Xiaomi Redmi Note

I recently bought the Xiaomi Redmi Note smartphone from the Xiaomi Singapore site (http://www.mi.com/sg/note/). Although at S$199, the phone is considered a "budget" (read cheap) phone, I don't have many complaints with it. I mean, it's S$199, man! What premium features do you want! Anyone who harbours deep-seated grievances about missing features or features they consider inferior to those on competing phones should just go and buy the competitors' phone and be done with it. My personal opinion is that despite some minor issues, the Redmi Note is absolute value for money. If you are not too picky, you won't regret it. At S$199, the Redmi Note is very good! Period.

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Super difficult to buy the phone from Xiaomi's website

Of course, nothing in this world is perfect. Although the pictures of Xiaomi's phones usually display the caption "Always believe that something wonderful is about to happen", it is terribly ironic that you will not get this feeling while trying to buy the phone from their website.

At incredible bargain prices, Xiaomi's phones are always sold out within minutes when they are put up for sale at the Xiaomi's website. When the Redmi Note was introduced to Singapore 6 weeks ago (8 July 2014), they sold out a batch of 5000 Redmi Notes within 42 seconds when sales were opened at 12 noon (link). This was to be repeated over the next few weeks, as Xiaomi appeared to be bringing in 5000 Redmi Notes every Tuesday. I know because I was trying to get one, and failed the first 4 times. I was lucky that on my 5th try on 5 August 2014, I finally beat the internet hordes and managed to ensnare a Redmi Note.

For the moment, this is a great marketing tactic for the company. There is a huge demand for cheap and good smartphones. By restricting supply to 5000 units every week, the 5000 units are guaranteed to be sold out each and every time. Supposing that Xiaomi continue doing this for 52 weeks, Xiaomi will be able to sell 52 x 5000 = 260,000 units in 1 year. Is this level of demand realistic? Perhaps. I don't know. It may be much higher. 

However, I do know that if users keep failing to buy the phone from Xiaomi's website, the users may feel jaded, and finally give up on acquiring a Xiaomi phone, and simply buy a competitor's phone instead. I think this is bound to happen. Already, phone makers like Asus and ZTE are starting to sell budget phones in the same market segment that the Redmi Note currently occupies. At the moment, Asus and ZTE budget phones cannot match the price/value ratio of Xiaomi's phones. But a new competitor might be able to do so. When that happens, this will be an interesting area to watch. 

Xiaomi can sell phones at incredibly low prices because they have very low overheads. You seldom see them advertise their phone in the newspapers or traditional media. They get their advertising for free because editorial blogs/websites and news organisations are giving them free publicity by telling the world how affordable their phones are for the hardware specs they are providing. And Xiaomi have earned very good word of mouth from their customers. With low prices and high end specs, the phones generate a very good feeling among the extremely satisfied customers, who then go on to spread the gospel to the rest of the public. It is really the Apple iPhone phenomenon all over again.

However, this playbook can be copied by a new player. And I hope someone does. Personally, I think phones selling at S$998 (Samsung Galaxy S5) is ridiculous. That is just too expensive. I think S$500 to S$600 is about right for a high-end phone. For S$1000, a premium phone ought to be made of diamond or some rare element.

However, when a single company have tremendous success selling a budget phone like the Redmi Note, the competitors get skewed into thinking that the hardware features on the Redmi Note is the standard, and their own budget phones ought to match the exact same standards. This is flawed, but because of the incredible market success of Xiaomi, the competitors become blindsided into doing exactly the same thing that Xiaomi is doing, instead of offering even more competitive budget phones!

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Hardware

Let's Talk Specs

If you are making/selling a smartphone, what areas should you focus on?

• Should you concentrate on fast CPU processing? Which is more important: a higher GHz but lesser CPU cores, or slower GHz but more CPU cores?

• Should you concentrate on long battery life? Is a 2000 mAH battery sufficient, or a 3100 mAH battery?

• Is the display important? What constitutes a good display? A large screen? A high resolution?

• How much focus should you spent on camera technology? Is 8 mega-pixel adequate? Or should you go the whole hog for 13 mega-pixel shooters?

• How much storage should the phone provide?

• How much RAM should the phone have?

• What other components should make up the phone?

