April 15 2019: The  fierce upward mobility of the Indian smart phone owner, has surprised  even experienced industry analysts.  He or she may begin with a feature phone --  but peer pressure,  plus the  desire to squeeze some more value out of the device,  will see the owner  graduate to a smart phone as soon as the purse will allow.
Which is why  many canny Indian makers have been  aggressively pricing  entry level smart phones at near-feature-phone prices.  The biggies are not blind to the trend and some of them are giving the Indian brands a  bit of competition:  This month saw the release by Xiaomi  of a smart handset  priced well below its normal  range: At  an online  price of Rs 4499 ( the MRP is Rs 5999) the Redmi Go is a disruptive entrant into the  4k-5k-rupee band -- and the ability of the buyer to flaunt a big name may be a clincher.
Spec-wise, Redmi Go is a  5-inch  HD device with 1 GB of RAM and 8 GB of memory expandable with  a 128 GB micro SDS card.  The cameras as  just OK:  5 MP front and 8 MP rear, the latter with full HD 1080p video recording. A 3000 mAh battery is good for a 12 hour working day of calling  and  both the SIM slots  are nano-size-ready and can take 4G LTE services. Xiaomi has  wisely gone for the AndroidGo operating system(Ver. 8.1), opitimised to run on  lower powered devices -- though the Quad Snapdragon 425 is no slouch. I liked the feature which let the owner to  select any of 10 Indian languages, upfront, without having to drill into the settings: the makers know their market!  In short,  an ideal device to graduate from feature phones and  start one's smart phone journey. Welcome to the club! 
VISHNU ANAND