Remember when budget phones had middling specs? It makes sense: To keep the price low, the manufacturer had to include a cheaper part or three. But nowadays, those cheap parts might mean a tiny performance hit, and — due to the heated race in China to offer a great phone at a low price — in some areas they're actually technologically ahead of the more expensive versions.

Case in point: Xiaomi's new Redmi Pro smartphone. It's a 5.5-inch phone with a metal body, a full HD OLED display, a 10-core MediaTek Helio X20/X25 processor, a fingerprint sensor, and a 4,050mAh battery. It also has a dual camera on the back — a 13-megapixel sensor coupled with a 5-megapixel one for additional depth information, and can be configured to have 4GB of RAM and 128GB of storage.

If that sounds better than basically any other flagship out there, you're not wrong; the only major part that falls into the "budget" category is the MediaTek processor, but we doubt the more powerful Helio X25 variant (which comes with the top Redmi Pro model) will significantly lag behind the current king of mobile CPUs, the octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 820.

Xiaomi has been consistently offering great phones at very low prices — its flagship Xiaomi Mi 5 starts at about $305 and offers performance comparable to the best smartphones out there. But unless you absolutely must have a Snapdragon processor, the Redmi Pro sounds like an even better offer.

Image: Xiaomi

The starting price for the Redmi Pro is RMB 1,499 or about $225; for that, you'll get the slower (but still 10-core) MediaTek Helio X20 processor, 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage. For RMB 1,699 ($255) you'll get the faster Helio X25 processor, 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. And RMB 1,999 ($300) will get you 4GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, coupled with the Helio X25 CPU.

We'll let that sink in: For 300 bucks, you can get a phone with dual cameras, 10 processor cores, and as much storage space as the top-of-the-line iPhone 6S, which costs nearly three times as much.

Image: Xiaomi

The Redmi Pro is not the first phone with a deca-core processor on the market; Meizu's Pro 6 sports the same processor and has a 21-megapixel (single) rear camera. However, it's priced higher, especially if you opt in for more storage. We'll need to take a closer look at the Redmi Pro to see how it performs in the real world (that dual camera, supposedly offering a DSLR-like bokeh effect, is particularly interesting), but right now it sounds like a very attractive smartphone at an insanely low price.

Xiaomi Redmi Pro will be available in China through Xiaomi's Mi.com, as well as Mi Home stores on August 6.