Redmi K40 Pro Review. Better Than The POCO F3? By TechTablets

Well here it is the k40 pro my review of it, so I've had the phone now for only four and a half days. I've got a lot of other techs on at the moment, but it's been enough time to give you what I can classify as a review, at least to give information on the battery life and all that. So you probably know what this phone is all about, and I think it's a good alternative to the mi 11. It is, of course, an import model, the k40 pro, so what it has going for it is a very good screen. The 120 hertz, it's an AMOLED panel, very, very bright and, as you'll see in this review, I'll give you details on the brightness of it and exactly what it's like good touch response rate: UFS, 3.1 storage. So this model here that I have has eight gigabytes of ram and 128 gigabytes of UFS 3.1 storage. Now, apart from the 6.67-inch screen being very fast and smooth, we have the snapdragon triple eight, of course, powering this and a 4 520 William hour battery 64 megapixel camera on the back, which does not sadly, have optical image. Stabilization, an 8 megapixel ultra-wide and a 5 megapixel macro camera that can actually take a very decent macro shot along with the phone.

You will find our type a to type c: cable, that's a typical Xiaomi one, the charger, so this is 33 watts. Maximum now will take just under an hour to fully charge the k40 pro. Now I did get this one from trading Shenzhen, and they include a power adapter for me for the EU and an OTA adapter there. So that's type c to USB. If you wanted to plug in USB pen drives or a mouse or whatever now in hand, the k40 pro does feel good.

We have a very fast fingerprint reader, although the animation you can see just now when I tap it, the animation comes in a little slow making it not look quite as fast as it really is, but this is under a second to read, and I find it is very accurate, I'm having no problems with it now you would have noticed with the 20 megapixel front-facing camera in the cutout that they have done well. What I first saw with the Samsung Galaxy s, 20 SC, and it's put a golden ring around it there, which is a little distracting. I kind of wish they didn't do this, and it wouldn't stand out so much but hey, that's just a design choice. They have made there and well. I don't really agree with that, and hopefully we're not going to see that on later phones, so very nice build to it now.

The weight of it is 197 grams, and I've got easy access to that fingerprint reader. So I'm not too fussed about it, not being an in-screen one volume up and down buttons. They do feel good. I think they're made out of metal, and we're looking at a thickness of approximately eight millimeters. Now, if you include the camera, which does stick out a little, that then brings it up to almost 11 millimeters, which overall is not too bad.

So it's not the lightest phone out there, but it has a solid quality build to it. This is typical Xiaomi and has been for many years now the screen does come with a pre applied screen protector on this that 6.67 inch, AMOLED, HDR, 10, plus screen 120 hertz. Of course, it's very nice, and I'll get onto that shortly. So these sim tray tool- that's not on the side here, which other manufacturers would probably put it, but it is down the bottom and this phone does have an ip57 rating which is new. We don't normally see this.

I think it's one of the first phones of theirs to have this particular IP rating, which is great, so the sim tray tool does have a gasket around it, of course, to keep any splashes of water out for that water, IP rating, and it takes two NATO sims. Now we do have a microphone down here, type c port, which is still USB 2. Unfortunately, no video out, I really wish they used USB 3.1 with video out support, even if it was just cloning the displays it doesn't have to be desktop support and our loudspeakers. There will be a sample later on. In this review of that loudspeaker up top, we have the secondary loudspeaker, an IR transmitter and then another microphone used for noise cancellation in calls and also for video.

So the cameras with this one. We don't have the 108 megapixel sensor, like we do with the mi 11. What we've got is a 64 megapixel one, and I believe it's the mix 582. This has an aperture of f 1.9, no optical image, stabilization 5, megapixel macro camera and an 8 megapixel ultra-wide, which is really the weaker camera of all. Three of these dual tone led flash and right here there is a front facing well rear facing, I should say microphone, so it can pick up extra sound and do the audio zoom feature too, and this is what our phone looks like with it inside the cover.

So good protection- the raised lip around that. So, if you put it face down, it's not having the screen touch a table. There is a lip around where the camera module is and, of course, the cutout for that fingerprint reader. It covers the buttons there and right at the bottom. It also has a little cover over that type c port, which is great to stop it getting fooled full of dust and rubbish when it's in your pocket.

