Redmi 2 Pro Xiaomi Phone Review

If you know me you know one very big fact is that I love technology but within technology I'm crazy about smartphones, you can safely say I live for smartphones. I research phones, I  always wait for the  latest release of phones, I always want the latest software on my phone, I read and watch the  latest news on phones (heck if there was a news channel dedicated to just smartphones I would be on it like super glue).

Now what brings me to this review is the experience I've had with smartphones recently (not a good experience at all). I have always wanted to review a smartphone for the longest time and now I have that opportunity but before we get to the phone I'm reviewing let me just share with you how many phones I've had in the last two years. Let me re-word that: this is how many phones I have LOST in the last two years (or had stolen from me).

Now I've had the opportunity to use some of the best smartphones and some not so much out there. This brings me to the purpose of this review which is the use of a budget phone as a daily driver. Now in the past 24 months I have lost two iPhones (stolen) an iPhone 5s and 5c. I have lost a Xiaomi Mi4 (which brings me to this review) at a bar (slipped out of my Chinos).  After all of this I was pretty upset so I decided to invest in a barebones, cheap, super budget smartphone just to get me by which was the Vodacom Smart Kicka and I held on to this phone for months because I was  happy with it except for a few other things which led to upgrading but I will cover that later.  I then bought a Vodacom Smart Prime 7, beautiful phone only was happy to own it for a month before I was smart mugged. Oh I had a Windows Phone throughout this whole time a Lumia 1020 which I bought in 2014 and I still have  it (I guess people aren't interested in a Windows Phone after all or they are so uninteresting they don't loose themselves).

So this all brings me to the Redmi 2 Pro and I've been interested in this phone ever since I bought the Mi 4 because Xiaomi are very good at cramming the best features and selling their phones at affordable prices for everyone. After owning Xiaomi device before I was really anticipating how well they would implement their trademark trait on a much more affordable smartphone and I'm pretty much impressed.

Unboxing

So I searched high and low for this phone considering that It was released a while back

and it was sold out at all the main retail stores that it's advertised to be selling, so I put on my thinking boots and decided to search the interwebs. Thanks to Hi-Online for helping me locate a store that was selling the phone.

Ok so upon opening the box which is minimal in appearance (the box uses recycled material a cost cutting measure). The contents of the box are the Redmi 2 Pro, USB charger and as a bonus (thanks to Hi-Online) is a rubber cover with a nice finish. The cover really compliments the phone, the phone is a beauty on its own but with the cover it has a unified elegance.  That's all that comes in the box you must remember that Xiaomi is all about affordability so they had to cut back on the extra accessories to focus on some more useful phone features.

The phone

A very well built phone nicely designed especially for its price it's pretty solid in all the materials that were chosen to make up the phone. Truly feels like all it's worth went into it and it's pretty neat to have a phone that feels like you should have paid much more for and that's what I like about the Xiaomi company.

Specifications

These are all the bells and whistles of this super capable phone:

Now the main features I was looking for in a budget phone were:

Now this was all fine and well it's just that I kept running into the same issue with these budget(Vodacom Smart Kicka/Smart Prime 7) phones they had very low RAM (processing power). I understand that the reason for it being low is why you have a budget phone. Another thing that painfully makes budget phones a nightmare is the ridiculously low internal storage and once this fills up (and this fills up quickly) it almost renders your phone useless.