Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 Pro (Max) long-term review

Display

Not only does the Redmi Note 9 Pro not have an OLED screen, opting for LCD, but it's not a high refresh rate either. We're not trying to bash the phone here; these specs were perfectly adequate for the price point just a few months ago. Right now, though, not so much. It's interesting to live in a world where the Poco X3 can do 120Hz with an identically sized panel for a very similar price, coming from the same company.

It's also understandably not the best LCD out there. For the Android world, that award probably goes to the Mi 10T Pro at the moment. That said, it's perfectly usable and doesn't have any huge, glaring issues, aside from the aforementioned 60 Hz refresh rate and the inevitable shading around the chin and the punch-hole selfie camera. We say "inevitable" because it is an LCD, and due to the way the screen is lit, this is bound to happen to some extent - especially at a price point where the manufacturer clearly can't pay more for panels that almost hide this completely.

Brightness is nowhere near close to the brightest OLEDs out there but gets high enough to make the screen decently discernible even on a sunny day. When you're in direct sunlight, things get harder to see, but not impossible. It also gets incredibly dim, making using it at night in pitch darkness a treat for your eyes. It's actually so dark on the lowest setting that we found ourselves manually adjusting the brightness to a tad more when in pitch black settings. It's the first phone we've ever had to do that on, so the lowest brightness setting is respectably low.

On this topic, auto brightness works decently, but we felt it was better in MIUI 11 than in MIUI 12. The system seems to prefer dimming the screen so that even when you have a soft source of light around you, it takes the screen to the dimmest setting in which it's basically unreadable.

Additionally, on bright sunny days, unless the sun is directly hitting the screen, the auto-brightness gets very shy in turning itself up to the max or close, so more often than not, you'll get a dimmer screen than you'd want. Hopefully, this can be improved in subsequent updates. Weirdly enough, manual adjustments don't seem to always "hold" for the same amount of ambient lighting either.

The screen quality is good, although whites seem to be way too blueish by default, which is a disease we unfortunately still aren't rid of in the mobile world. If you dislike this as much as we do, you can just switch the color temperature to Warm in Settings. We left the default Auto color scheme because it should adjust things based on the current ambient lighting. That said, it's either too subtle or doesn't really do anything because we've never seen any noticeable changes in white balance throughout our use. There's a profile named just that, while Standard is probably the most accurate for fans of that saturated look if you're into that.

Display settings

Another disadvantage of having an LCD screen is the chin, which is significantly larger than it would've been for an OLED, that is, if we're talking in percentage points. It's fine in absolute numbers and could even prove useful for such a huge phone as a small point where you can hold it without triggering any on-screen action. But, it is there, and it's always going to be obvious that there's no symmetry between it and the top or side bezels.

We probably shouldn't even mention this, but the screen is flat because mid-rangers with curved panels aren't really a thing (aside from a couple of oddballs), and neither are curved LCDs. A lot of people will be happy with this, so we won't comment further. Suffice to say, it would be interesting to see a decently priced mid-ranger with a curved OLED, but that's probably not going to happen anytime soon thanks to price constraints.

Overall, the Redmi Note 9 Pro's display is good, if not the best LCD out there. It will get the job done really well for most people, with minor inconveniences here and there - most of which can be overlooked because of the price. On the other hand, the lack of a high refresh rate looks really bad compared to the Poco X3 because it is priced very, very close.

Note that because we have an LCD screen here, there's no Always On Display functionality. You do, however, get a small notification LED that's part of the earpiece grille. It's white only and does the job admirably, considering its inherent lack of customization options.

Notification light settings

Performance, smoothness

The Redmi Note 9 Pro uses the Snapdragon 720G, which is really close on paper to both the 730 and the 732. As far as real-world use goes outside of gaming, for all intents and purposes, one could consider these three so similar to be practically indistinguishable.

The branding of these chipsets is slightly misleading, though, in our book, because the difference in performance (and especially smoothness) between these and the 8-series is much higher than the one-digit increment might have you believe. These are still Qualcomm's best performing 4G mid-range SoCs, that's for sure, but don't think that because 7 is so close to 8, there's anything similar going on with how things feel when you use a phone with a 720/730/732 compared to an 865. They are worlds apart.

Then again, so is the pricing of devices using these chips, and that more than the branding should be your guide in assessing the delta you're getting. Some of MediaTek's 5G midrange chipsets perform better, but unfortunately, seeing any of those outside of phones meant for the Chinese market is still incredibly rare.

The Redmi Note 9 Pro's Snapdragon 720G is fine in day to day use, but it will never feel on par with a flagship chipset, not even for a split second. It's slower at everything, every single interaction takes a bit longer, and smoothness is barely decent. This - remember - compared to the Snapdragon 865, Kirin 990/9000, and not anything else. So we can't award the Note 9 Pro anything here. It's interesting, perhaps, to also compare things to last year's Redmi Note 8 Pro, which we also long-term reviewed.

That phone's Helio G90T chipset got close to offering something that felt like flagship performance and smoothness most of the time, but with very noticeable hiccups from time to time that ruined the illusion. The Snapdragon 720G in its successor, on the other hand, is much more consistent in both performance and smoothness, except it's consistently slower feeling than the G90T in its peak times.

We're not basing any of this on benchmarks; by the way, if you're interested in those, many results are floating around. Like in all long-term reviews, we're talking about how things feel to us subjectively because spec sheets and synthetic benchmarks can't really reveal these things. Smoothness-wise, the Redmi Note 9 Pro is less smooth than the Note 8 Pro usually is and more smooth than when the Note 8 Pro has its slowdown moments.

Keeping the price point in mind, though, these are very good results, and we're looking forward to seeing Redmi Note phones with Dimensity chipsets outside of China soon, as we have a hunch that those will be much improved in the performance and smoothness department.

Battery life

Battery life on the Redmi Note 9 Pro has been nothing short of outstanding, which is not really surprising to us given the huge battery and non-flagship chipset. Even so, we were impressed. This will surely be a two-day phone for most people, and even for the most demanding use cases, it should last you through a day with no worries.

We consistently managed to get around 8 hours of screen on time in a day, with ample battery capacity reserves to spare. That's unmatched by any top of the line smartphone we've had for a long-term review, so the Redmi Note 9 Pro gets the unofficial long-term review battery champ crown, for now at least. You can see some samples of our screen-on times below.

Battery usage stats

As usual, our use case involves around 12-17 hours off the charger in a day, with mostly Wi-Fi connectivity, about an hour or two of mobile data, location and Bluetooth always on, around 30 minutes of GPS navigation, about an hour or two of music listening through Bluetooth and an hour or two of phone calls.