Hi guys Chris here back with a review now off the xiaomi redmi note 5 so i've
been using it for over a week and this truly is in my opinion the best budget
phone that you will find priced around 220 us at least this is the cost of my
model here with the 4 gigabytes of RAM 64 gigabytes of storage now this has
qualcomm's latest you could say super efficient chip with reasonable power
it's the Snapdragon 636 now that's got eight cryo 260 cores on it Adreno 509
GPU it's pretty much a GPU for everyone out there because it's going to have
enough power to play all the games it won't be the fastest so you won't get
the smooth frame rate but in general a very good chipset that is quite power
efficient so it's really easy on the battery so this phone right here has an
18 by 9 aspect ratio screen which is 2160 by 1080 or 2 by one ratio really I
don't know why anyone's not calling it that it seems to be all the manufacturer
so it's 18 by 9 that's 2 by 1 so the screen here has a maximum brightness of
almost 500 Lux about 489 a mishit and then it's really decent now the sunlight
legibility as you can see here isn't wonderful so it's not as good as say a
Super AMOLED panel so that blacks as well they're not gonna be as deep but
overall the color reproduction seems quite good you can't took that in the
settings as well to your own personal preference and the viewing angles are
good now they're not I would say not as good as I have seen I mean I even think
the readme Note 4 has a slightly better IPS panel in it but overall a very
decent screen that this has now some of the changes with this new model here
since the Chinese Edition is that Xiaomi decided to change things up a little bit
when it comes to the cameras so we still have that 5 megapixels since a use for
the depth photo so that's going to grab the background so you get the blurred
background but they decided to change the 12 megapixel sensor this one here
has a slightly different lens on it so it's f 1.9 and it has a one point four
millimeter pixel size two sensor on here which is a sensor that has dual pixel
face detection autofocus so what does that jargon mean it basically means the
focus on this mobile phone is really quick it is very very fast indeed
and this finally kills the focus hunting issues that has been plaguing showing
these phones for quite some time so we don't have any issues with that anymore
and it really is a step up and camera performance as you'll see later on in
the review when I get to my camera part and look at the performance of the
cameras on it so the front camera we have up here this one's 13 megapixels as
a downgrade you could say from the Indian version which is the redmi note 5
pro we now have 13 megapixels but it supports now and it has depth so you can
take those dips fake photos with your blurred bokeh backgrounds and it does a
reasonable kind of job of that it does tend to get the stitching a little bit
wrong at times it also has an LED flash which shy in the beginning falsely
mistaken for as perhaps the secondary camera but it kind of looks like one but
it isn't it's a secondary flash which is great to have so they can light up your
face for those selfie lovers out there so raw Delft is quite a bit now in terms
of build quality you can see we've got a full not quite a full metal unibody it's
the back of its all metal but the tops and the bottom are made out of plastic
this to me is a slight con slight disappointment I would've liked them to
view say the Uni body from the me 5x or even my MMX - that's quite a good
unibody and we don't have a type C port on here which I feel is a huge error I
mean come on show me this is 2018 what's the problem with them why can they not
use type C they think it's only for flagships but my guess is they probably
have like a billion micro USB ports that they still need to use up in these
phones so that's why that is happening so we've got dual SIM support now this
model because it's the Chinese one does not support LTE band 20 which is a bit
of a con so wait and get the global version or the local EU version that
will be coming out in Portugal and Spain hopefully soon that's supposed to be
coming out so it will take to nano Sims as you can see with the sim tray there
or a micro SD card if you give up one of those nano Sims there so my storage here
I've got 64 gigabytes of course you can put up to a 256 gigabytes of micro SD
card storage in there so it's great to have that option there now the volume
buttons that are on the right-hand side here so these are made out of meets all
they've got a good feel to them they don't rattle around and overall the
position of them to get them get to the one-handed is
perfectly fine and it's quite a comfortable phone to use now because the
longer screen perhaps maybe it's there's a little bit harder to swipe but really
I don't find it too much of an issue you can get used to that so the UI now is
shipping this phone at least with Android 8.1 which is really good and is
and being no over-the-air updates yet which is a little bit strange but
perhaps with all the Chinese holidays they've had lately that's probably why
but hopefully there's going to be a patch coming out because I have
encountered a few problems with the ROM that now and then you will see a little
bit of stutter this happens mostly in the fullscreen gesture mode which is
something they recently added with the new UI 9.5 and it just lets you use the
screen to the full advantage here you don't have to have the on-screen
navigation buttons showing all the time it's very easy to do you just swipe from
the side to go back or you can swipe up and then pause and that brings you to