CPU

The Redmi Note comes with a 1.7 GHz Eight-Core Mediatek MT6592 CPU. 

If you are making a budget phone, I think this is a good enough CPU. I think that buyers of budget phones primarily needs a device that is more phone than computer. Thus, high GHz speed or high number of CPU cores might be overkill. However, the CPU must provide a good UI response when doing swiping motions - a bugbear of Android which still "stutters" despite the Project Butter enhancements made to Android 4.1. A slower CPU mars the UI experience.

I have found the Redmi Note to be quite responsive using Google Now voice search, Google Maps, internet browsing, and general swiping. But I notice the phone tends to get warm when using Google Maps with GPS and Navigation. My Shanzhai phone with a single core 1.2 GHz CPU doesn't generate as much warmness, but it isn't as responsive the the Redmi Note.

Competitors of budget phones should offer similar performance as the Redmi Note. But I don't think most users can discern slight differences in CPU performance. In real life, most Android apps require internet access, so internet speed is actually more critical than a minor speed improvement in the CPU.  

Battery Life

The 3100 mAH battery in the Redmi Note is awesome. In standby mode with just one SIM card activated (for 2G voice calls) and wifi enabled, I notice a 1% drop in battery level after every 2 hours. This is quite good.

I love removable batteries. I like the fact that users can self replace a dead battery with a new one, without having to send the phone to a servicing centre to have the dead battery replaced. 

However, I wish that all manufacturers making phones with user replaceable batteries would standardise on the battery form factor. It is already the year 2014. Why can't manufacturers just standardise on the smartphone battery form factor, just like the standards we have in AA and AAA batteries? Then, a battery pack can be interchangeable between Samsung, LG, Xiaomi, and the myriad of Android shanzhai brands out in the market. Proprietary battery packs are bad simply because they are proprietary.

Many years ago, phone chargers came in all shapes and sizes. The EU got together, and force the different phone manufacturers to standardise on the micro-USB interface for charging the phone. Now, you can use the same micro-USB cable to charge almost every modern Android smartphone, which is a boon to everyone, as well as the environment.

Likewise, someone should do something about standardising smartphone batteries. If Google and the major phone manufacturers can do something about it, they could agree to a common standard on the form factors of batteries. For example, there will be fix form factors for batteries for phones, tablets, notebooks. Batteries will be interchangeable between different manufacturers phones, tablets, and notebooks. Innovation is allowed where the same phone battery form factor can be used to pack different mAH capacities. Thus, the same phone battery form factor may come in capacities of 1000 mAH, 2000 mAH, or 3100 mAH (the capacity of the Redmi Note battery). 

LCD Display

If you are making a budget phone, I think a high-resolution LCD display is superfluous. I think a cheap display with 160 dpi resolution density is adequate. If you think 160 dpi is too low resolution, go up to 300 dpi. Anything higher is really overkill for budget phones.

Screens with higher resolutions are more expensive to make. If a display has more pixels, it draws more power, runs hotter, and also reduces battery life. Besides, can the human eye really discern images at 300 dpi? 

Competitors should not compete on pixel resolution, but on display attributes like large viewing angles, good brightness control to allow easy readability under direct sunlight, good colour reproduction. 

The Redmi Note's 1280 x 720 resolution, 5.5" IPS screen (267 dpi), is a good compromise. My Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 (2014) tablet with its ridiculously high 2560 x 1600 resolution, 10.1" screen (299 dpi) is drawing too much battery, making the tablet runs shorter per battery charge than it need to. It can only run about 8 hours per full charge. For comparison, the Lenovo Yoga Tablet 10 with its 1900 x 1200 resolution, 10.1" screen (224 dpi) can last an astounding 18 hours. Just simply because the Lenovo Yoga doesn't need to waste so much battery on the power draining LCD screen.

Camera

One of the things that drew me to the Redmi Note is its 13 mega-pixel rear camera. 

However, the few photos that I have taken with this camera is not impressive. Even photos taken under good sunlight looks grainy. I have photos taken with a 4.5 mega-pixel Fuji digital camera that looks better than the 13 mega-pixel shooter of the Redmi Note.

