Xiaomi Redmi Note 10 Pro long-term review

Conclusion

According to our stats, the Redmi Note 10 Pro has been immensely popular with you, our readers, ever since it launched. And after using it for a long period of time as our one and only smartphone, we have to say - we get it. There's a lot to like here.

We don't long-term review a lot of midrangers, simply because there are gazillions of them out there and we just couldn't go through a large sample - there isn't enough time. We blame physics. Jokes aside, we try to look at the most popular midrangers each year, and recently those have all been made by Xiaomi - under either the Redmi or Poco brands. That in itself tells you something about where the strengths of the company lie, and it hasn't disappointed at all with the Redmi Note 10 Pro.

As we said in the Introduction, this phone has two features that make it stand out from a sea of similar-looking and similarly priced devices on the market: its screen and its main camera. Both, as it turns out, deliver on the hype.

While the display isn't on par, quality-wise, with panels we've seen in much more expensive devices, the sheer fact that Xiaomi was able to cram a 120 Hz AMOLED inside a Redmi Note is something to be celebrated. And it does get pretty close to the top ones out there, mind you. Brightness is lower but still adequate (and higher than any LCD on any previous Redmi or current competing handset), while the high refresh rate helps a lot with the feeling of smoothness, even if it does seem to take a small toll on battery life (more on that in a bit).

The main camera is simply outstanding for this price range, although it would have been made even more so by the addition of OIS. Maybe next year? Still, even so daytime shots come out very good, and at night you'll have no issues if you have time for (Auto) Night Mode to do its thing and your hands aren't too shaky. There's also an ultrawide which adds framing flexibility during the day, though unsurprisingly it's not very useful at night (that's kind of the norm at this price point).

Battery life is great, if not amazing. As we said before the screen is probably to blame, but we'll take this screen with this battery life over the Redmi Note 9 Pro's 60 Hz LCD panel with its marginally better endurance every day. Performance is better than in the Redmi Note 9 Pro, although the improvement isn't night and day. Smoothness also appears slightly better, aided by the 120 Hz refresh rate.

While we would have enjoyed a bigger improvement, we understand that price constraints were involved. There's also the fact that Qualcomm seems to have given up completely on developing new, better performing 4G chipsets, so we're left with either the Snapdragon 732G in the Redmi Note 10 Pro or the rebadged 855 that is the 860 in the Poco X3 Pro. That one does perform better, by the way, but you're sacrificing the Redmi's main selling points if you go for that Poco - both the screen and the main camera are inferior.

The Note 10 Pro runs the latest MIUI 12.5 based on Android 11, and after a first update that introduced a fair share of lag issues, a subsequent one thankfully fixed them - albeit many weeks later, after a pretty big online backlash. This is life with MIUI - updates come slowly, and you're almost guaranteed to never be on the current security patch level. It definitely feels like Redmi branded phones suffer from much more lenient software quality control than we see for the Mi branded flagships, with Poco devices somewhere in between.

This is the state of things, and while we are hoping for improvements in the future, you shouldn't dream of those in making a purchasing decision. We assume some things have to give in order to reach such aggressive price points in relation to specs on offer, and this could be one of those things. It's important to keep in mind so that you aren't disappointed.

Otherwise, MIUI 12.5 itself is easy enough to use, although still has some distinct idiosyncrasies, its animations are among the best out there, and you also have extensive theming options at your disposal right through the Settings app (that connects you directly to the theme store).

Performance is good enough for the price, while the vibration motor being decidedly average means some of the vibrations used throughout the UI won't feel as 'physical' as on other, more expensive Mi phones. They're not bad and still welcome to have, they just don't pack the same oomph. On the other hand, the stereo speakers are very good - not the best, but they get the job done in all but the noisiest conditions.

The fingerprint sensor has been an issue for this reviewer, but do note that this has been true for all recent side-mounted scanners, and it seems like other people don't have the same problems. The proximity sensor is definitely not the best, but it's far from the worst either - it's just slower than you might expect, but does work all the time. Perhaps the main issue we've had with the Redmi Note 10 Pro was the bad Wi-Fi connectivity, which seems to be more spotty than for most other phones. If you have a great Wi-Fi signal, though, this shouldn't be an issue.

The Redmi Note 10 Pro is a very worthy successor to the Redmi Note 9 Pro, and an intriguing alternative to the Poco X3 Pro. After having used it for an extended period of time, we also see why Xiaomi thought about discontinuing the Poco X3 NFC - the Redmi has the same SoC, a similar price, but a much better screen and main camera. As we said above, if you value sheer performance above all else (and are on this budget), go for the Poco X3 Pro. If you value the screen quality and camera image quality more, then the Redmi Note 10 Pro is the one for you.

Few phones at any price point have ever offered so much value for money. Xiaomi has always been known for this, and the Redmi Note 10 Pro, just proves that the company continues to be the king of value.