Xiaomi Redmi Note 4: China’s latest ten-core smartphone debuts

The Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 was released internationally in November 2015, but only made its way to our shores late last month. Now, Xiaomi is pulling a Sony by launching the Redmi Note 4 phablet already.

The Chinese firm announced the Note 4 earlier today, offering little in the way of new features, to be fair.

The biggest change is the presence of a decacore MediaTek Helio X20 processor (two ARM Cortex-A72 cores, eight A53 cores), replacing the hexacore Qualcomm Snapdragon 650 (two A72 cores, four A53 cores) in the older Note phablet.

The Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 comes just nine months after Redmi Note 3 was launched globally

Otherwise, you’re looking at a 5.5-inch full HD screen, a 13MP f/2.0 main camera (down from 16MPs), a 5MP selfie shooter, a 4100mAh battery, a hybrid SIM slot and rear-mounted fingerprint scanner. No major improvements over the Note 3, then.

As for aesthetics, the phone features a similar metal design to its predecessor, but switches to iPhone-like antenna strips instead of the Note 3’s plastic top and bottom.

The Redmi Note 4 costs RMB899 (R1910 as a straight conversion) for the 2GB/16GB storage model and RMB1199 (R2547) for the 3GB RAM/64GB variant.

There’s no word on a South African release yet, but the Redmi Note 4 seems more like a Note 3 with a few tweaks, it has to be said.