Xiaomi Redmi K40 PRO Full Review: the first TRUE flagship killer in 2021 By gizmochina

Hello and welcome to gizmo china, I'm Kiran Redmi, no doubt is the most popular smartphone brand this month and today, let's take a close look at the Redmi k40 pro the model that is probably going to make a lot of brands nervous in 2021. You might think as compared to the k40. The pro model may be less cost-effective because of the 2999 RMB starting price, which equals to about 464 USD, but among all flagship models running the snapdragon 888 chipsets, the k40 pro no doubt offers the best value for money. I guess that's enough of an introduction of the phone. Let's check out how the true flagship killer performs and are there any areas where it doesn't do well to start off. The design of the k40 pro is almost the same as the standard k40.

Both of them get excellent weight and size control, especially the pro version, it's exactly as light and thin as the k40, even though the pro features a better main camera and a slightly better chipset. Since we have a lot to talk about the pro model, we are not focused much on the design and display in this review. If you are curious about what's new in the k40 series, design just check out our k40 review, video that'll be out in a day or two, but it's pretty clear that the k40 is the first generation in the k40 series lineup that takes its design seriously. Redmi canceled the pure black version of the k40 and replaced it with the Damascus pattern version, which is also exclusive to this pro model. Here, look at the Damascus pattern version in our hand, in our opinion, it's by far the best looking Redmi model and even more elegant than the mi 11's design, but we noticed that the side frame is made of plastic instead of metal, which makes it prone to scratches and damage.

So, if you're going to buy a k40 or a k40 pro, we suggest that it's better for you to put a case on it to prevent damage to the frame. One of the biggest upgrades of the pro version is the snapdragon 888 chipsets, but compared to the snapdragon 870, the performance improvement is not so significant. The benchmark results show that the gap is mainly in single core performance, which, in theory, would lead to around a 10 improvement in actual gaming. On the other hand, the multi-core performance of the k40 is much closer to the k40 pros, so in daily use, we really don't feel the gap between the two models. What about gaming is the chip better optimized than the snapdragon 888 on the me11.

It was pretty easy for the k40 pro to unleash the best gaming performance in PUBG mobile, without any issues we've seen before how the game Genshin Impact has caused issues to a number of phones running the snapdragon 888 chips, but this time the k40 pro restored dignity for the flagship, chipset and finally achieved a stable, high frame rate of 58.2 fps without much fluctuation and during the whole 30-minute test. The CPU of the k40 pro didn't throttle down the clock, speed for the heat control. However, the phone surface did quickly heat up to 50 degrees Celsius. So does this mean the k40 pro offers excellent, optimization in all scenarios, and what about the other games? Well in simian legends, the smooth and delightful gaming experience was surprisingly absent. The familiar result for the 888 chipset came back.

The phone suffered frequent ups and downs of performance and met a lot of stutter issues. The frame rate eventually remained at 36.5 fps. So clearly the chip wasn't optimized for this game. In MBA 2k20, we could fully take advantage of the 120 hertz display in the first six mins. The k40 pro stably ran the game at around 120 fps, and then you can see the CPU temperature was rising rapidly when it rose to 55 degrees Celsius, the frame rate and CPU clock started.

Jumping up and down the performance down throttling occurs every minute and lasts for a few seconds still. The average frame rate of 101.4 fps is still not bad for this game. In short, the optimization on the k40 pro is much better than what we used to see on the mi 11, but since the chipset remains the same, we still encountered overheating issues, so the chip throttled down at speed, frequently on the k40 pro. But thank god, things get much better. Now on the k40 pro as compared to the mi 11.

, the main camera of the k40 pro features a Sony imx686 sensor, it's a popular sensor that has been mainly used on the 2020 flagship phones. Let's look at some samples shot from the main camera on the k40 pro. The samples, color style is pretty close to what we have on another Xiaomi model. The me11. Both of them are most likely to present a cooler tone than what we actually saw from our eyes and the k40 pro samples have a pretty high saturation with good contrast.

The mi 11 still has a better overall exposure to represent brighter images, especially in darker scenarios. The mi 11 is able to capture more details with sharper edges and thanks to the original 108 megapixel resolution and a 27 megapixel resolution for normal mode, the mi 11 samples are sharper with better clarity, while the 12 megapixel samples of the k40 pro looks a bit blurred when we zoomed into the samples. Another drawback of the k40 pro's main camera is the lack of is anti-shaking. So when it comes to low lighting scenes, our handshake could easily spoil the photos we shot. So you can see that some night samples are a bit blurred and lose much detail talking about the night shooting the mi 11 could produce better details in both dark and bright situations, no matter whether we were using the normal mode or the night mode.