So we have a very nice screen in this. It is over 1 000 nits of brightness, I'm measuring 950. Officially, I think it's 1300, and it's a HDR plus screen 120 hertz are very smooth and fluid. Now, with our color scheme here, you've got all the different options, which is great, and you can set dark mode. That's there the touch response.

The edge detection, is really, really good. I've had no issues with this at all, but one thing is missing that I would love to see on this display, especially in AMOLED, is DC dimming and well it's not there in the settings. I hope with a firmware update. It could be added DC. Dimming mode because we have seen it on, for example, there are me 11 that is there, so the 11 series has it, but not with the k40 and the k40 pro it doesn't seem to be there, which is a slight disappointment.

So those gestures trigger them perfect, no problems so very uniformed color. There are no darker edges around where the cutout is, as you can see, with these just sample images and then the bottom, where the chin is you're, not going to see slightly dimmer. No, it's all the same white, the same exact brightness. It states green colors, but this is black. So blacks are deep.

They're excellent whites, look good! You can adjust the white balance to your own preference, so a few questions have propped up about this particular ROM here being a Chinese ROM. So English and Chinese- that's all you get with this, because this is an import version that I got from trading Shenzhen, as I mentioned, so you can use them or other companies, of course, to import and in the settings it is still on android 12 as I'll show you and yes, you can install now at the time of this video you can get google services google play is there. It runs just fine, no problems, but I think it's apart from mini 12.5. When that update eventually comes, we don't know yet a hundred percent, it could end up blocking google play, and that is when we will have to revert to unlocking the bootloader which Xiaomi still lets us. Do you wait the 10 days? I think it is, and then you could flash over a global ROM or the Xiaomi EU ROM for this particular model, and that will solve that problem.

So at the moment it's still fine, it's usable now. The performance of this ROM is excellent, really, really good. It is blazing fast, eight gigabytes of ram UFS, 3.1 storage. It really does show there is no lag. There is no slowdown, I'm not seeing any animation problems.

The whole UI is running at a solid 120 frames per second. There are various apps, though, however, that will be running. I've noticed not at 120 frames per second, but it's 60 apps like say YouTube and I believe, there's a way to force and override that to get all applications to be running, so really good performance notifications are all showing now someone commented: is there a status led in this? So when you plug in a cable? No, sadly, there is no status led within the top part here where the earpiece is, which is slightly off centered with this phone. Now I am at the time of this video on the latest ROM. I always check and update before I go out and take any photos before I start using and testing these phones, and it's now been well its day.

Four. This is a little rushed for me but day four of using this phone. I think that's enough to give you an overall opinion of it and a review, even though it's probably not you know a month later. Review, of course, is always better, so there is a lot of bloatware that is pre-installed. A lot of it was already removed by uh the team at trading shin gym before it was shipped out.

They do some tests on it, and they install google play for me, and they do that with most of the units, and they remove some Chinese stuff. So you will encounter quite a bit of that. You need to remove global ROMs, have over 1.2 gigabytes and normally about 20 bloatware applications that I've counted, for example, on the me11, so they do put a lot of bloats on there safety net test. Another question that someone asked: yes, it does pass this. Yes, you can use your banking apps.

Yes, it does have NFC camera 2 API. This is full level 3 support, so Guam ports. If you're into those go and grab yourself one, and you can install it, and it will work it work, fine, find one for the k40 pro, of course, wide vine level 1 suit. So I am a little surprised to see this. Although they've started doing this now on all of their phones- and it's good to see so- yes, Amazon, prime video Netflix will be in full HD.

That is great. GPS works very well. However, the accuracy is three meters, it's not going to be any better than that. It sees a lot of satellites and a very good average signal strength. All the wireless features on this are great, so the 5g, the reception that I'm getting is very good.

The speeds are great and even our wireless that'll get onto shortly. So that's carrier frequency five is there. You can see that, so it supports the dual carrier: frequency with the GPS, with this chipset, the snapdragon 888, the triple eight now internal storage speeds very, very good. Here. Look at that sequential read, that's probably faster than a lot of people's, it will be said to three hard drives and even the right to faster than say the three hard drives out there.

