14 DAY TRIAL // Chinese company Xiaomi has taken third spot on top five world smartphone makers at the last minute thanks to the merger between Lenovo and Motorola.
Even so, this is quite an achievement for a company that mostly sells its products in China and a few other Asian countries. Xiaomi has recently started to introduce some of its smartphones in other regions, but it has yet to reach the success it achieved in China.
We've been used to Xiaomi's cheap but more than decently specced Android smartphone, which is the main reason the company had so much success in emerging markets.
Xiaomi isn't known for its affordable smartphones because the company did not launch any entry-level handsets yet and it even announced that it had no intention to do so.
However, this might change in the coming days, as Xiaomi is expected to introduce its first entry-level Android smartphone, GizmoChina reports.
The smartphone will be officially unveiled on March 31 and might go on sale on April 8 for just 499 yuan outright, which is about €75 or $80.
It might come with LTE support too
We also know quite a few things about the smartphone's specs sheet, which seems to include a decent 1.6GHz quad-core Leadcore LC1860 Cortex-A7 processor, a Mali-T628MP2 graphics processing unit and 1GB of RAM.
We also expect it to pack 8GB of internal memory and microSD card slot for memory expansion. On the back, the affordable smartphone will pack an 8-megapixel camera with autofocus, LED flash and video recording, while in the front there will be a secondary 2-megapixel camera for video calls.
Unfortunately, Xiaomi's entry-level smartphone is supposed to ship with Android 4.4 KitKat operating system out of the box and MIUI on top.
Since there isn't much time left until the alleged release of Xiaomi's affordable smartphone, stay tuned for more updates on the matter.