REDMI NOTE 5 PRO REVIEW AND FIND OUT WHY THIS PHONE BECAME MORE POPULAR

The Redmi Note 5 pro that we have with us today really has a lot to live up to. Can it manage to do that?Well we find out in this review. The new phone brings a dual camera and a Univisium display to the Redmi line. According to us, the shining star of the device is the chip that powers it now. The Snapdragon 636 isn’t just a new chipset. The Redmi Note 5 pro is the first smartphone to bring this chipset to india. Coupled with the 4000 mAh battery we think we have a winner on our hands. The 18:9 aspect ratio on the smartphone makes it more grippable than its predecessor. The taller 5.99 inch 2160x1080p display is still not the best size to be used in one hand. That said it is definitely an improvement over the last phone. The display has rounded corners and thinner bezels which adds to the whole design appeal. The curved back does make the phone easier to grip but at the same time it feels heavy and does take some time to get used to. There is no improvement as such in terms of the materials used. Unlike the Moto G5s plus or the MiA1, the Redmi Note 5 still doesn’t have a metal unibody. That is to say it has plastic inserts both top and at the bottom of the metal back to incorporate the antennas. The worst part and all this to us seems to be the camera bump which means that the phone rocks every time you tap on the display if it’s on a flat surface. It also feels a bit annoying. All that said the redmi phones were never about the looks and design. It was always about keeping things utilitarian and that’s exactly what the Redmi Note 5 pro does with this phone. The 5.99-inch display here is just as good as we have come to see on xiaomi devices. Xiaomi is still using an IPS LCD panel on the phone which has good viewing angles and good color reproduction. The color fidelity is not perfect as by default the display is calibrated to push out slightly warmer tones which looks quite pleasing to view in a day-to-day use. We have no complaints about the touch response but we are not sure whether it has gorilla glass on top for the added safety. Meanwhile MIUI looks just as colourful as it has been over the years. However you dont get Android Oreo out of the box. The UI carries forward its no app drawer approach and tries to offer some added features such as dual apps and second space. Now the miss on Oreo is actually a really big deal especially when you consider the fact that customers expect a brand-new launch smartphone to run the latest operating system. With dual apps one can run separate accounts of the same service or app the second space functionality provides separate user experience. For example for work and for home. Both features can be accessed in the settings menu. Xiaomi has its own app store onboard which seems completely unnecessary since the Google Play Store is already here. Now the UI is optimized to give you better battery life and the brightness level on auto is always a little lower than we’d like. But as long as it’s optimizing the battery were okay with that. The main feature as we mentioned earlier is the new chip on the phone which is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 636. Now Xiaomi has told us that the Redmi Note 5 pro is the spiritual successor to the Redmi Note 3. Remember, when the Redmi Note 3 was launched back in 2016 it had the snapdragon 650 SOC, which made it a package deal of budget smartphone with great performance. Xiaomi says it wants to relive that success with the Redmi Note 5 pro and hence we have this device. The company also says that its listened to its fans and made this device the way it is. Manufactured on a 14 nanometer processor, the Snapdragon 636 uses 8 Kryo 260 cores which are arranged in two quad clusters and clocked at 1.8 GHz and 2.2 GHz respectively. Along with an Adreno 509 GPU, the Redmi Note 5 pro just blazes past every other phone at same price point in synthetic benchmarks. Now the story is the same with day-to-day tasks. The smartphone outperformed all the other phones in this budget category. Games loaded fast, multitasking was a breeze and we opened all the apps on the phone which was about 50 apps. And when we check the RAM consumption we had about 600 to 800 MB of RAM free. Now when you’re using the device heavily, you aren’t really going to notice the amount of lags and stutters. Unless you are using a flagship device like a pixel or a OnePlus 5t then you might notice the slight bit of lag. But by the time the lag registers it;s already gone and the device is performing smooth once again. The other good thing we observed was that the phone hardly gets warm even after playing on the phone for an hour straight. The audio quality with the equalizer enabled is as good as any other phone under 25k and we have no issues with the quality and reception for calls. The Redmi Note 5 Pro can provide up to two days of battery life quite easily. The battery just wont die in a day. After two hours of gaming the battery went down by just 20%. If you havent calculated that yet its about nine to ten hours of heavy gaming. Streaming videos on the larger display is a joy and the battery life will easily move into double digits even if you are watching everything on full brightness. Now we love the battery performance of the Redmi Note 4 but the raw performance combined with the battery performance and we really like the Redmi Note 5 Pro. The new dual camera setup offers better results than its predecessor. You have a 12MP primary camera with a sensor size of 1.25 microns and an aperture of f/2.2. The secondary 5 megapixel camera is used for depth sensing and only has a sensor size of 1.12 microns with f/2.0 aperture. In ample lighting conditions, the camera captures a good amount of detail and has a punchy color reproduction. This means that the color reproduction is not true to source but it’s not too far off. And at the end of the day we will look pleasing to the normal user. Low-light image capabilities are equally good and the camera has good dynamic range. The images captured in low light conditions retain details quite well and keep the colors in check. If you ask us this is a better shooter than Mi A1. The secondary camera at the back does not do optical zoom. The main purpose is depth sensing. That said it does help in the image quality and offering better subject separation for all the images we have taken so far. The portrait images look better than most of its competitors. We also like that there is no beautify setting in the portrait mode which means you will get natural-looking images. We didnt like the video mode though the phone can shoot 1080p at 30 frames per second. But the overall output isnt great and thats a bummer especially when you consider the powerful SOC that this smartphone has. At the front the phone features a 20 megapixel IMX 376 sensor coupled with an LED flash. Images look equally good under artificial and low lighting conditions. But not as good as the ones you will get from the real camera. The verdict is that the Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro is quite simply the new budget King. It offers superb performance combined with excellent battery life. The display is good and both the rear and front cameras leave little room for any complaints. The company should have launched the device with USB Type-C and Android 8 out of the box. All in all the Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro comes out as the winner which now sets the benchmark for upcoming budget smartphones to launch this year. So if you are looking for a budget smartphone, this is the phone to buy. Although we would suggest you get the 64gb storage variant.