Xiaomi Redmi Note 10S hands-on review

Design

Just like its more expensive sibling, the vanilla Redmi Note 10 boasts an IP53 certification against water and dust. And it's one of the few Redmi to have it too. However, don't expect the phone to be fine if you submerge it into water. The IP53 certification ensures against splashes and rain, for example.

But unlike the Pro, this one has Gorilla Glass 3 for its front, instead of Gorilla Glass 5, and the back is made of plastic, not GG5 again. The frame is also plastic, but there's nothing wrong with that. The handset still feels pretty good in the hand - it's thin (8.3mm) and light (178g) mainly because of its almost all-plastic build. It kind of feels less slippery too. The Deep Sea Blue variant that we received shows fingerprints and smudges on the back easily. Our review unit also had odd patterns embedded in the plastic that were impossible to wipe.

As we are still on the back, we can't miss mentioning the rather minimal protrusion of the camera module. We find the camera design to be pretty nice, too, and it doesn't seem to be bothering us with asymmetry. Additionally, the side panel edges are a bit more curved than usual and make the handset feel slimmer while improving the overall grip.

Flipping the phone reveals decently-sized bezels all-around, with the bottom one being slightly thicker, which is to be expected. The side frame and the top bezel seem roughly symmetrical in size. The punch-hole in the middle is a bit on the larger size compared to Xiaomi's more expensive models but not too distracting.

The sides are where things start to get interesting. The frame is so thin that it has been widened to accommodate the power key and the volume rocker.

Both seem to be a bit bigger than you'd expect, and the unusual part is that the power button, which doubles as a fingerprint reader, isn't indented as you'd normally expect from a phone with a side-mounted fingerprint scanner but raised like a standard button.

As we have noted in some of our recent Xiaomi reviews with this raised side-mounted fingerprint reader, the performance is hit or miss. Even when you firmly plant your finger on it and press the button, most of the time the phone will just turn the screen on instead of unlocking the phone. You then have to raise your thumb and touch it again for the sensor to work.

Fortunately, you can set the sensor to unlock when you just touch it rather than press it. This makes the sensor work a bit more reliably but there were still times when touching it didn't cause the phone to unlock. Also, the problem with switching the unlock method to 'Touch' instead of 'Press' is that the phone will angrily buzz at you every time the sensor comes in contact with any skin that isn't a registered fingerprint.

The bottom and top ends of the frame are flat and adopt a matte finish instead of the glossy one for the rest of the frame. The top side has a port for the loudspeaker, the IR blaster, and a microphone. The loudspeaker port is just an additional grille for the speaker placed underneath the earpiece grille so even if you block this top port it doesn't change the sound output. Similarly, if you block the earpiece grille for some reason, the audio then comes out of the top port.

On the bottom is the slot for a second loudspeaker, a USB-C port, a microphone, and the increasingly rare headphone jack.

On the left side is the tray for SIM and external storage. It can hold two separate nano-SIM cards as well as a microSD card, so you don't have to compromise on one or the other. Curiously, Xiaomi still marks the microSD slot as 'TF'. The TF here stands for TransFlash, which some may remember as the original name for the microSD standard.