[Xiaomi Redmi 2 Questions & Answers] agentmilo:
Hello folks,

Quick and simple question- is it worth buying the Redmi 2 Prime now? Is the hardware too outdated for Marshmallow?

I know the Snapdragon 410 isn't the best out there, but is it capable of handling a custom Marshmallow ROM, be fluid and stable? I'm enquiring about the custom ROM since I'm aware that this phone is still officially stuck in KitKat.

I'm a relatively light user. I don't play any games on my current phone (the old Xperia Mini). I mostly just use Telegram, Whatsapp, Sync for Reddit, PocketCasts and Blackplayer Ex. I won't be even browsing all that much.

My current concerns are -

1) Being outdated the moment I buy it- it was released in the middle of last year.

2) The call quality is rather bad, supposedly

3) Heating Issue

Should I be buying something that officially supports a recent OS? (Lollipop or Marshmallow) How important is that I be using a new one?

Cheers everyone!

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UPDATE : My opinions about Redmi 2 Prime after owning it for 10 days.

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I know that 10 days ain't a large enough time frame to provide a detailed analysis, but this wasn't meant to be a review per se anyway. There are tonnes of those online- This is more my personal impressions against my expectations.

+ The phone heated up extremely quickly in idle state on the first powerup- less than 5 minutes infact. This raised a red flag in my mind and my immediate thought was to return the device. However, installing the OTA update and suffice to say, that particular heating issue was gone in an instant. Weird, actually.

+ The back cover is quite slippery. Using an additional case fixed it, but added up to the bulk.

+ I like the thickness a lot- felt just right. This is from a person coming from 5 years with an Xperia Mini ST15i.

+ MIUI is really quite the pleasant UI. I spent a few hours going through all that it had to offer, and boy there is a lot. I expected the general UI performance to be much worse, and excluding the few lags and hitches, it was overall a smoothly running system.

- Out of the box, the available RAM was idling around 800-900mb. Launching Chrome made it take a huge hit and fell as much as to 400mb, which made me concerned about the performance again.. However, I quickly replaced Chrome with my go-to Habit browser, and everyone lived happily ever after.

+ However nice MIUI is and can be, my heart was already set for Nova Launcher anyway. Installing Nova Launcher freed up about 200-300mb of RAM. Just goes to show that MIUI really does eat your RAM and doesn't have much to show for it, in terms of performance. This isn't to say that MIUI is bad, its just that its not well optimized, atleast on KK.

+ My next step was to root the phone- an extremely easy process with this handset.

+ Removing all bloatware and a bunch of core processes freed upto 1.3gb of RAM. That was a massive jump, and significantly improved multitasking.

+ Over the course of the next few days, I installed my usual apps and imported data from my previous Android phones. This is about 30 apps, about 8 of which accesses the internet on a timely basis. RAM still hovered around 1.2-1.3gb mark.

+ I have Whatsapp, Gmail, Wallet from Budgetbakers and MLO2 open all the time. Generally RAM is around 900mb-1gb at idle. This is very, very good for my usage, and also good stuff in general.

General Impressions

+ Extremely impressed with the battery life on this thing! In one instance I had about 6.30 hours of screen time with said apps open, occasional youtubing and background syncing- had 39% remaining. Nuts, considering how super low my expectations were.

+ The display is so darn good, AFTER I removed the pre-installed matter screen protector.

+ I don't care about the camera, but I can say its decently better compared to my old phone. I don't use it much.

+ I haven't used the front camera, don't care. Not one to take selfies.

- One aspect of the phone that really shows how many corners were cut to dip down the price, is the micro-usb charging slot. It is simply a rectangular cut out, and not shaped to the contour of the USB slot- meaning, you can damage your phone in no time if you use it carelessly.

I decided to stick with stock MIUI for now, since none of the custom ROMS are 100% stable. I can attribute to this due to Redmi not releasing kernel sources, so any kind of reverse-engineered ROM / Kernel won't be completely reliable for use as a daily driver. Was really disappointed in finding this out, since I was really looking forward to using Marshmallow. Despite that, I got used to being at KK, and truth be told it doesn't really matter all that much as long as you can use you phone and get work done with it.

If you can live with Kitkat and are willing to take the time to tweak the phone, this is a really good buy. I'm seriously impressed by what Xiaomi has brought out to the general public. SO FAR, that is. Lets see if my opinion changes for the worse in the coming months! But by then, this phone might get completely replaced with its newer brother, the Redmi 3.