Random reads and random writes really, really good there, too, so very good performance, and this is the one that impresses me is the wireless speed. I think this is a new record for me here getting over 1 000 megabits per second. I've noticed this with the Chinese ROMs and the Chinese phones that they tend to just really push these fast and high performance with the wireless, and this, of course connected up to Wi-Fi six to get these results even in the weaker spot. It still gets over 300, which is well it's amazing. So it's very, very quick when it comes to the wise performance just like an tutu.

Now I ran into a bit of a problem here. This is the new version of an tutu off their website and for some reason it keeps saying that it's not verified online. Every time I tried, I ran the test twice and the score is just crazy, very, very high. I mean look at the GPU score there, wow um, so take this with a pinch of salt. This result, but it would be around the 700 mark now battery life 700 000 points that is sorry battery life is uh the weak point of this particular phone.

There had to be something so this performance, the great wireless performance, the great signal, strength and just running 120 hertz comes at a toll to the battery, so this fixed battery life test with the brightness configured to 200 nits. You can see the same result over all the phones I review in my channel and compare them. That's why I do this that you will get realistically and on-screen time with this phone about seven hours of on-screen time. So it's not amazing. Now, if you lower it down to 60 hertz, you will gain then an additional few hours of on-screen time.

If that's really important too, and you don't mind running 60 hertz now the charge time to go from 19 here to 100 is 41 minutes, and I did another charge that I forgot to record here, and that was from seven percent and that took about an hour to do it. It was around 59 minutes or something. So it is just under an hour to fully charge this with the fast 30 watt charging it has, which is still good. This is still very good. The battery capacity there, you can see, is 4 500 William hours on to the audio quality.

So sadly, with the flagships, we've known this now for some time- and it's never coming back. Of course, is the 3.5 millimeter headphone jack. Now you can use the type c adapter and the quality is very, very good. I always seem to rate, and it seems to always be the case, though, that Xiaomi's output for audio is excellent, one of the best even for type c, and if they did have analog, it would probably be the same way now these two loudspeakers they are loud. They are good, they have a hint of bass to them and overall, I would rate them as well.

Above average, these are a good seven out of ten or seven and a half out of ten loudspeakers very loud they're, not quite as good as the mi 11s, but that's understandable. It's a more expensive phone onto our gaming performance. Now so PUBG you can run the extreme frame rate setting HDR, and you can also download and run ultra HD too, very, very smooth. Okay. He got him my teammate, so that's great, very smooth, 60 frames per second, as I move around here, there's no lag and when you look down the scope, no problems as well, Jen, Chen impact.

So as expected, this one does run really well now I set it to the medium settings with uh 60 frames per second option, and it is most of the time 60 frames per second now occasionally, if you get up to some areas with a lot of just enemies around and magic and spells on this fire, you will notice a quick little frame dip, but it bounces back very quick, so as expected, really, really good performance with this one. One hour now has passed off gaming and I did play a little more PUBG than I wanted to, because Jen Chen impact is definitely going to push it a lot, and we're getting up to about 45 degrees that I've seen on the front of the phone. The frame does feel quite warm. There is a bit of a hot patch where the chipset clearly is just below where the camera module is, and that's 42 degrees. So these temperatures they're in an ambient temperature of around about 1920 degrees.

So if you're in a warmer climate, you're using a case, do expect hotter temperatures in this, so I can see it getting up to easily 48 degrees and maybe even more, but this is cooler than the 11 that I've reviewed in the channel over to the cameras. Now so with the front facing 20 megapixel sensor, we can only shoot 1080p, 30 frames per second or 60 frames per second, and it does have electronic image stabilization, which does work well now. This quality is very good, and we do have 320 kilobits per second audio nitrate. However, we cannot shoot 4k 30, which I think is about time now that Xiaomi started to add this, at least with their flagship phones, because other flagships, the front-facing cameras, can shoot 4k vlog quality, but you just simply cannot with Xiaomi. So this is 4k rear camera can shoot 4k 34k60.

We have 8k without electronic image stabilization. So this 64 megapixel center with an f 1.9 aperture, does not have any optical image stabilization. Sadly- and that is just an area of cost saving from them, so if you want the optical image stabilization, what are you going to get the 11? Of course, that's probably what they want you to do so, the electronic image stabilization. It is good now. I do see some noticeable butter coming through when panning around, especially if you do it quickly with the different exposure changes.