recent apps and then of course if you just swipe straight up then that's to
take you back to the home screen and I've been using that now for a week and
it's perfectly fine and I found that when I use my max - I ended up doing
that on that phone there so very easily get used to those swiping gestures and
everything so let's take a look now at the face unlocking so using the
front-facing camera can unlock quite quickly now I found that it works okay
but sometimes when it should work in good light it just doesn't okay there it
worked quite quick so it's only really in low light that it doesn't work as
you'd expect the face unlocking I'll try it again and it's just sometimes
couldn't recognize you there it goes okay a little bit slower than but the
fingerprint reader on the back I mean this takes under a second to unlock it's
very quick just like other redmi devices like the redmi note 5 the redmi note 4
really good there moving on to battery life now but before I mention that
charge time so it is two hours and five minutes to fully charge it from 5%
battery life using the supplied charger now if you use a Qualcomm quick charge 3
charger then you can drop that down to this one hour and 49 minutes which isn't
bad so also talking about not bad is 9 hours and 15 minutes of on-screen time
here this is what the wireless on with the data enabled as well yes data a
little bit but most the time was actually just Wireless now this
figure is very decent so it's about two days for most people but it's not quite
as good as the readme five plus I managed to get ten hours of that so
moving from the snapdragon to six to five and then to the six three six you
lose about ten percent battery life but I feel it's a welcome trade-off no this
is quite heavy use as well so I was playing hit chrome I used quite a bit as
well and pub G so pub G for one hour and 53 minutes and you can see here hit for
just over two hours and then chrome for an hour and 32 minutes during that time
there so the Snapdragon 636 is a relatively new chipset I mean it only
just came out I'm very interested to see how it performs and synthetic benchmarks
so we get a score here that is quite a bit higher than a Snapdragon six to five
so the 65 gets about 70,000 and here we're getting at times almost close to a
hundred and twenty thousand this is what the latest version of antutu so not a
bad result at all a huge step up really from the previous generation of the
chipset here's the Geekbench full score now I did test out the internal storage
so it's e MMC 5.1 speak here and these speeds are okay kind of to be expected
really for the spec of Drive it does not have that fast u FS 2.1 storage that
comes on mid-range and flagship devices of course GPS performance i've noticed
that it's quite good just like most of the qualcomm chipsets really it's only
media tech that was having trouble with GPS accuracy is always around about
three and four meters so not bad and i did test out my wireless speed so
testing the maximum that this wireless AC can output is close to 300 megabits
per second here but then when i tested out 4g not really too happy with the
results here so i couldn't really get what I would call the normal kind of
speeds out of here no tested over different days and maybe this is down to
the fact that I have the Chinese version and hasn't got the optimal band of LTE
that I'm currently running on and this is probably the best residing managed to
get with the wireless here - so 134 and then
thirty-four upload again not as fast as other mobile phones that are pushing
more around 160 download and about a hundred and fifty upload as well so not
too sure waters up with the wireless and the 4G performance hopefully software
updates will address this just down the bottom you'll find the 3.5 millimeter
headphone jack and the loudspeakers it is just one of them and the volume of it
it's actually quite decent I'll give you a sample that of just a second but I
wanted to mention that the sound output from the 3.5 millimeter headphone jack
it's good no issues with it it's not super high quality it doesn't have a
high quality deck on there anything like that but it's good it's decent nice
volume output as well and the core quality as well is really good but let's
have a listen to that loudspeaker now
so decent volume coming out of that it's not super high quality either the
loudspeaker is a tiny little bit of bass a little bit of meds but overall for the
price of the phone I find it to be good and yes on this mobile you also get FM
radio with a hardware FM radio tuner so it's not using any of your data it's
great to have this on here still on mobile phones so let's move over to the
cameras now I covered the camera in depth and did a comparison against the
Samsung Galaxy s7 so please check out my video of that I've got way more samples
and even more video samples as well but you can see that this phone here can
take some really good images in daylight and it can even match or even sometimes
better the quality of photo produced by the Samsung Galaxy s7 a two-year-old
flagship and that is really something that's amazing results here you can see
look at these photos just check out the clouds still got some details of the
clouds still have some details in the shadows there so the dynamic range on
the rear camera is really good and what impresses me is the focus and you could
still take a decent macro to with this camera now where it isn't so good as
always is low-light so I'm only gonna give you just a few samples here you can
see here that it's but to get a bit of grain pixel II it's over sharpening so
hopefully maybe with a little bit of tweaking Xiaomi can improve the quality
