hongmi 1/s users have been asking for months now, and last time it was promised to arrive 2015 march. I think this will upset a few people, pretty much communicating: “oh, you want MIUI6? Better buy our new phone, that is almost identical to your current one, but we support this one”. At least they should have doubled the RAM, the new MIUI6 is pretty memory-hungry…

  3. I wonder why they don’t expand to U.S. Well archos diamond phone looks nice and blu always makes low cost phone s

    1. Downside to those is BLU only has T-Mobile bands and Archos only has ATT bands..

    2. The Blu phones have a bad reputation, check the Amazon.com feedback.
      Having been burned by prior Archos products, I wouldn’t touch them for phones.

    3. Apple, that’s why. Apple lawyers already have lawsuit lined up the second Xiaomi set foot in USA or EU.

  4. these phones are always nice but they usually lack LTE bands for US carriers

  5. Actually there are multiple versions of the 1S with both Mediatek and Snapdragon 400 and when you say slower you better check and make sure. SD 410 is slow since it’s clocked low at just 1.2GHz while the SD 400 they were using is at 1.6GHz. So there might be gains in some benchmarks and no relevant gains in others.
    This is a non-upgrade and gets them into trouble.They had a poor Q4 and they really needed some solid upgrades but this is not it.

    1. The 1S stand for Snapdragon, the previous version is just Redmi/Hongmi with Mediatek CPU

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