Xiaomi Redmi Note 8 Pro long-term review

Performance, smoothness

MediaTek hasn't traditionally been associated with the best performing mobile chipsets out there, but the company has historically churned out some pretty good value-for-money offerings. The Redmi Note 8 Pro's Helio G90T is an upper-mid-range SoC from the Taiwanese company, and we were very interested to see how it would perform in day to day tasks, especially compared to the competition from Qualcomm.

In short, it's a mixed bag. The Redmi Note 8 Pro feels pretty much on par, performance-wise, for normal day-to-day tasks, with a flagship smartphone - around 70% to 80% of the time. But the rest of the time is when the chipset shows some weaknesses, with random stutters and lags. The lags aren't unbearable, but we have seen more stutters than we would've expected based on the general performance.

That's the thing - this is a phone that's mostly great for performance and smoothness, which makes the times when it does stutter or lag all the more frustrating because every single time seems rather unexpected. You get used to the good performance overall, then bam! - a stutter somewhere. They're all (in our subjective evaluation) under one second or at most around one second, but it's a weird feeling every single time you get one.

Note though that we're mostly used to reviewing flagships long-term, and that inevitably skews our perceptions here. Compared to the Mi Note 10, which is powered by the Snapdragon 730G, the Redmi Note 8 Pro feels faster most of the time, but slower when it stutters or lags. That's the thing about the Mi Note 10, and it's SD730G - while it's slower than a flagship SoC, it is consistent in that. There are never any surprises, good or bad. The G90T in the Redmi wants you to believe it's a flagship chipset - and it succeeds most of the time. Which makes those times when it falls short all the more frustrating.

Then again, let's not forget that the Mi Note 10 costs twice as much. And while most of that price difference has to do with the cameras and its screen, this still isn't something to just gloss over. For the price, the Redmi Note 8 Pro performs admirably, but we still wish future software updates would take care of those stutters and lags, at least somewhat. As it stands, though, the MediaTek Helio G90T is probably the best mid-range chipset around, if you're going by that 'flagship feeling' - most of the time. In day to day use, it easily outperforms the 730G most of the time, and that one is Qualcomm's premier 4G mid-range chip.

In terms of smoothness, the same logic as above applies. The Redmi Note 8 Pro is quite smooth, although not record-breakingly so, around 70% to 80% of the time, and then the illusion is broken by a random stutter here and there. But for this price, the fact that it can pull off perceivable smoothness even 70-80% of the time that well is rather outstanding.

So obviously the Note 8 Pro wouldn't be in our Top 3 or 5 smoothest phones we've ever long-term reviewed or anything, but that's because in such a list it would primarily compete against flagships that cost at least three times as much. In the end, while performance is one of those areas where compromises had to be made for the handset to reach its price point, overall it feels much less compromised here than we would have expected.

Battery life

Battery life on the Redmi Note 8 Pro has been amazing. It's easily tied with the Huawei P30 Pro for the best battery life we've ever seen from any device that went through our long-term review process, and most times it even surpassed that handset's longevity.

The Note 8 Pro will easily last you through one day of use even if you're a 'power user', and we constantly got a day and a half out of it with our usual use case for long-term reviews, which involves primarily Wi-Fi connectivity, an hour or two on 4G mobile data, Bluetooth always on with an hour or two of music streaming, and around two hours of phone calls each day.

Battery life samples (screen on time and usage time)

Above you can see a few samples of our screen on times with this use, and within one day, with such a scenario, we feel like 9-10 hours is easily achievable. Even after a day and a half off the charger we managed to squeeze in excess of 7 hours of screen on time, usually. Obviously if you spend all of your time on mobile data, the numbers will go down, likewise if you use GPS navigation a lot (we stick to around 30 minutes each day).

None of this is entirely unexpected as the Redmi's battery is pretty big even by 2020 standards at 4,500 mAh. This just shows you that Redmi has focused on battery life as one of the primary selling points of this phone, and it is indeed something to boast about.

As a final note, we should mention that we didn't use the dark theme in the UI, as while that is helpful for OLED panels, it really isn't for LCDs - in fact, LCDs use the most power when showing the color black, so in that way, they're exactly the opposite of OLEDs. With this in mind, if you do like the dark theme, the battery life will probably take a hit, although we can't say exactly by how much.