Xiaomi’s mission is good devices at honest pricing. Keeping that in mind, the Redmi Note 8 Pro is a lot of phone at a wallet friendly price.
Design and Build
The Note 8 Pro is a huge phone, while also note feeling all that huge. That in itself is quite an achievement.
On the front you get a pretty big 6.53 inch screen. The screen is almost edge to edge, with an acceptably small chin and a teardrop notch at the top.
The back feels plasticy, but also has a beautiful colour and so you don’t really feel like it’s a cheap phone. Even the unboxing experience is great with a homage to the colour you get. The phone we got was black or as Xiaomi calls it, Mineral Grey.
The sides of the phone are metallic and the curves and the way it’s all put together is really nice. If you have seen the Redmi Note 7, you will know that the screen looked like an add-on to the phone. Now you get a really well built metal, glass and plastic sandwich. Very well done.
The camera bumps are pretty prominent, and they have a rather strange layout. But let’s discuss that in the camera section of the review.
Camera:
The Redmi Note 8 Pro has a total of five cameras!. Yeah that’s bonkers. Four cameras are on the back and you get one front-facing camera.
Here is the breakdown of all the cameras:
- 64MP with f/1.79 aperture – Main Camera
- 8MP with f/2.2 aperture – Ulta-Wide Angle
- 2MP – 2x Telephoto
- 2MP – Macro
- Front-facing: 20MP with f/2.0 aperture
Like I said, Bonkers. All of that at a smartphone that costs less than 1,000 AED. What are these guys smoking, because I love how crazy they are.
Ok, let’s calm down and take a step back. As you would expect the 64MP part is kind of a gimich. You don’t really get all those pixels in your photo, that would be quite insane. But the idea is that you can do a lot with this AI powered camera.
Xiaomi does some math wizardry with their pictures and save them as a 64/4MP resolution. That is 16MP, which is a much more sensible number. This is because the Redmi Note 8 Pro uses Samsung’s Isocell GW1 Quad-Bayer sensor, which essentially means 4 pixels are grouped together, this gives a higher quality 16MP output file. Honestly, it makes sense, simply because the amount of storage required would be way to mental.
You can take a pure 64MP picture if you need a high resolution picture, but you will sacrifice on low light performance and dynamic range. So keep that in mind. Also, the 16MP version of an image is 1/4th the size of the 64MP version. It’s obvious, but I felt like mentioning it.
The front-facing camera is pretty decent. In good lighting it does a respectable job, even though the pictures turn out a bit soft.
Regular Lens 
Telephoto Lens 
Wide Angle 
Macro Lens 
64MP Mode – Regular Lens (Compressed) 
Selfie Camera
With regards to video you can take 1080p videos up to 60fps and 4K videos up to 30fps. You can also take slow motion videos at 120fps in 1080p or 960 fps in 720p! Which is quite impressive. Though the 960fps videos are limited to 10 seconds, which includes the slow-mo time. So more of a gimmick than a usable feature.
As a bonus you can also record videos using the H.265 codec, which means much smaller file sizes without giving up too much quality.
The Macro lense is fun to play around with. Even tho its a mere 2MP, its enough to get some interesting pics and go down into the detail.
There is so much to cover in the cameras, but I will end with the strange placement of the lenses. You get 3 in a line, followed by the fingerprint sensor. The Macro lense and flash are on the side. Why you ask? Because…
The fingerprint sensor should have been in the phone and not on the bump, all the lenses should have been in one unit, long square, triangular or whatever I don’t care. None of this makes sense, but whatever.
Display
The Redmi Note 8 Pro has a 6.53” LCD display with a 1080 x 2340 resolution which gives it a pixel density of 394.7 ppi. Not the highest resolution display but at this price, it definitely is good enough. The screen also supports HDR videos.
Personally I found the screen to be pretty great. It gets plenty bright and watching videos on this screen is quite a fun experience. The screen it big and colourful enough to be immersive enough for a smartphone. The notch on the top of the phone is quite small and doesn’t come in the way at all.
If you happen to be looking at a white screen, like a browser I noticed a faded black bleed at the bottom of the screen.
The viewing angle on the phone is also not that great. While there isn’t really a colour shift, the brightness gets severely affected. So if you are not exactly in-front of the screen, parts are darker than they should be.
Battery
The battery in the Redmi Note 8 Pro is a sublime 4,500mAh battery. Oh yeah!
The battery along with the screen and the processor gives you some amazing battery life. While I don’t have any scientific way to test this, but if you are only on Wifi and calling, this phone can last you a couple of days on decent usage.
The huge battery means charging it can be a bit of a pain, but with the included QuickCharger, the phone juices up relatively quickly as well.
Xiaomi took everything I felt was missing before and fixed it and gave me so much more!
Features, Specs and Performance
The Redmi Note 8 Pro comes packed with a few extra features, like an IR Blaster. If you are a Xiaomi customer then this won’t come as a surprise. It’s sad to say that the app that controls the IR Blaster is still absolutely frustrating to use. Still it’s cool to have something funky. It came in handy when testing out an old TV whos remote we couldn’t find. Good in a pinch but not something I will be relying on.
A good addition is the Headphone jack which is a welcome feature in any phone. You also get a USB-C port, ahh the bliss of old and new in one device.
The other specs of the phone are:
Processor:
- CPU: MTK Helio G90T, octa-core gaming processor
- 2 x A76 2.05GHz large core
- 6 x A55 2.0GHz small core
- GPU: ARM Mali G76 MC4
- With LiquidCool tech (not sure what means in this phone)
- RAM: 6GB 2,133MHz LPDDR4x
- Storage: 64GB or 128GB with UFS2.1 flash storage. The model we got was 128GB storage.
The performance of the Note 8 Pro is pretty baller! Nothing short of perfect for this price range. You can play games without missing a beat, take photos, have calls and keep going easily for a day, if not longer. All while the phone feels zippy and quick.
Software
The Redmi Note 8 Pro comes with MIUI. It’s Xiaomi’s skin and feature set on top of Android. And the entire experience is what you would think an Android running iOS would feel like.
I generally am a fan of MIUI, its my favourite UI after stock Android and OxygenOS. However this latest version really pushes my buttons.
While many of the customisation features exist, like custom gestures and button shortcuts. Some things are just not obvious. For example, the option to put the back button on the left side is under an obscure menu option (Settings > Additional settings > Full Screen display)… And even the option says “Mirror buttons”, which is enabled by default. Mind you there is another Settings area for FullScreen under Display. So yeah its not confusing at all. Might seem like a small thing, but if it takes me more than 30 mins of digging through menus to get to something, that’s just bad UX.
There are some other gimmicks in the UI, with the “stock” Xiaomi apps that have this little icon animation when you close the app.
I loved MIUI in the Redmi Note 7, to the point where finally I thought stock Android isn’t the only way. But in the Note 8 Pro, I’m not a fan. Mostly because of a mix of tiny gripes that all add up.
Quirks
I don’t understand why Xiaomi had positioned the lenses on this phone the way they have. The fingerprint reader is awkward and I always touch the lenses, which means repeated cleaning. This is a major gripe for me.
The speakers is probably where the Note 8 Pro is the weakers. The sound simply doesn’t get loud enough. While watching a movie in a relatively small room, the audio was not clear nor very audible. A bit sad since the screen is quite a delight to watch.
The Xiaomi Redmi Note 8 comes in two configurations, either 64GB or 128GB storage with 6GB of RAM. The latter being a good configuration for this kind of phone.
The Xiaomi Redmi Note 8 Pro is available at Etisalat, Carrefour and Mi Stores across the UAE.
