Redmi 9T Review - Watch this before you buy! By Izzi Boye

The Xiaomi Redmi 9T is a budget device from the brand with some impressive specifications and affordable pricing. It holds up quite well as a great budget device but it lacks in certain areas. Is this a device you should consider buying? Hello guys Izzi here again and welcome to the channel. This is the Xiaomi Redmi 9t, I've had it for a couple of days now and I have to say it has lived up to expectations in certain areas, other areas... not so much. It currently retails for around $180 or 72,000 naira for the base model and it was a hard device to get my hands on, it was scarce.

This is the carbon grey color option. You can also get it in twilight blue, sunrise orange and ocean green. When you purchase the Xiaomi Redmi 9t, in typical Xiaomi fashion you get everything in the box except earphones. You get a bulky user guide and warranty card, usb c cable, a 22 watts power brick, and a transparent protective casing which fits in quite well. It also comes with a pre-installed screen protector that you'll barely notice.

I find the carbon grey color to be the most attractive, personal preference of course. The Redmi 9T has a textured rear finish which makes for easy grip. From the bottom edge of the camera bump you'll notice this design pattern with a lighter shade of gray. It is built of plastic on the rear and it is quite solid, with the Redmi brand engraved nicely by the lower left side. It is pretty lightweight for a device with a large 6000 mah battery.

It has a subtle camera bump which houses its quad cameras and flash. The fingerprint scanner is side-mounted and doubles as the power button. It does its job to unlock the device quite well. Alternatively for security you can use the less secure face unlock. Right above the power button is the volume rocker keys.

The headphone jack on the Redmi 9T is at the top, right next to one of the dual microphones. We also have the trademark IR blaster. Next to it is one of dual stereo speakers. Premium stuff for a budget device. At the bottom we have the usb-c port, the second noise cancelling microphone and the bottom stereo speaker.

The Redmi 9T accepts dual nano sim cards and there is an extra slot for an sd card to support the 64 gig base internal storage this comes with. My model has 128 gigs internal storage. Xiaomi remains one of the very few brands that tries to bring premium materials to its low-end devices and the Redmi 9T is not exempted. Aside its solid build, it uses gorilla glass 3 on the display. However, it is a 2019 style water drop display which houses its 8-megapixel selfie camera.

A left or center-hole punch display would not have been a bad idea. It is a 1080p IPS LCD panel with up to 400 nits of brightness. The display is 6.5 inches tall with a pixel density of 395 pixels per inch. The waterdrop notch can be easily ignored when you use it for media consumption. At least a waterdrop notch is better than the real estate notch our iPhone friends have to deal with.

Still talking about media consumption on the Redmi 9T it's dual stereo speakers are among its best features. There is a speaker at the bottom and another at the top. It has good loudness levels and there's this vibration or reverb effect you feel from the back of the device when playing sound. It is a nice feeling. Here's sound from its speakers.

The software on the Redmi 9T is currently Android 10 and Xiaomi's custom MIUI 12. You're going to get a good share of bloatware apps here and a decent amount of ads within the system. Not my favorite experience with Xiaomi devices. After setting up the device there is an update waiting that you need to install. It is a new version of the MIUI 12.

The Redmi 9T comes with four gigs of ram and up to 128 gigs in storage and it handles multitasking quite well, able to handle any task you subject it to without lags. the 6000 milliamps per hour battery on the Redmi 9T is quite impressive. It just won't die. With under 70% of battery I got six plus hours of screen on time and still had 10% battery left. You would think that the massive battery might mean longer charging time but it has actually not been the case.

The Redmi 9T supports 18 watts fast charging and in a charge test, in 30 minutes I got 26% charge from zero percent it took one hour to get to 50% charge and two hours, fifteen minutes to charge up to a hundred percent while powered off. Unlike the Redmi 9 which came with the gaming Mediatek Helio G80 chipset, the 9T sports the Snapdragon 662 it has good benchmark scores on both Antutu and Geekbench. Quite impressive for its price point I must say. In the GPU department it sports the Adreno 610 GPU and it is capable of taking you comfortably through long gaming sessions without lags. With a game like PUBG mobile, it maxes out at medium settings, but the gameplay is lag free.

With Call of Duty Mobile you can go up to high graphics settings and still experience smooth gameplay. I carried out a 2-hour gaming session in and out of PUBG, Asphalt 9 and Call of Duty Mobile and I didn't experience any lag or abnormal heating. The Redmi 9T has improved camera specifications over the Redmi 9 and you'd expect it to provide better picture quality, but I found it a little underwhelming. Its quad rear camera comprises of a 48 megapixel main camera, an 8 megapixel ultra-wide and 2 megapixel macro and depth sensors. You can take okay photos with its cameras but I feel it lacks a little in dynamic range and detail and sometimes the images may appear a little oversaturated.

You can set it to the 48MP mode to take higher resolution photos but you may not notice any difference until you crop-in. Its ultra-wide cameras have a 120 degree field of view to allow more into your shots. The macro camera is 2 megapixels so no expectations there. Regular selfies and portrait shots look okay but I think it looks a little too smooth and lacks detail. Some people might prefer it this way but I think it could have been better and Xiaomi should do more to improve its image processing on its lower end devices.

We don't always have to rely on Gcam for better image processing. And speaking of Gcam, I could not find a working Gcam port. The Redmi 9T has a dedicated night mode but I'd say it's nothing special, you can barely differentiate it from the regular shots. Hello guys so I'm out testing the cameras of the Xiaomi Redmi 9t. You're looking at video from the 8 megapixel selfie camera and also the sound is from the microphone of the Redmi 9T, and now you are also going to be looking at a video from the rear cameras which has 48 megapixels and both can do 1080p full hd videos at 30 frames per second.

The Xiaomi Redmi 9T is a good budget device and my only real dissatisfaction with it has to be with the camera performance I've seen better slightly lower price points. But hey! When it comes to picture quality it may eventually come down to personal preference, so there's that. It does great in every other aspect asides the ads and bloatware of course. Great stereo speakers, impressive battery life, nice build and also lightweight. Hopefully this video helps make your purchase decision a lot easier, I guess I'm going to see you in the next one.

Peace...

Source : Izzi Boye