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Here's why Redmi is making a gaming phone and when it'll launch
- The Redmi gaming phone is set to launch at the end of this month.
- The company says it’ll be the lightest and thinnest hardcore gaming flagship.
- It’ll also have an affordable price tag in comparison to existing gaming phones in the market.
Xiaomi sub-brand Redmi has been teasing its first gaming smartphones since the beginning of the year. The company has now disclosed via Weibo that the Redmi gaming phone will launch at the end of April.
The firm’s General Manager, Lu Weibing, also revealed the reasons for launching the gaming device in a machine-translated post on Weibo, giving us a few hints about what to expect from it.
According to Weibing, gaming and e-sports are the next big areas of focus for the company. He said that 70% of Redmi users are young and spend a lot of time gaming. So the company decided to bring together a bunch of its product managers and engineers who love gaming to create the dedicated Redmi gaming phone.
Weibing also commented that most gaming flagships out there are expensive, unusual in appearance, and bulky. They’ve always targeted a niche category of geek players. According to him, many use existing gaming phones as their spare handset and not a daily driver.
The Redmi gaming phone will address all these issues and will be a “normal” mobile phone. Weibing said that the company has also considered the daily usability of the device in addition to making it a gaming-centric phone. The phone has apparently gone through many design changes throughout its development cycle. Weibing claims it’ll be the “lightest and thinnest hardcore gaming flagship” on the market.
Redmi has also promised to maintain its brand’s price-to-performance ratio. Weibing confirmed that the upcoming phone will be affordable so that more people can experience it compared to current gaming phones.
The device will most likely be powered by the MediaTek Dimensity 1200 processor, as previously teased by the company. The chipset features software-driven ray tracing and 168Hz refresh rate support. Although, the GPU on it is from last year’s flagship SoC.
There’s no word on whether the Redmi gaming phone will have physical inputs or not. However, Weibing did say in his post that the company has focused on “performance, display, and control.”