Xiaomi’s first smartphone to run
on Android Oreo (Go Edition) has made it to India. The Redmi Go is made for
people who want to transition from using a feature phone to a smartphone.
Interestingly, the Redmi Go is now the most affordable Xiaomi phone in India at
Rs 4,499.
With the toppings of stock Android goodness, the Redmi Go makes
a case for itself in the entry-level smartphone segment and let’s have a look
at it briefly.
Xiaomi Redmi Go price and release date
Redmi Go is priced at Rs 4,499 and its first sale will be held
on March 22 across Flipkart, Mi India Store and Xiaomi partners.
Design
The Redmi Go has a very compact form-factor and
upon first look, it does not seem to be cheap. It’s got a solid build courtesy
of aluminum alloy chassis and the brushed aluminum finish on the back. The
phone has a certain heft and it certainly does not go for the sleek profile
that we have seen with other sub-Rs 10,000 phones. To give you an idea, the
Redmi Go is 8.4mm thick. Its back panel is slightly curved towards the edges
which enables easy grip.
The volume buttons and power key are located on the right
edge while the dual SIM card slots and microSD card slot are situated on the
left edge. There’s a speaker unit on the bottom adjacent to the USB 2.0
charging slot and a 3.5mm jack on top.
Display
Redmi Go features a 5-inch HD (1280 x 720 pixels) IPS
display. To provide additional protection against regular drops, the display is
layered with Gorilla Glass 3 2.5D glass.
For its asking price, there’s little that we
expect from the phone’s display but it is not bad at all. In addition to that,
it packs in features like ambient display and night light which are a bonus. In
our little time with the phone, the display looked bright with vivid colours.
However, we’ll reserve our judgment until we get to review the Redmi Go.
Camera
Being an entry-level phone, the camera on the Redmi Go is
also pretty basic. It has an 8MP rear camera and a 5MP front-facing camera for
selfies. The camera can record videos in full high definition, supports Auto
HDR and AI Beautify mode for selfies among others.
In our limited use, the cameras performed
decently while we did notice that the pictures came out to be a bit grainy. It
was an indoor location which was not very optimal to test the photography
skills of the Redmi Go.
Performance
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 425 chipset, coupled with a
quad-core CPU clocked at 1.4GHz forms the beating heart of the Redmi Go. It is
backed by 1GB of RAM and 8GB of storage which can further be expanded by up to
128GB via microSD card. There’s a dedicated microSD card slot on the Redmi Go
which is a welcome addition.
During our use, the phone felt snappier and
smooth which performing general actions. The stock Android loaded onto the
phone does make things easier as it is specially optimized for budget phones.
In addition, the Android 8.1 Oreo (Go Edition) supports Google’s Go suite of
apps which are light on the storage and are equally well optimized to perform
smoothly. The phone comes pre-loaded with a couple of these apps.
We did notice one odd thing about the Redmi Go. It does
not come with the stock Android launcher and instead runs Mint Launcher. While
the Mint launcher allows users to customize the phone with themes and icon
packs, we’re not sure at the moment whether it affects long-term
performance.
Battery
Redmi Go draws power from a 3,000mAh battery
which is claimed to provide up to 10 days of standby time and upto 12 hours
worth of calls or 78 hours of music and 5 hours of video playback.
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