Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro Review: The Smartphone that makes you sit up and take Note

In a market as competitive as the Indian smartphone market, every company strives to achieve the number one position. But what happens once they achieve it? Ever since Xiaomi joined Samsung as the top-selling smartphone in Indian smartphone market at the end of Q3 2017, as per IDC, it was only a matter of time the Chinese company took the title for itself. And that’s what has happened. According to the latest figures from IDC, Xiaomi has been crowned the king of the Indian smartphone market beating the chaebol during the fourth quarter of the year 2017, creating a certain pressure on Xiaomi to remain the leader. It’s one thing reaching the top but to sustain it is a totally different ball game. Perhaps that’s why Xiaomi has been a bit quieter than other brands. While others have made a lot of noise about launching new handsets, all this time Xiaomi was sitting tight. We’re in the second month of the year and Xiaomi has finally decided to launch its products in India, which are going on sale tomorrow for the first time. Among all the launched products -- the Redmi Note 5, Redmi Note 5 Pro and the Mi TV 4 -- recently, here we are going to talk about the Pro edition of the newly launched Redmi Note 5 . The India launch marks the global entry of this device which comes with certain features worth your attention such as a completely new Snapdragon 636 processor, the 20MP front camera and a dual rear camera setup, because of which, the company is calling it ‘India’s camera beast.’ We played with the device for a few days and here is our review:
Redmi 5 Pro Design and Display Given the obsession of the smartphone world with the 18:9 aspect ratio of the display Xiaomi too has incorporated this for the Redmi 5 Pro . But this isn’t the first Xiaomi phone to come with a bezel-less design in India as it had introduced this feature with its flagship device the Mi Mix 2 last year.
However, with the Redmi 5 Pro, now it won’t burn a hole in your pocket. Due to the bigger display, the capacitive keys are now on-screen keys. The front is as usual dominated by the display along with the selfie camera, earpiece and the usual array of sensors on the top edge, with a layer of 2.5D Corning Gorilla Glass on the top with rounded display corners. The curves make the phone easy to hold and facilitate smooth operation, despite sporting a 5.99-inch screen size. Turn the smartphone around and you will first see a vertically placed iPhone X like rear camera setup, where the LED flash is housed in between the two lenses.
Frankly, this is not the first time when an Apple design feature has made its way to other smartphones. Remember when the dual rear camera setup of the iPhone 7 Plus was unveiled, how many handset makers got "inspired" by the design? Moving on, the back panel also has a centrally placed fingerprint sensor and the Mi branding below it. The handset comes with a micro-USB charging port (we fail to understand why) that is placed at the bottom, along with 3.5mm audio jack and the mono speaker.
There's a volume rocker and power button on the right, while the left side has a SIM card tray. The top of smartphone has the IR blaster that lets it control devices such as a TV. Coming to the display, the Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro has a 5.99-inch screen with a FHD+ resolution of 2160x1080p. The display comes with features such as Reading mode, which reduces the blue light emissions; Schedule that lets you customize the period of this reading mode; Contrast and colour selection and text size options. The images were quite sharp and we did not see any pixelization.
The sunlight legibility is not one of the best suits of the device and we also felt the display looks slightly dimmer, when viewed from a certain angle. Overall, we can say we did not have any complaints with the slim body design and is definitely going to grab some attention, even if it’s just for the rear camera panel.
Performance and camera Let’s talk about the specs of the device as it comes with a noteworthy feature. Debuting along with the Xiaomi Redmi 5 Pro is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 636 processor, making it the first smartphone in the world to be powered by it. This new chipset features the newest Kyro technology, claimed to be seen in the 800-series chipset. Apart from this, the Note 5 Pro has 4GB RAM and 64GB internal storage. The device runs Xiaomi's MIUI 9 skin based on Android 7.1.1 Nougat, and should hopefully receive an Oreo-based update as all major launches of this year now are expected to come with the latest operating system.
The MIUI 9, like the typical Xiaomi UI, has no app drawer and therefore all apps are placed on multiple home-screens. It comes with an app lock feature and dual apps space customized theme option. The leftmost home screen comes with quick cards that show the frequently used features and information. It is placed in the form of cards, similar to Today's page in iOS, that show shortcuts, calendar, take a note and more. This can obviously be customized as per the user and comes in quite handy once you start depending on it. One thing that we must point out is that even though the handset has a third-party theme support, these apps are not yet optimized for the 18:9 aspect ratio of the display.
There is a blank black patch that comes on the lock screen if you select any app and it surely gets on your nerves after a point. When we asked Xiaomi about this, they said, "Starting this month, all official themes from Mi India will be adapted to 18:9 aspect ratio. Also, third-party theme developers are being pushed to adopt their themes for 18:9 phones." In short, right now you get only two native themes that are fully supporting the display. We ran Antutu and GeekBench 4 tests on our device. While the phone scored 100031 in Antutu Benchmarks, the single-core and multi-core scores on GeekBench 4 were 1772 and 4227 respectively. During our testing, we found the overall performance of the Xiaomi Note 5 Pro to be simply incredible.
The phone handled multi-tasking of random app in a smooth lag-free way. We did not encounter any frame freezing of any kind. Both the call quality and the Audio quality are also quite good. The issue persists with the speaker placed at the bottom as the sound gets muffled when the device is placed in a landscape mode. The Xiaomi Redmi 5 Pro is backed by a 4000mAh battery that easily lasted us for more than a day of average use that included playing games and browsing social media apps, with Wi-Fi turned on. Moving on to the cameras, the Xiaomi Note 5 Pro comes with a -- iPhone-look-alike -- dual rear camera setup of 12MP+5MP RGB sensors. The primary 12MP camera has a 1.25µm sensor and a f/2.2, while the secondary camera has 1.12µm sensor and f/2.0. As per Xiaomi, the secondary camera comes in handy for depth sensing in the portrait mode as well as capturing 'additional information' in low-light shots.
On the front, the device a whopping 20MP camera, not seen something on a Xiaomi device before. This front camera comes equipped with Beautify 4.0 AI algorithm and a dedicated selfie-light, clearly marking its move to capture the selfie-crazed generation of the country. The camera app is pretty simple with options to make a video, a short video (it is preset to 10 seconds), capture a picture in square mode, portrait mode, panorama and manual mode. It also has native Instagram-like filters for the users. In our experience, the camera of the smartphone is excellent.
The colours were sharp and true to the actual shades. The Bokeh effect was also bang on where the camera was able to completely focus on the foreground. Even the selfie camera will amaze you with the precision of its Bokeh effects. Also, the beautification feature surprisingly looks realistic rather than making one look like an anime character. The otherwise perfect front camera just falls short of capturing detailed low-light images. But overall, the Note 5 Pro does stand up to the camera beast tag it comes with.
Verdict The Xiaomi Note 5 Pro is hands down a great phone. It has a powerful processor and a good camera, not just on paper but in experience as well. The FHD+ display in an 18:9 aspect ratio is an added perk. The device comes in two storage variants of 4GB RAM and 64GB internal storage at Rs 13,999, which is dirt cheap for the kind of specs it offers.
There is also a 6GB RAM variant that comes at Rs 16,999, making it the first Xiaomi Note phone to have 6GB RAM variant. Personally, we feel, 4GB will be enough for a casual user, but for those who want extra, even this variant doesn’t qualify as over-priced. With so many things going for it, it’s hard but to not absolutely recommend the Note 5 Pro. Competition better up their game as Xiaomi with Note 5 Pro clearly has