Just because the camera has 13 million pixels doesn't mean pictures taken will be good. In actual fact, the size of each of this pixels might be more important than the total number of pixels. If the pixels are larger, then more light can be collected by the pixel, which may result in a better photo overall. If the pixels are smaller, less light falls on the pixel, which results in poorer photographs.

I am not impressed by the photos taken by the 13 mega-pixel rear camera, or the 5 mega-pixel front camera. Perhaps this deficiency in the Redmi Note can be addressed by a software update of the camera app. I understand that Google Nexus phones/tablets also suffer from poor photos initially, which were subsequently fixed by a software update. I am not sure if Xiaomi has the capability to improve on the graininess through a firmware update. I doubt it.

Unfortunately, there is a flaw in the default Camera app that comes with the Redmi Note. Photos are saved in the Phone Storage area, which is ridiculous. After installing many of the Android apps, I only have about 2 GB free in the internal Phone Storage area. However, I have large swathes of free storage on my 32GB SD card. But the Camera app cannot be configured to change the default save location from the Phone Storage to the SD Card!

Luckily, I have previously purchased the Camera Zoom FX Premium app from the Google Play Store, and this 3rd party camera app allows me to configure the default save location.

My friend owns a Redmi 1 phone (the first version, not the Redmi 1S). I checked her Redmi 1 contents, and was surprised to see that on her Redmi 1, the Camera app saves the photos on her SD Card! 

I don't know why the default Camera app doesn't allow users to change the default save location to the more sensible 32 GB SD card. I suspect that Xiaomi is just using the default stock Android Camera app written by Google, and we all know that Google just doesn't like users to access cheap SD cards storage (all Google's Nexus devices do not provide external SD card slots). I hope that in future, Xiaomi would provide their own camera app that users can configure the default save location. But if they don't, it is still possible to overcome this problem through 3rd party apps like Camera Zoom FX or special MIUI patches (link).

Storage

The Redmi Note comes with 8 GB of internal storage. 

Personally, I think that even for budget phones, 8 GB is insufficient. I think that 32 GB should be the minimum storage.

I do not understand why in this day and age, phones still come with so little internal storage. Is there a gouging exercise going on? 

The cost of a Class-10 32 GB SD card is a mere S$20. Class-10 cards presumes a write-speed of 10 MBps (megabytes per second). The same capacity 32GB card with a faster write speed of 90 MBps sells for S$70, while a 32GB card with a write speed of 280 MBps sells for S$160. I presume that for internal storage, manufacturers must be using flash memory at the highest speeds, and may be using the type with 280 MBps write speed. Since this is very expensive, they resort to giving the minimal internal storage, which is why only 8 GB internal storage is provided.

I would think that with the volume of smartphones being sold, the price of such fast flash memory should have dropped significantly by now. But it didn't. So phones and tablets still come with low internal storage space.

This is why the microSD card slot is a godsend, and a requisite for every budget phone. 

Unfortunately, to keep the price down, the microSD card slot in the Redmi Note can only support SD cards up to 32 GB capacity. It would be nice if the slot supported SD cards up to 64 GB or even 128 GB capacities.

Despite Google's insistence on not having SD card slots, and they always recommend users to save their data in the cloud, the reality is that mobile internet charges is extremely expensive. In Singapore, a phone plan with 2 GB of mobile data costs S$40 per month. Excess data is charged at S$10 per GB, making it very expensive to use cloud storage. If a phone has only 8 GB of internal storage and no SD card slot, just retrieving 2 GB of files from the cloud via mobile internet will bust the bundled mobile data capacity for the month. With an SD card slot, you can always buy a cheap Class-4 SD card and carry around all the files you will need in the SD card. Since budget phones are typically targeted at consumers who are not as well off, cheap SD cards make absolute sense as compared to paying for expensive mobile data.

Besides, many new Android apps are very storage hungry. Some games have asset files as large as 2 GB. Most videos - especially movie length films in high-definition - are about 1 to 2 GB. Thus, the hunger for more storage space is never satiated. Buyers of budget phones are often taking public transport, and during long commutes to and from work, they will use the commuting time to watch videos. The SD card slot allows the phone owner to store more videos on the phone itself, and not have to juggle with the limited internal storage space on most phones by deleting old files to make room for new ones constantly.

All budget phones must come with SD card slots because of the above reasons. The Redmi Note only supports 32 GB SD cards. Competitors should come up with budget phones that support higher SD card capacities.

