Xiaomi’s Upcoming ‘Cheaper Than the Cheapest’ Smartphone Leaked
Earlier we reported that Xiaomi was planning to invest in a Chinese chipmaker Leadcore to offer more cheap devices. Now, according to a report, Xiaomi has acquired 51% stake in the company. It is expected that with the inclusion of these chips, the price of Redmi phones might go even further down.
Leadcore is generally not recognised when it comes to system chips as this segment is ruled by the likes of Qualcomm and MediaTek. However, that isn’t to say that they should be ruled out, especially after a healthy cash injection from Xiaomi. The only processor that could catch our attention is Leadcore LC1860 chip, which will reported be used by Xiaomi in its future devices.
The LC1860 system chip is built around the a 28nm Cortex A7 architecture running at 2.0GHz with a Mali T628 GPU. Now, according to a report by Gizchina, the company is working on a device powered by LC1860 that will be priced at ¥399 and will be LTE capable. This translates to approximately Rs. 4,000 as per Indian currency.
A leaked specification sheet suggests that the SoC can support 2k LCD displays and record up to 720p videos at 120fps and 1080p videos at 60fps. It also has 4G LTE support. In addition, the Gizchina’s report also said that the device will have a 720p HD display and 1 GB of RAM.
Xiaomi’s handsets are really cheap as it is. Now, the phones with LC chips would bring that price further down, which is a good thing (as long as these LC chips can offer decent performance). However, we doubt that Xiaomi will give up on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors though, we think that Xiaomi will include these LC chips in their cheapest smartphone line and once again push the limits of low-cost smartphones, while sticking to Snapdragon for their high-end phones.
