Xiaomi is once more disrupting the market in India with an entry level smartphone, the Redmi Go. As the name suggests, this has the Android Go Edition as the operating system. The phone was launched in India on Wednesday at an event in New Delhi.
First, a look at the specifications of this entry level smartphone: It comes with a display of 5 inches. It’s a HD display with a screen resolution of 720x1080pixels. The processor is a quadcore Qualcomm Snapdragon 425SoC. The RAM support is 1GB and the onboard storage 8GB.
With the Android Go Edition built on the Android Oreo version 8.1, the storage will be sufficient. The very idea of Google launching this lighter version of its OS is to facilitate low-end smartphone users get almost the same level of experience as the ones holding phones that cost multiple times. And the storage can be taken to another 128GB through a microSD card. For the record though, Xiaomi has launched the same Redmi Go in the other markets, internationally, with 16GB onboard storage.
The camera section has also been kept simple with an 8MP shooter in the rear and 5MP sensor for selfies in the front. A 3000mAh battery rounds up the major hardware specs.
Xiaomi has tweaked the Redmi Go to adopt to the Indian market with support for 20 Indian languages and the Google Assistant available in Hindi as well.
Keeping in line with the objective of offering all features, but without the frills, you can use practically all popular apps like YouTube in their ‘Go’ version. This means these apps have been created with a much lighter weight in terms of the size occupied on the ROM.
The Xiaomi Redmi Go is being offered at a launch price of Rs 4,499 and you can buy the phone from online sources like Flipkart and Xiaomi’s Mi.com and offline from the Mi Home Stores from March 22.
Incidentally this is Xiaomi’s first smartphone with the Android Go edition OS and at this price, the phone could give a run for its money to many entry level phones and devices like Jio 2 which will be watched with interest.