Xiaomi Redmi Note 8 Pro review

Bright LCD panel with a minimalist notch

The Redmi Note 8 Pro features an LCD panel with a small notch on the top. The panel measures 6.53" in diagonal that fits 1080 x 2340px resolution with 19.5:9 aspect ratio. It's also protected by Gorilla Glass 5 and supports HDR - a rare find in this price range.

It's apparent that Xiaomi didn't cut corners with this particular display as it's sufficiently bright and delivers high contrast. Our tests show that with the brightness slider cranked up, the panel will peak at 460 nits but with auto mode turned on, the screen can go as high as 640 nits. That's more than enough for sunlight legibility outdoors.

In terms of uniformity and color accuracy, however, things aren't exactly stellar. This is especially true to the latter. The default color mode returned an average dE2000 of 6.8 and a maximum of 12.7 with overblown dark blues, cyans and blue-ish whites. Unforutnatley, the "cool" color preset was even worse while the "warm" one didn't contribute much - the whites are still blue and the dark blues and cyans are over-saturated. The average dE2000 is 5.7 and the maximum is 10.6.

And as far as uniformity goes, we did notice some small halos around the lower bezel and especially around the notch at the top. Still, we can say they are hardly noticeable and a lot less prominent than the in other competing smartphones.

Battery life

Having a generous 4,500 mAh battery and a rather power-efficient SoC, one would expect good battery life. However, we were even more surprised with the results. The handset got stellar results on the screen-on tests as well as on the standby and 3G talk time. The phone's overall rating is 114 hours, which puts it in top 20 in our battery ranking.

Perhaps the chipset is more efficient than we thought it was in the first place because phones with similar scores usually carry at least 5,000 mAh units.

When it comes to fast charging, though, the phone didn't impress. Of course, given the price range, it's a huge advantage to support USB Power Delivery but the 18W standard can take you only so far. In 30 minutes, the phone charged from flat to 39% using a compatible PD charger with USB-C to USB-C cable. We are pretty sure that the original charger will be performing similarly.

We tried to investigate whether the chipset also supports Quick Charge 4.0+ since MediaTek's Pump Express charging tech and Qualcomm's QC 4.0+ are based on USB Power Delivery, but we weren't able to confirm for sure. All of the compatible chargers in our office support Power Delivery and Quick Charge 4.0+ simultaneously and perhaps you won't be able to find a pure QC 4.0+ as well. One thing is for sure, though, if you are near a PD-capable charger, you can use it for quick top-ups for your Redmi Note 8 Pro.

Our battery tests were automated thanks to SmartViser, using its viSerDevice app. The endurance rating above denotes how long a single battery charge will last you if you use the Xiaomi Redmi Note 8 Pro for an hour each of telephony, web browsing, and video playback daily. We've established this usage pattern so that our battery results are comparable across devices in the most common day-to-day tasks. The battery testing procedure is described in detail in case you're interested in the nitty-gritty. You can check out our complete battery test table, where you can see how all of the smartphones we've tested will compare under your own typical use.

Loudspeaker

The handset has a bottom-firing loudspeaker that's a bit on the quiet side. Most of the phones nowadays achieve an Excellent score easily so "Good" in this case isn't enough in our books. You might miss a call or notification if you are in a noisy environment.

Audio quality

The Redmi Note 8 Pro performed brilliantly with an active amplifier, delivering the perfectly accurate output you can expect in this scenario at some of the highest volume levels we've measured. And we are not taking just its price range here - it's louder than most flagships too.

Unfortunately the clarity of the output takes a significant hit when headphones come into play - stereo crosstalk spikes a lot, intermodulation distortion comes into the picture and the frequency response gets a slight shakiness to it. Volume drops a bit, but the Redmi Note 8 Pro remains one of the loudest handsets out there, so nothing to worry there, at least.

Redmi Note 8 Pro frequency response

You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.