Recently announced in Beijing, is a low-cost Xiaomi Phone 2, powered by the Google Android platform. If you think this is another cheap knock-off, take a look at its pretty impressive specifications:
- A 4.3-inch 720p IPS display manufactured by Sharp (providing 342 ppi pixel density);
- Qualcomm’s Snapdragon S4 (Krait) Pro APQ8064 quad-core chip running at 1.5 Ghz with Adreno 320 GPU;
- 2GB of RAM (double data rate); and
- 16GB of memory.
According the information at the presentation, it is using Krait 1.5Ghz quad-core processor, 2MB of L2 cache, double data rate 533 mhz memory and is based on the 28nm process. For the Android OS, Xiaomi had decided to jump straight to Android Jelly Bean (yes, 4.1!) for the phone’s firmware.
The Xiaomi comes in a 2,000mAh cell for powering the phone (at 10.2mm device thickness), but you if you require more juice, you can also purchase a 3,000mAh battery version of the phone for safe measure (although it will add about 2mm of thickness for this larger capacity battery).
Xiaomi co-founder Lei Jun has shared that the cost of manufacture for this phone is about USD370, and it will be selling for about $310, which means that it is hoped that sales the volume will help push down the cost in due time.
Considering a similar iPhone 4S now retails for USD649.00 (unlock and contract free), this is basically a quad-core wonder at half the iPhone 4S (and a dual-core, mind you) price! The phone is expected to be made availability some time in October. Apparently, it will be for the China market, which has overtaken US as the largest mobile phone market with 23.9 million smartphones shipped in the third quarter 2012.
If you are proficient in reading Chinese words, you can drop by their website at http://www.xiaomi.com/mi2 for more information.
Oh yes, if you are into taking photographs, then you might be pleased to know that it sports a 27mm, f2.0, 8-megapixel camera on the back, and a nominal 28mm 2-megapixel camera at the front.
These are some samples of the camera’s photos, as given on the manufacturer’s website:
