$130 for a quad-core smartphone? Enter the Xiaomi Red Rice

We were trying to think of something inspiring to say, but the just outed Xiaomi Red Rice speaks volumes on its own – and what an enchanting story it is!

Unveiled earlier today, Xiaomi is changing the name of the game by offering an extremely affordable (even for its homeland) smartphone that sports internals rivaling those of other more premium offerings out there. Namely, a quad-core Mediatek MT6589T processor ticking at 1.5GHz is helped by 1GB of RAM to run the 4.7-inch 720x1280 pixel IPS display snugged behind Corning's Gorilla Glass 2. The handset runs Xiaomi's custom user interface, MIUI v5, on top of Android 4.2 and features a 8MP camera at the rear, with the front taken care of by a 1.3MP snapper.

So what exactly does all this translate into? As you can see in the gallery below, Red Rice already paid benchmarks a visit, scoring just over 15000 on AnTuTu – an impressive feat, all things considered.

The rest of Xiaomi's Red Rice is less exciting – the handset comes with dual-SIM capabilities and a rather frugal 4GB of internal memory which is, fortunately, expandable via microSD. Powering this entire show is a 2000mAh battery.

So what do we think? Red Rice really is something, especially at that price point. What's more, Xiaomi is elbowing its way through the smartphone arena, and succeeding, even if on a local level. The manufacturer booked some $2.15 billion in revenue for the first half of 2013 - that's slightly more than double the amount it cashed in for the same period last year. That being said, there's no telling when (if at all) Xiaomi will push distribution on a bigger scale. In fact, with the size of the Chinese market, we could definitely see Xiaomi sticking to what is working for it in the foreseeable future.


source: Xiaomi (Weibo)