The Redmi Go, a budget smartphone from Xiaomi’s sub-brand Redmi, can now be bought in the country.
Unveiled recently as part of the devices set to headline this year’s early Jumia Mobile Week, the device’s local availability has been in the offing for quite some time now with frequent teasers from the Xiaomi brand’s local handlers.
The Redmi Go is now listed on Jumia with a price tag of Kshs 8,500, not far from where we speculated it may be priced when it was announced back in January.
Bar the bit where it comes from a reputable player that is keen on capturing the budget smartphone market, the Redmi Go is not any special. It is an Android Go smartphone through and through, packing the most basic of specifications.
As previously noted, the Redmi Go sports a 5-inch HD display, 1GB RAM, 8GB onboard storage that can be expanded up to 128GB via a microSD card, an 8-megapixel main camera backed by a 5-megapixel shooter on the front, a Snapdragon 425 chipset from Qualcomm, a 3,000mAh battery unit and, the Go edition of Android 8.1, Oreo.
It is not clear at this point if there are any plans to upgrade it to the Go edition of Android 9 Pie.
Still, at that price, this is perhaps the lowest that Xiaomi or a brand affiliated to it, has gone for a smartphone in the Kenyan market. At that price, the Redmi Go goes head to head with Huawei’s Y5 Lite 2018 smartphone which goes for a similar price on e-commerce platforms Masoko and Jumia.
The device is expected to get some competition from Infinix’s own brand new Android Go smartphone, the Infinix Hot 7. That device is set to go on sale soon with pre-orders already open online where it is listed for Kshs 10,000.
