Once upon a time, a budget Android smartphone wasn’t a very nice thing to look at. Made to conform to a price point rather than to attract customers, cheaper Androids were typically poorly-designed, slow, and difficult to use. Once upon a time. Xiaomi’s newly-announced Redmi Go, the company’s first Android Go smartphone, is hoping to change your mind on that score.

The Redmi Go uses Google’s stripped back Android OS, designed for lower resource phones, but — on paper, at least — the Redmi device isn’t bad as entry-level devices go.

A bit of everything

The new budget phone is packing a 6in 720p display, powered by a 1.4GHz Snapdragon 425 quad-core CPU. Since it’s supposed to be a My First Smartphone™ device, there’s just 1GB of RAM installed and 8GB of storage. There’s space for up to 128GB using a microSD, if you really, really must have all your music stored locally.

There’s an 8MP f/2.0 rear camera with HDR and an LED flash, in front is a 5MP f/2.2 snapper, and the whole thing is being powered by a 3,000mAh Li-ion battery. And it’s using the Go version of Android 8.1 Oreo.

The Redmi Go is set for a European launch shortly, with an 80 Euro price tag. That’s about R1,250 for those playing the home game. We’ve reached out to Mobile in Africa to find out whether South Africa will be getting its hands on this one at any point. We’ll update once we hear, either way.

Source: Xiaomi