Xiaomi Redmi Note 8 Pro long-term review

Design

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.

Fingerprint sensor

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.

Fingerprint and Face unlock settings

We should also mention here that face unlock is available as an option, but because it just uses the front-facing camera and no fancy additional sensors, it's much less secure than scanning your fingerprint. That said, it is lightning fast too.

Handling, build quality

The Note 8 Pro isn't the slimmest phone around, but at under 9 mm (excluding the camera bump) it's not the thickest either. At 200g one or two years ago it would've been deemed excessively heavy, but in 2020 it isn't record-breaking in that area by any stretch of the imagination. It feels good in the hand, but it is a big phone, and slightly wider (by a mm or so) than most 'mainstream' Android flagships of this day and age.

The upside of that is you get more screen, but if you have small hands this won't be easy to use with one hand. We were fine with it, but anything larger (and most of all, wider) than this would've become uncomfortable over extended usage sessions. The buttons are all on the right side, which is fine but sometimes it's hard to tell them apart just by touch, and you may find that you hit volume down when instead you wanted to touch the power button. If the latter was ridged in some way this would have been alleviated.

Build quality is excellent, and aside from the use of plastic on the frame and the capacitive fingerprint sensor, you wouldn't be able to tell how little this device costs just from glancing at its design or handling it. It's quite amazing that we've reached this point in the mobile world, where even handsets that are this cheap are this well put together, with no creaks, no gaps, nothing. Oh, and you get a headphone jack too.

Speaker

The single bottom-firing speaker is passable, while it won't win any awards it does get loud enough that you can usually hear what's going on in any video you're watching (or podcast you might be listening to). As always, if you cup your hand around it things get even better.

This isn't the best speaker out there, but for the price bracket the Note 8 Pro is in, it's perfectly adequate.