Xiaomi Redmi 2 review: Spare hand

Image gallery

The Xiaomi Redmi 2 comes with a custom Gallery app with slightly updated flat looks compared to MIUI v5. It defaults to your camera roll with two shortcuts at the top that will take you to album view of your local images and album view of your cloud pictures. You can't change this view, nor can you customize the default folders.

Gallery

The available features when viewing a single image are pretty standard - share it, delete it, enter edit mode or just get more info.

The integrated editor offers various effects, frames, tools (crop, mirror, straighten, rotate, fisheye, doodle) plus light adjustments that let you bring out the shadows or the highlights.

Editing an image

Music player

The MIUI music player is a custom app with a well-laid out, easy to navigate interface. It features a two-page layout - the first one is cloud music, similar to Google Music service provided by Xiaomi. It has similar subscription plans.

The second page has your own local and cloud music.

Music Player

The player has cool effects, transitions and transparent elements, especially on the expandable Now Playing section.

Now Playing screen • Subscription plans for Xiaomi's music service

Xiaomi's Music app offers customizable equalizers with a few default presets already available for use. You can also try Xiaomi's MiSound enhancer, which comes into play when you use headphones, and especially, a Xiaomi-branded set.

Audio enhancements and equalizers

Finally, you can edit song info and you can also enable automatic song info download in case the ID3 tags are empty. Lyrics can be downloaded, too.

FM radio

The phone has an FM receiver and supports radio recording. There is a sleep timer as well.

FM radio app

Video player

Xiaomi Redmi 2 does features a separate video app, but you can also use Explorer to find some videos the default app doesn't recognize (but are still playable).

The video player interface is very basic but there is rich video codec support. It managed to play everything we threw at it (including MKV and WMV files). The AC3 audio codec is supported too.

Video player

Subtitles and pop-up play are not supported by the MIUI's video player.

Audio output is very good

When connected to an active external amplifier the Xiaomi Redmi 2 performance is pretty good and markedly better than any other Xiaomi phone we've tested in the past. The smartphone posted excellent scores all over the field and its volume levels were well above average.

Plugging in a pair of headphones causes a very minor increase in stereo crosstalk leaving the other readings unchanged. That's a pretty solid performance no matter how you look at it.

And here go the detailed results so you can check them out for yourselves.

Test	Frequency response	Noise level	Dynamic range	THD	IMD + Noise	Stereo crosstalk
Xiaomi Redmi 2	+0.06, -0.04	-94.8	95.9	0.026	0.016	-95.8
Xiaomi Redmi 2 (headphones attached)	+0.04, -0.06	-94.0	91.0	0.039	0.053	-70.0
Xiaomi Redmi 1S	+0.08, -0.02	-95.4	88.4	0.0045	0.028	-82.3
Xiaomi Redmi 1S (headphones attached)	+0.03, -0.07	-95.3	88.2	0.0090	0.032	-52.8
Xiaomi Redmi Note	+0.09, -1.23	-88.4	88.4	0.056	0.252	-85.2
Xiaomi Redmi Note (headphones attached)	+0.83, -6.73	-84.0	86.7	0.196	2.354	-63.5
Oppo R819	+0.04, -0.09	-92.4	92.3	0.017	0.045	-87.9
Oppo R819 (headphones attached)	+0.58, -0.13	-91.0	90.9	0.015	0.438	-48.7
Nokia Lumia 625	+0.13, -0.10	-90.3	90.3	0.013	0.355	-82.5
Nokia Lumia 625 (headphones attached)	+0.24, -0.00	-90.2	90.2	0.014	0.460	-83.8

Xiaomi Redmi 2 frequency response

You can learn more about the whole testing process here.