RAM

I am very surprised that the Redmi Note came with 2 GB of RAM. I am not complaining of course. More RAM allows more apps to stay resident, and makes the Android OS run more fluidly.

Thus, budget phones from competitors that only come with 1 GB of RAM will be threatened by the new standard that Xiaomi has set. 

I think it is not necessary to increase the RAM to 3GB or even 4 GB for phones, particularly budget phones which probably could have run pretty decently even with 1 GB RAM. But I have no issues with Xiaomi delighting it users with such a generous amount of RAM on this budget phone. There is really no downside to having 2GB of RAM on the Redmi Note.

Miscellaneous Hardware

I think miscellaneous stuff like GPS, accelerometers, gyroscopes, compass, proximity sensors, bluetooth, wifi hotspot tethering, USB slot with USB On-The-Go, should be standard on all phones, whether budget or premium. These should be pre-requisites.

However, I was pleasantly surprised that the Redmi Note came with FM Radio. But for a budget phone targeted at less well off consumers, FM radio makes sense. Although I seldom listen to radio nowadays, I am still happy that the choice is available should I need to.

Now, one of the reasons I bought a Redmi Note instead of the more premium Mi3 phone is because the Redmi Note comes with dual SIM slots, whereas the Mi3 has just a single SIM slot. I wanted a dual SIM phone because when I subscribed to my fibre-broadband plan, I was given a free mobile broadband SIM card with 1 GB of mobile data. By using this free mobile broadband SIM card for my mobile internet access, I can subscribe to a cheaper voice-only 2G mobile plan.

Thus, on my Redmi Note, I put my 2G voice-only SIM card in the SIM2 slot, and the 3G data-only SIM card in the SIM1 slot. As my voice plan costs me S$20 per month, with the free 1 GB of mobile broadband, I can lower my monthly telecommunication costs significantly as I don't need to subscribe to a voice+data plan - where the lowest such plans starts at S$40 per month. 

Should budget phones always be dual-SIM ones? I don't think so. But I am glad the Redmi Note has dual slots. 

Recently, Asus introduced their budget phones - the ZenPhone 4, ZenPhone 5 and the ZenPhone 6. They too are dual-SIM phones, which seem to reinstate the market sentiment that budget phones should be dual-SIM phones. 

Interestingly, the Asus ZenPhone uses micro-SIM slots, whereas the Xiaomi phones (the Redmi 1, Redmi 1S, and the Redmi Note) uses mini-SIM slots. 

I think Xiaomi is correct and Asus is wrong. If you are making a budget phone, then your target market is primarily the ones in lesser-developed economies such as India, Africa, Asia, where most people are still using the old feature phones with SIM cards that are primarily of mini-SIM form factor. 

A budget smartphone with a mini-SIM slot can thus accommodate the mini-SIM cards from the feature phones without any problems. If the customer has a micro-SIM card, the micro-SIM card can be easily fitted into a mini-SIM adapter which is then inserted into the mini-SIM slot.

For the Asus ZenPhone budget phones, because they are using mini-SIM slots, customers migrating from feature phones to the Asus phones will need to either CUT their existing mini-SIM cards to micro-SIM dimensions, or have their telco transfer their existing mini-SIM card to a micro-SIM module.

Also, in less developed countries, most mobile customers are on prepaid cards (as opposed to postpaid plans). However, most prepaid cards uses mini-SIM cards, which are again more suited to Xiaomi's budget phones than Asus's.

Personally, both my 2G voice-only SIM card and my 3G data-only SIM card are of the mini-SIM form factor. If I were to buy the Asus budget phones, I will have to either cut my existing SIM cards to the smaller dimension (a task that I do not relish), or pay S$35 per card to migrate them to micro-SIM modules. With Xiaomi's budget phones, I do not have to make any such anguishing decisions. This is one of the reasons why I did not consider getting the Asus phones at all.

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Software

MIUI Interface

The similarity of Xiaomi MIUI interface with the iPhone iOS is uncanny. I am sure if Apple had their way, they will sue Xiaomi for the look and feel. So many icons look iOS-rish.