That is when that normally happens. Now the focus is good and overall, I do like this 4k quality, as if you were going to shoot a lot of low light footage that optical image stabilization would definitely help as you'll see, with the photo samples later on and now with the ultra-wide. So this quality is not as good. It looks a little more washed out less details, more noise, sorry about that wind noise- very windy up here at the moment- and it does have reasonably good electronic image stabilization as you can see, and when you pan around it doesn't tend to have too much butter, because it's only 1080p so no 4k with the ultra-wide camera. We cannot swap over to the cameras at all once you start shooting, and this is 8k footage.

So with this we don't have any electronic image stabilization. So really you need a gimbals. It is 30 frames per second, but it's AI 8k, which really is just 6k upscale to 8k, as I walk ahead, you'll see it shakes around. So that is why you need a tripod or a gimbals to get nice footage if you plan on moving about, and so we do have 1080p60 with electronic image stabilization, but you're looking at it only at 30 frames per second is, of course, because my timeline and all my videos are 30 frames per second, not 60. , but it is smooth the electronic image stabilization.

It isn't the best I have seen, because there also is no optical image stabilization. The focus is okay and overall quality is good. I do like that.320 kilo bits per second audio that we have with this Vera, say hi g's off on her adventures, exploring the bush and forest around us. Okay, so those camera samples were going to be a lot more different from me. I ran into a bit of a problem that was my own fault.

I end up having to factory reset this phone and that's to do with a password. Furthermore, I put a password on this that I somehow messed up, and I couldn't remember it, so I had to format the whole phone uh. That was a bit of a disaster because I spent a whole morning taking photos all around town like I often do with my reviews, and then I went at nighttime down and took some nighttime photos. So that's why they're just around this area and I managed to save four samples only though from those photos I took anyway enough of that my little problems here with reviews, it's normal. So that's got perfect performance on this.

It's so fast. The UFS, 3.1 storage, snapdragon 8, the widest performance, is the new record setter for me, just the raw throughput from this, the transfers so good and even 5g reception, great call quality is very good and the screen great super bright, I mean really bright. So it's about 1300 nits, so I'm measuring well, 920 or so, but still I believe it can go and do the 1300 at least well over a thousand nets. A bright great screen so responsive the whole UI is so fast and fluid with this model. But there are a lot of things to take into consideration with this particular model.

Here is well. One of the big ones is that mini 12.5 is coming, and they did say officially Xiaomi. I don't know whether they're going to change on this, though that they will be blocking with the Chinese versions. The domestic versions google support. So that means no google framework.

No Google Play Store you're going to need to then install one of those Xiaomi EU ROM. So the bootloader is unlocked. You can do that. You can flash over the ROM, so there's a workaround for it, but it's still a bit of an annoyance there being a Chinese ROM. Furthermore, you get a lot of Chinese bloatware.

Furthermore, you need to uninstall it. Furthermore, you sometimes get some notifications come through, and I did have a few minor little issues with some notifications for like WhatsApp, you need to make sure you set up auto start of apps and the permissions all the permissions need to be given to the app, and then it should pull through those notifications. Without you having to wonder hey. Where are my WhatsApp messages you go into the app and then suddenly you get a hundred new messages come through, which is a minor annoyance there, so very good performance. What about the camera? Well, 108 megapixels isn't here, and they want you to get of course, the m11 or other models.

Now, if you're really into your cameras- and you want a perfect screen, I recommend the Redmi Note 10 pro. Okay, that's a very good one, and if you're a gamer, and you're on a budget. What about then the Poco f3? The Poco f3 is well it's this, but the non-pro version, it's the k40, so the Poco f3. I will be reviewing that one in the channel so do subscribe for that and that'll be for the gamers out there, snapdragon 870, very good price point, the same screen, the same fast refresh rate and UFS 3.1 storage, it's a very good phone and I hope to have that soon and for you all to see. So.

Thank you so much for watching my review here of the k40 pro. It is a good phone. Oh, I almost forgot battery life on this is nothing amazing at 120, hertz you're, looking around seven hours on screen time. Realistically, if you lower it down to 60 hertz, then you may be able to scrape eight to nine hours. So it's not a battery champion.

Unfortunately other models like say the Redmi Note 10 pro can do a little better and the mi 10 t is another one. That's very good on the battery. If you're interested in that, so I do hope to catch you in my up and coming reviews.

Source : TechTablets