<div>Xiaomi shook the smartphone market last year with its highly competitive prices and it continues to do so with its launch of the Redmi 2 smartphone. At first glance, the smartphone does not look different from its predecessor the Redmi 1S but on close inspection you notice that the size and weight has seen a slight reduction while maintaining the previous screen dimension of 4.7-inches.</div><div> </div><div>The overall construction seems similar with a soft plastic removable panel at the back and a 720p display on the front which is toughened with a scratch-resistant AGC Dragontrail glass panel. You also get the same and very distinguished red capacitive keys at the bottom of the display which we have seen on the Redmi 1S and the Redmi Note. The corners are now curved and even the back feels more smoother and curvier than before giving a better grip than its predecessor.</div><div> </div><div>On the hardware side there is a bump in the processor thanks to a new Snapdragon 410 quad-core processor while the rest remains the same with a gig of RAM and 8GB of expandable storage. You also get two SIM card slots, both of which support 4G LTE radio, but this feature seems too ambitious as the new high-speed network has not yet made an impact in the country.</div><div> </div><div>Something new that we noticed was the UI. The Redmi 2 comes loaded with the new MIUI 6 out of the box running on top of Android KitKat 4.4 which was only seen previously on the Mi4. The new UI does give it a fresh look and it definitely feels smoother and hopefully will get the new Lollipop update later this year.</div><div> </div><div>Considering the last range of smartphones from Xiaomi, the Redmi 2 is not a huge update rather the company has looked on the minor issues and has substantially improved on them. For the price of Rs. 6,999 it is definitely worth the money, but not worth an upgrade from the Redmi 1S. <br /><br /><img src="/image/image_gallery?uuid=0a906720-faf0-453c-a221-eb0f364321ba&groupId=36166&t=1426154925447" width="650" height="360" vspace="1" hspace="1" align="middle" alt="" /></div>