Another thing that I do not like about MIUI is its lack of the Android App Drawer. There are several disadvantages without the App Drawer:

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Disadvantage 1

I cannot see a complete listing of all the apps and widgets that I have downloaded, and then open the app from that list.

It can be argued that if you run the Play Store app, the app will show a list of all the apps you have downloaded, and there is an [Open] button to execute the app from there. However, I discovered that the Play Store app doesn't work without an internet connection!

I then thought of the Settings > Apps option, which also list all the apps on the phone. However, Settings > Apps  doesn't allow the execution of a selected app. You can only terminate/stop its execution, or uninstall it.

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Disadvantage 2

Without the App Drawer, every application that you install will have its icon thrown in the Home Screen automatically. The problem is that only 1 icon is allowed per app. This was problematic for me because of the way I have been using Android phones.

In all my other Android devices, I need to create multiple shortcuts for the same app in many different folders.

For example, I have an app called SG Buses that provides me information about public bus routes and services.

I created a shortcut to this app in a folder called "Transport",  which also groups other shortcuts like Google Maps , Singapore Map (previously called Singapore Street Directory), and MyTransport Singapore .

However, I also created a second shortcut to the SG Buses app in a folder called "Singapore", which also groups shortcuts to all apps that are Singapore related (e.g. AsiaOne News, Channel News Asia etc). With most Android launchers that uses an App Drawer, multiple shortcuts to the same app can be created, and this suits me to a tee.

Also, some auxiliary apps that is very seldom used can be left out of the home screen completely. Should I need to execute these apps, I can just open the App Drawer and then execute it from there. I can thus maintain a very organised and clean Home Screen.

Without an App Drawer, the MIUI causes a problem because I can only put the icon in one folder. Then the categorisation problem starts. Should I put the Google Maps icon in the "Google" folder, or should I put it in the "Transport" folder? I can't have both like I use to.

I find this very irritating and am not used to it.

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Luckily, Android allows you to use different launchers if you are not satisfy with the default launcher. I am currently still using the MIUI launcher with the Redmi Note. However, I may switch to an alternate launcher that includes a proper App Drawer in the future.

Someone published an AppDrawer app for MIUI. Although this app displays a list of all installed apps which can then be executed, AppDrawer is unable to create multiple shortcuts. Thus, it is still not a panacea for the missing App Drawer in MIUI.

Lock Widget / Power Off Widget

The power button on my old Shanzhai phone became flaky, and it sometimes became very tricky to turn on or turn off the phone (you must depress the power button in the right way...). It was also difficult to turn off the screen by quickly depressing the power button.

I found a Lock Screen widget that allows me to click on a widget icon to turn off the screen. However, I couldn't find a Power Off widget or app that allows me to click on a icon to shutdown the phone. There were some in the Google Play Store, but every single one of them requires rooting the Shanzhai phone. And one of the problems that I had with the Shanzhai phone is that I cannot find any information about rooting that no-name Android phone, so all these apps or widgets that require root access are out.

Interestingly, the  Redmi Note has built-in Lock and Power Off toggles that can be activated either from the Toggle Notification Shade, or placed as shortcuts on the Home Screens. 

Thus, MIUI allows me to simply tap on an icon to quickly lock the phone, or to shut it down completely, all without requiring rooting the phone, or downloading a 3rd party app from the Play Store. And something that I just couldn't do (power off via an icon) on all my other Android devices is a built-in function on my Xiaomi phone.

Alarm will ring even if phone is shut down

I read about this from the internet, and verified this to be true. If the Redmi Note is shutdown, it will automatically power on and then play the alarm sound at the preset time.

Neat!

Amusing/Amazing Tools

The "Tools" folder contains a number of useful apps. The interesting thing about many of the tools is the skeuomorphic designs of some of them that make them look like iPhone apps. 

The "FM Radio" app looks like a white iPod.

The "Recorder" app has this very nifty animation of a cassette tape being wound when recording or playback takes places.

However, all the tools are useful. 

The "Explorer" app has a built-in [FTP] button. If you click this [FTP] button, an FTP URL address will be displayed on the phone. You can copy this address into an FTP program running on your PC to allow you to use a PC FTP client program to copy files to or from the PC to the phone. 

The "Torch" app can actually be invoked from the lock screen by simply holding the Home button.

