Xiaomi announces its new Redmi Note phablet will cost $129.99

Xiaomi last week took the wraps off its upcoming first phablet, the Redmi Note, and now the company has revealed that the device will cost upwards of $129 and go on sale outside of its native China — initially in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore — in May. It will be available in China first, launching on March 26. The new details were communicated via a Google+ post from Xiaomi’s Hugo Barra, who says the device will retail at $129 for a 1.4GHz/1GB version, and $159 for a higher-specc’ed 1.7Ghz/2GB model.

Putting its faith in the future of phablets, Xiaomi is releasing the Redmi Note. The tablet/smartphone hybrid houses an octa-core processor and flaunts an attractively affordable price. The 5.5-incher ships with Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, dons a 1,280×720-pixel resolution IPS display, and will be available in a variety of colors. It only has 8GB of internal memory, but it includes a microSD card slot that’s expandable up to 32GB. The Xiaomi Redmi Note also comes with two different sets of internal specs; one packs a 1.4GHz octa-core MediaTek MT6592 processor with Mali 450 GPU and 1GB of RAM, and the other is a slight upgrade, with the same CPU and GPU, just a faster 1.7GHz MediaTek MT6592 CPU and a total of 2GB of RAM.