Xiaomi Redmi Note 8 Pro long-term review
Can a mid-range smartphone even be a Pro? At this point, we're used to seeing the Pro branding applied everywhere, and it probably makes sense in the upper echelons of the market, but what exactly is Pro about a mid-ranger? That's what we set to find out using the Redmi Note 8 Pro.
We don't usually long-term review mid-range devices, but this one is special, "Pro" name aside. The Redmi Note 8 Pro has consistently been among the most popular handsets since it came out last year, both in terms of sales numbers as well as going by the pageview stats of our specs pages.
The Redmi Note 8 Pro also has a pretty intriguing chipset from MediaTek that we haven't seen a lot of in other devices, so we were curious to see how it would perform in day to day life compared to the Snapdragons of the world - and especially, of course, compared to mid-range Snapdragons. Our previous long-term review was of the Mi Note 10 which uses what can still be described as Qualcomm's premier upper mid-range offering that doesn't have 5G baked in, and we were curious to see how these might compare - away from the labs and standardized testing and benchmarks.
This long-term review will hit on that in the Performance section, but it won't be an all-out comparison because that wouldn't be fair. After all, the Redmi is around half the price of the Mi Note 10, and price (specifically, the price per features ratio) is one of its main selling points, whereas the Note was more a showcase of how far Xiaomi has come in terms of camera systems.
With all this in mind, we'll try to tell you if the Redmi Note 8 Pro's hype and huge levels of interest and popularity have been warranted, according to our subjective evaluation of the phone over a long period in which we've used it as our only smartphone. Spoiler alert: it was an intriguing ride, this, and we can't wait to tell you all about it. So join us over the next few pages as we unpack what makes it special, and where it might fall short, even with the price accounted for.
You've seen this before. Once again, we're faced with a glass sandwich construction. It's so widely spread that things are much more exciting when things do go differently. But that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with glass sandwiches. Actually, the fact that this is the gold standard now should say something about the fact that, on one hand, the manufacturing techniques to achieve it have been improved to the point of near perfection, and also that people seem to really like such a design.
Because it's not a flagship, the Redmi Note 8 Pro forgoes the metal sides for plastic, although you might not be able to tell at first. It's definitely engineered to look like shiny metal, but what gives it away is that it doesn't have the same thermal conductivity as metal. It takes more time to cool out in the cold than metal.
The polish of the plastic frame makes it very slippery, so on that point, it's not very different to most aluminum frames out there.
On the front and the back, there's Gorilla Glass 5, which may not be the latest version (that's 6 if you're keeping track), but a lot of the Redmi's competitors use even older generations, and not even all flagships are wrapped in GG6, so we don't think there's anything wrong with this choice. The glass on the back neatly curves into the frame, and the rear is unsurprisingly very slippery in hand, because, well - it's glass. Despite this, we haven't managed to do an impromptu test of how resilient all that glass would be in a fall, because we've been careful not to drop the Redmi Note 8 Pro.
We can say that thanks to the pronounced camera island, this is not one of those phones that will 'magically' slide off couches if you lay it on its back. That said, if you do the same with it face-down, don't be surprised that it wants to slide and slide and keep sliding... up to the point where it will, in fact, fall off.
Speaking of the camera island, the fingerprint sensor is housed in it too, which makes for a nice look, especially since everything is centered on the back too (horizontally), but you don't even have to hold this phone for one minute to spot a problem with that setup. Just look at a picture of its back and it will hit you.
Indeed, the placement of the sensor makes it incredibly easy to smudge the lowest camera lens. There's no way around that 100%, but we found that if we started hunting for the sensor from the middle of the phone, then sliding our finger carefully towards the top, we would easily locate the outer ridge of the island and then tap the sensor safely with no camera smudging.
If you go about this the other way, from the top down, then you could even smudge all of the cameras. It's a downside to this design, for sure, but it's not as huge as we expected it to be. And the fact that the camera island protrudes quite a lot has actually been rather helpful, because it makes it easier for your finger to stop sliding in its hunt for the fingerprint sensor when it hits the edge. Not a perfect system by any means, but in truth we got used to this weirdness within a couple of days and from that point on only smudged a camera a few times, between hundreds (if not thousands) of fingerprint unlocks.
The sensor itself is lightning quick and very accurate, as all later-gen capacitive models have been. Such a sensor is still marginally quicker and more accurate than even the best optical in-display ones at the moment, but the difference is much smaller than it once used to be. That said, the only "fingerprint unrecognized" errors we've had on the Redmi Note 8 Pro were due to us lifting our finger off the sensor just one split second too soon. And that's a 'user error', as they say. The sensor really is perfect, while its placement is less so.
If you're one of those people who would've preferred it on the front, hopefully, you get how that was not an option. The Redmi has an LCD screen, and as of now, there aren't any in production in-display sensors out there for this display technology, although that may quickly change - as apparently Redmi itself has been able to create such a setup in its labs. That may arrive on successors of the Note 8 Pro, but for now, it was either going to be on the back or on the side. Each of these versions has upsides and downsides, but at least the sensor used is outstanding.
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