of low-light photography so on the rear camera and the front camera we can take
those dips effect photos you know were the ones with the blurred background
that seemed to be very popular so portrait mode on the rear camera does
a much better job than the front-facing camera when it comes to stitching as you
can see here now if you zoom in close especially with the front-facing camera
you can see that at first glance this photo looks good
zoom in and oh hang on the stitching just around the side of my face there
not so great so hopefully this will be improved
so with the native camera app you can shoot in 1080p with electronic image
stabilization now just check out how steady this is you're probably thinking
well you must be using your gimbal surely but no yes a budget phone with
this level of stabilization pretty much unheard of until now and it really is
impressive considering that I'm just holding this with two hands so handheld
walking along and it's doing a really really good job and not only that for
1080p video I find the quality to be good there is some improvements as well
to the audio although the bitrate is still quite low
it is a little bit louder than most phones you'll see here now because we
have that phase detection autofocus the dual pixel phase detection autofocus I
should say just like the Samsung Galaxy s7 you find that the focus is pretty
much rock-solid very good no more focus hunting so Xiaomi have done an excellent
job here with this really good and overall I'm really impressed considering
that this is about a 220 US mobile phone now if you want to shoot in 4k you can
do this but you need to use open cam I'll give you a sample of that now now
with open camera it's not perfect because I do have the electronic image
stabilization enabled as well because the hardware support is there now you
notice that it might drop a few frames now and then it depending on what
bitrate you set so if you set a really high bitrate it will tend to drop more
frames but to me this quality is excellent it is really really good I
mean I even walked down these steps here to show you just how that image
stabilization is going to work and I used to be a really strong believer that
you must have optical image stabilization but that really is only
needed now for low-light photography and not so much for video because you have a
lot of the killed with Google pixel and now this kind of stabilization
I feel the electronic image stabilization or digital is all you
really need
video sample now in low-light and you can see it's not very good at all
there's a lot of grain it actually looks so much brighter than it really is and
there's a quick sample as well what the front-facing camera looks like in low
lights you can see it's not great again lots and lots of grain alright so that
wraps up my video here Xiaomi has set the standard yet again for a budget
mobile phone under 250 u.s. this sells for about 220 and really it just offers
so much so the Snapdragon is six three six this is my new favorite chip see
because it's got a real almost a perfect blend of performance features and
efficiency so it's not quite as efficient as a Snapdragon 625 it's about
10 percent less efficient uses about 10 percent more power in my testing so I
got eight to nine hours on screen time with this with the xiaomi redmi v plus I
managed to get about 10 hours so we're losing about an hour there you can see
Tim percent really is what it is but overall the build quality is decent
that's solid the screen is fine I mean 1080p IPS panel with maximum brightness
of 500 Lux is very good and we are getting better cameras than you'll ever
find really in most other budget phones around this price find me a mobile phone
at least at the time of this review that will take a bit of photo than this one
and you will struggle because this has a sensor on the rear of it that has
features from Fletcher flagship mobile phones so we've got that dual pixel
phase detection autofocus which is very fast so the same focus technology used
in the Samsung Galaxy s7 s8 and even the s9 is using that the dual pixel
technology for the focus really good but what surprised me is if you put photos
side by side in certain conditions the redmi note 5 can take a better photo
than my samsung galaxy s7 and then is a huge and amazing feat for $220 mobile
phone just let that sink in that's kind of amazing now low light no low light
the galaxy s7 would absolutely kill this mobile phone here well not absolutely
but there's a huge difference it's a lot better so it's it's not perfect there's
a couple of things I'm not too happy about so first off there's a couple of
UI stutters so when you swipe up sometimes especially in the full screen
gesture mode you will see a couple little tiny micro stutters a little a
little bit of lag there but it's not a deal-breaker and show me I believe we'll
be able to patch and fix that because I feel the
roms quite new there and that's probably the reason why so we've got Android 8.1
out of the box which is great to have so very recent version and of course this
has me you a 9.5 1 of it their latest builds as well too so there's also good
to see so overall as a package as a phone for the price really good highly
recommended from me I really don't think Chumlee could have bettered this unless
of course they put a type C port on here unibody and NFC and then it would be a
mid-range phone and they'll be charging an extra hundred or 150 US more thanks a
lot for watching this review and please do check out my camera comparison of the
Remy note 5 vs samsung galaxy s7 up here and then my latest videos over here bye
for now