The k40 pro seems not so stable to present the colors correctly and usually when it happened, the image turned out to be a bit greenish and the color style may be inconsistent when we switch from the normal mode to the night mode. As for the high resolution mode, however, the gap between the 108 megapixel resolution on the mi 11 and the 64 megapixel on the k40 pro was not as significant as we expected. Coming to the wide angle. Camera the m11 sample shows slightly better image clarity, while the k40 pro does a better job on image, pureness with less noise, but when it came to night shooting the gap is much more obvious. The k40 pro's performance is far behind what the mi 11 can do, no matter whether you compare their exposure or image detail, because the mi 11 and the k40 pro use exactly the same setup for the macro camera.

Their performance is exactly the same from their samples. We cannot really see any difference, but both of them are perfect at shooting, extremely close subjects and present some interesting detail for close-up shooting. As for their filming capacity, the k40 pro only supports up to 4k 30fps video on the main camera and up to 1080p 30fps video on the 8 megapixel wide-angle camera. So, to be honest, it's not so practical for video filming overall, the Redmi k40 pro has a pretty decent camera setup, especially under good lighting conditions, but it's still not as good as the mi 11. This is expected, given the difference on their pricing.

To conclude, while the cameras on the k40 pro are decent, it still isn't one of its strong points. Besides the difference in the camera and chipset departments, there's still several tiny differences between the k40 and the k40 pro, although they both feature the fast charging up to 33w. The k40 pro applies a slightly aggressive charging strategy that can save several minutes for full charge. Another difference is the ram they use. The k40 pro can take full advantage of the lpddr5 ram and run up to 6400 megabits per second, while the k40s ram can run up to 5500 megabits per second, but to be honest in daily use, it's hard to perceive the difference.

The third one is the network support. The k40 pro supports dual sim cards with dual 5g network standby. While on the k40, you can have one 5g standby and another 4g standby as loading dual sim, but you still need to make sure whether the bands that they support are adopted in your region. The last one is the Wi-Fi signal: Redmi claims that the pro features an enhanced Wi-Fi, 6 connection, which brings more stable and faster transmission when connected to the Wi-Fi 6 wireless network. As for the pro's charging and battery capacity, there is no surprise from what we expected.

The charging result is very close to what we got on the k40. The pro was charged to 70 in 30 minutes, and it took us just 50 minutes to fully charge the phone. The 4 500 milliampere hours. Battery in daily use didn't bring us any surprises and the test result of battery life was close to what we got on the mi 11. We played PUBG mobile on the k40 pro for an hour and the power dropped by 23, and then we used the phone's camera to shoot 1080p videos for another hour which consumed an additional 19 of power.

Considering the snapdragon 888 has been in the market for over two months, we feel that the k40 pro could have a slightly better efficiency in terms of power consumption. In addition, although the dual speaker solution of the k40 series has the same Dolby certification as the mi 11, it still doesn't compare to the sound output from the mi 11. That said, the immersive stereo sound of the speakers is still pretty impressive. Cinematic technology you've ever experienced begins. This is Dolby Atmos.

The number of speakers around you no longer matters, because this is the world's first object-based cinematic audio, with powerful moving audio that transcends from channels to moving around you with pinpoint accuracy whether the soundscape sits the mood of nature's fury and remember this, so that's it for our Redmi k40 pro review. The k40 series is definitely a revolutionary entry in the 2021 smartphone market. The biggest surprise is still the pricing, especially of the k40, and the k40. Pro is still the best option. By far that you can have in its price range compared to the k30 pros released in the same period last year, the k40 pro brought us more surprises and even gave us an illusion that it's trying to challenge the Xiaomi me flagship series to some extent, but it's worth mentioning that the room gt was released a couple of days ago, and it's also a super powerful flagship killer that takes on the k40 pro and, more importantly, it's even a bit cheaper than the k40 pro in China.

These two models were designed for those who prefer flagship features with decent cameras. Thanks for watching our review, please subscribe to our channel and stay updated for their comparison, and, if you like our video, please don't forget to give us a thumbs up. It means a lot to us. This is Kieran from gizmo china. We'll see you soon.

Source : gizmochina