Xiaomi Redmi Note 10 Pro long-term review

Display quality, brightness, settings

While it's great to see a 120 Hz AMOLED screen at this price point, and making its debut in the Redmi Note Pro line, we feel like we should mention that you do still need to have your expectations in check. Not all 120 Hz AMOLEDs are the same, and this one is definitely lower-end than most we've seen to date - granted, those were all inside more expensive devices.

It gets brighter than LCDs at similar price points do, which is a nice plus but not by a lot. You'll still feel the difference on a bright sunny day, compared to, say, the Redmi Note 9 Pro or the Poco X3 NFC, but the more sun directly hits the display the harder it is to make out. It's not outright impossible to view under any conditions, but not as easy as higher-end panels either. We're not bashing it, we're just pointing out that your expectations for its quality need to be aligned to the price the Redmi Note 10 Pro goes for.

In that frame of reference, this is a very good screen, better than what was on any of the phone's predecessors, and better than its LCD-endowed competitors. It's not all rosy, though - in lower brightness scenarios there's some rainbowing going on over gray backgrounds, and in pitch darkness, at its lowest brightness setting, it's reasonably dim, but could definitely have been dimmer - and this is where those LCD competitors take the cake, going much darker.

Reading at night at the lowest brightness isn't retina-searing, but it could have been more comfortable. We've seen this issue a lot in even more expensive AMOLEDs (though not the top-of-the-line ones), so we're putting it down (speculatively) to the price. If you're one of those people who don't care for eye health and constantly blast full brightness stuff at yourself no matter what the ambient light conditions are, you will obviously not care about this.

Display settings

The auto-brightness curve is very good overall, it just seems to be a tad conservative in pushing itself to the max. The only manual adjustments we had to make during our time with the Redmi Note 10 Pro were outside on cloudy days when we felt we needed slightly more brightness than was offered automatically. Otherwise, we're still happy to see most companies reaching a very good level with their auto-brightness curves in 2020 and 2021, and this is one trend we hope continues. Although we aren't entirely sure, in use it definitely seemed like the Redmi Note 10 Pro has an additional ambient light sensor on the rear - it always responds to light changes from that side almost instantly, which is a huge plus in our book, especially at this price.

You get the usual settings for screen color calibration, and as always we stuck with the Auto setting for the color scheme since this should adjust the color temperature based on the ambient lighting. This is basically what Apple's True Tone does, except on this phone it's either very subtle at changing the colors or doesn't do much at all, since we haven't noticed any obvious changes even when going through different ambient lighting strengths and color temperatures.

Color scheme settings

We also picked the Warm color tone because the default one in the Auto state comes with whites that are much too blue. If you want more accurate colors, that can be achieved too - go with Standard mode and you'll get sRGB targeted very well indeed.

Always-On Display

Because this is an AMOLED panel, as you'd expect there's Always-on Display functionality. However, it's not actually always-on, instead, it's more akin to what OnePlus used to do with its Ambient Display feature. The always-on display settings, including all the customization options, are the same as you'd find on all Xiaomi/Redmi/Poco devices, albeit missing the Super Wallpapers. The rest of the options are there, you can customize the AOD very extensively.

And yet, all of that is kind of pointless since it will only be shown for a few seconds when you pick the phone up and a few seconds after the screen locks. That's it. Strangely enough, the relevant menu seems to have been created in a way that allows more options (including, we assume, a truly always-on setting), but you can only 'pick' one thing: "For 10 seconds after tapping".

Always-on display settings

We're definitely intrigued by this state of affairs. Perhaps the panel used here isn't particularly good with battery savings while it's in the AOD state, or something like that. Regardless of the reason for it, you in effect do not have a truly always-on display, nor do you get even the simplest of notification LED lights. This, to put it mildly, is frustrating. If you don't have a smartwatch or band to show you notifications, you'll always have to either pick up the phone or tap the screen to figure out if there's anything you missed.

Refresh rate

The 120 Hz refresh rate definitely helps with the perception of smoothness on this phone, and it feels much more smooth than the Redmi Note 9 Pro for example, despite the chipset not being a huge upgrade over that one. We'll go into more detail about smoothness in the Performance section of this review.

While it's very much welcome and helpful, this 120 Hz refresh rate doesn't feel exactly like it would on a higher-end phone, and we're assuming that has to do with the SoC. There are stutters in scrolling here and there, and while those happen even on the Redmi Note 9 Pro, there's a bigger contrast here between the times everything goes smoothly and those random times when it doesn't.

Refresh rate settings

We're not complaining, though, we'd much rather have this sort of 120 Hz situation than have to deal with a 60 Hz panel, for sure. The 120 Hz setting is sort of dynamic, in that it's always 120 aside from when the screen is showing a static image when it reverts to 60 Hz - and then jumps right back up to 120 Hz the second something changes on the display (or you interact with it).

This is a far cry from many other systems that are much more dynamic in switching between a lot of refresh rate steps, but that only makes sense from a battery-saving perspective, and as you'll see in the appropriate section, the Redmi Note 10 Pro has great battery life even with this rudimentary system - so we're not going to knock it for not going with something more dynamic.

Reading Mode

The blue light filter is present and does its job very adequately, although unlike on other phones it seems to have no impact on brightness. So the aforementioned issue regarding minimum brightness being right on the verge of what we'd consider too bright for use in pitch black environments can't be helped by using the Reading Mode, which is what Xiaomi calls its blue light filter.

Reading Mode settings

As in other MIUI 12.5 implementations, Reading Mode here is the most comprehensive we've ever seen, with a Classic setting that does what you're probably used to, but also an additional Paper option that can give your screen a paper-like look (hence the name).

You can adjust the texture with a slider, as well as the color temperature for both modes, and if you go with Paper you can even pick between using full colors, light colors, or black and white. Seriously, MIUI currently has the best blue light filter out there, and naturally, you can also schedule it (either to turn on and off automatically at sunset/sunrise or using custom times).