The "Calculator" app looks like an iPhone calculator. It has a "Basic" mode, which is adequate. However, you can switch it to this weird "Scientific" mode, that is not quite there. For example:

• there is [sin], [cos] and [tan] buttons, but no [arcsin], [arccos] and [arctan] buttons
• the [sin], [cos] and [tan] buttons only allow you to specify radians. You cannot specify angles in degrees/minutes/seconds
• there are no [hyp] buttons
• there are [ln] and [log] buttons, but only [e] and no [10^x] buttons.
• there is no [M], [MR] or [MC] buttons. You can't save any intermediate results into "memory".
• there is no [+/-] button to change the sign of a number. If you try to key in a negative number like -123, the screen always show "0-123".

I really don't know why they bother with a deficient "Scientific" mode when there are plenty of good calculator apps in the Google Play Store (for example, Real Calc). Perhaps this is a stopgap for their China market, because in China, users are blocked by the government from accessing the Google Play Store. However, the "Scientific" mode is really useless with the lack of memory functions to store intermediate results. Most people who need to use a scientific calculator will simply not find this useful at all. I don't understand why the scientific calculator has not been improved.

Software Support

However, the MIUI launcher is actually a very nice piece of work. And I think Xiaomi is learning the Apple lesson extremely well, and is thus becoming just as successful as Apple.

One of the major problems with vendors like Asus and Samsung is their lack of software support. For Asus, I was very disappointed when they stopped providing updates for the Asus TF300 tablet. Hence, although Asus is a company that worked hand in hand with Google to make the Nexus 7 tablet, they simply stopped updating their older Asus lines at Android 4.2. There is no news about the important Android 4.3 update, which fixes a fundamental flaw in Android 4.2 and earlier (the missing TRIM support for SD cards. Because Android 4.2 and earlier does not implement TRIM, data that is supposedly erased from an SD card is actually still extant in the SD card, and will continue to occupy space despite reporting to the system that the so called "erased" space is freed. Ultimately, the operating system will crash because the SD card cannot be physically written to, even though the OS sees the SD card space as available. Only reformatting the SD card will actually perform a true "erase" and reclaim the storage.

Samsung is just as bad in terms of software support. I have a pretty high end Galaxy Note 10.1 (2014) Edition tablet, but it only runs Android 4.3 instead of the much faster and more optimised Android 4.4 (KitKat). There is practically no news about a firmware update for the tablet to update it to Android 4.4, so I guess there won't be any, just like for Asus. 

In both cases, new devices from Asus and Samsung comes with Android 4.4. Asus and Samsung will just not update their older devices from Android 4.2 to the latest version of Android. I guess they want their customers to buy a new device with the latest Android version. Well, I guess the customers will have to buy new devices then. But for me, I will not be buying products from Asus or Samsung anymore seeing that they do not provide any software upgrades for their hardware.

I am cautiously optimistic that Xiaomi is not as bad as Asus and Samsung in software support. Firstly, I like many of the facilities provided by Xiaomi on their Redmi Note phone. Things like FTP support in the "Explorer" app, Lock and Power Off widgets, a highly customisable launcher, alarms that work even when the phone has been shut down. These really appeal to geeky users like me. 

The MIUI launcher is now at version 6 (currently under beta testing for official release in September), and can  be installed on many older Xiaomi devices. Xiaomi really takes care of their early customers with their first generation devices - ensuring that new firmware updates can still be applied to such old devices. This is completely unlike Asus or Samsung which have basically abandon providing firmware updates to devices that are merely 1 or 2 years old, even when the 1 or 2 year old devices have the hardware resources to support a firmware update. 

Both Asus and Samsung makes lots and lots of device variants, and therefore cannot dedicate much time to a single variant. Xiaomi, like Apple, makes only a few device variants, and therefore can spend more time testing their firmware for the few devices they make. Apple do this because they sell their iPhones at very high mark ups and profits, and people who pay top dollar for the iPhone will want a top dollar experience. Xiaomi makes much lower profit as they don't make ridiculously high mark ups like Apple, but still aim to deliver good experiences for their customers despite their customers buying lower end (non-premium) phones like the Redmi Note. And software support such as frequent firmware updates is a great marketing tools for ensuring customer loyalty and repeat sales.