Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi launched the Redmi Note 2 in August at its home country via its usual flash sale and indicative of how well the new handset was received by consumers, nearly 80,000 units were sold in a single online flash.
Xiaomi developed the Redmi Note 2 for consumers looking at owning flagship smartphones on a tight budget.
At a price tag of $125, the technical specifications of the Xiaomi Redmi Note 2 are actually more than its value in the market, making it a great buy.
It has flagship specifications that do not require consumers to spend a fortune. The smartphone is actually faced with intense competition from other budget flagship devices from other well-known brands but its closest competitor is the Asus ZenFone 2 of Taiwan, notes the International Business Times of UK.
The only advantage of Asus ZenFone 2 is that it has already been released globally while the Xiaomi Redmi Note 2 has yet to come into the retail markets outside of China.
The handset also has 4G capabilities, an impressive camera, and performs solidly well. In fact, some smartphone enthusiasts consider it as a great alternative to the Motorola Moto E 2nd Generation because the two handsets are comparable in most respects.
For its price range, the Xiaomi Redmi Note 2 is a suitable smartphone for heavier multitasking even a few years from now, notes NDTV Gadgets.
A smartphone by a different name
Xiaomi Redmi Note 2 is also known as the Redmi 2 Prime, which is the successor of the Redmi 2. It is greatly considered a mid-life cycle refresh of the Redmi 2 because the predecessor handset has been launched into the market a little over six months ago.
It is thus no wonder that the some astute observers have noted that the Redmi Note 2 looks more like a variant of the Redmi 2 rather than an entirely different model.
Xiaomi is considered in the global smartphone business as the poster child of the low-cost, high-spec smartphone but people should be surprised to know that the Redmi Note 2 is actually manufactured in India at a plant located at the Sricity special economic zone in Andhra Pradesh operated by Foxconn.
For those who own a Xiaomi Redmi 2, they will certainly see and feel that that the Xiaomi Redmi Note 2 is exactly the same as its predecessor or some other Xiaomi smartphones launched in the past.
This strategy is no longer surprising since many companies have been splitting inventory between multiple factors in multiple countries for ages in order to save on production costs.
But for Chinese consumers, having a smartphone that has a ‘Made in India’ mark means something unusual which is also a good market strategy for the Xiaomi Redmi Note 2.
Comes with a polished interface
The Xiaomi Redmi Note 2 comes out of the box with the MIUI 7 skin on top of the Android 5.0 Lollipop mobile operating system, which is fair enough for most users.
But MIUI is one of the most polished interfaces from Chinese smartphone makers and it practically follows the same template as every one of them, which means users can not expect an app drawer and most of the default apps have been replaced or duplicated or restyled.
It is kind of amusing for first-time smartphone users compared to the stock Android but it has no quick settings in the notifications shade which makes it quite an annoyance. Users have to swipe a second time to the side and find the useful apps buried in a long scrolling list.
The Xiaomi Redmi Note 2 has a fairly large 5.5-inch full HD touchscreen display with 1080 x 1920-pixel resolution, along with 401 pixels per inch (ppi) density. It boasts of multi-touch and 16 million different colors, and offers a high degree of sharpness.
The handset runs on two octa-core Cortex-As53 processors clocking at 2.0GHz and 2.2GHz, respectively. The CPUs are embedded within a MediaTek MT6795 SoC. The internal storage of the smartphone varies according to the processor configuration. It comes with either a 16GB or 32GB variants, with each variant featuring a 2GB of RAM.