Xiaomi Redmi Note 8 Pro Unboxing & Review: Before you Buy! By Fisayo Fosudo

Hey what’s up guys, it’s Fisayo here and this is my Unboxing and review of the Note 8 Pro. Which is the bigger brother to the Redmi Note 8 which I’ve reviewed earlier. Linked below. It’s the classier version in this line up sort of and in this video, I’ll talk about my usage of this device as well as what I’ll consider the pros and cons of using it. As is tradition, I’ll leave timestamps in the description and pinned comment of this video in case you want to skip ahead to sections you want to get informed about quickly. Without further ado, let’s get to the video.

In the box of the Redmi Note 8 Pro, the first thing we get is the gift box just like the Note 8, opening that shows you the sim ejector tool. We also get the thick user guide, warranty card and clear soft case with relevant cut outs. Next up is the Note 8 Pro which we’ll get to later. Underneath the device is the 18W fast charger, and the USB C cable. No headphones in the box.

The Redmi Note 8 Pro is point 2 3 inches bigger than the Redmi Note 8 and also shares the same Gorilla Glass 5 on the front and back of it, which gives them quite the premium feel as far as budget devices go. On the screen wrap in front, you also see other specs that it comes with.64MP High Resolution camera among 4 other cameras, Liquid Cooling Tech for which The Redmi Note 8 Pro was the first device to use or shop with this processor and it’s dedicated for gaming. In fact, when you check the teardown, you’ll see the Heat sync pipe for gamers more about that later. Taking that wrap off, you can see the 6.53 inch glossy panel and taking the stickers off the back of the device. You can also see the nice and glossy reflective gradient style it has and it really feels cool to hold in the hand.

Color options for the Redmi Note 8 Pro include Mineral Grey, Forest Green and of course Pearl White which we have here. Then of course, we’ve got the 4,500 mAh Battery with 18W fast charger out the box and if you saw the previous Note 8 video you’ll know that the regular Note 8 comes with a 10W charger in the box but both of them are capable of 18W fast charging. My first impression on the build quality of the Redmi Note 8 Pro is that it’s slightly heavier than the regular Note 8 and of course the side the device feels very flush in the hands when holding it. On top of the Note 8 Pro, we get an Infrared sensor remote for controlling appliances like Air conditioners and a microphone port, on the right side, it’s the power button and volume rockers while on the left we get the hybrid sim slot which is not like the dedicated slot from the regular note 8, but if you want to expand your storage by 256GB, it will be at the cost of an extra sim. On the bottom, we get a headphone jack, usb c port which is also capable of reverse charging.

We get another microphone port and speaker grilles. The front of the Note 8 Pro houses the 20MP Selfie camera, with the earpiece right above it and the charging indicator. On the back Just like the Note 8, the camera bump here is more prominent and it gets an extra layer.. it’s just a little lesser when the case is applied and it’s got the protective cap for the USB C port. On the back of the Redmi Note 8 pro, there are 4 cameras a 64MP wide angle camera, and similar to the Note 8, the 3 other cameras are for 8MP ultra wide and dual 2mp , except one is for ultra macro shots and the other is for depth sensing.

The 2MP Macro Lens is directly underneath the flash and some inscription for the 64MP Camera It can’t go without saying that the back of this device is actually very attractive especially this Pearl white version. The way it reflects looks really nice and I also like the fact that it’s glass too. About the question of whether the device will last with this form factor, I’d say there’s almost nothing to worry about.. if you’re careful you probably won’t get any scratches on your device since it’s Gorilla Glass 5 on both sides. I however put a case on this device all through my usage and I like the fact that the default case has that cut out for the USB C port.

It did weight quite well heavy in the hand and putting it on a scale shows that it’s 199 grams compared to 190 on the regular Note 8 and this is note too much, however adding the case on the Note 8 Pro, the weight goes up to 220 grams and I remember one time I picked up the Note 8 Pro and was like what is this heavy thing I’m holding so yeah, a little on the heavy side. It took over 2 minutes to boot and set up the Redmi Note 8 Pro and this brings us to MIUI 10.4.4 based on Android 9 and I got a security patch update for the Note 8 Pro for 10.4.5, it sadly wasn’t available on the Note 8 though that only got a MIUI 10.3.5 but I already upgraded to 10.4.5 now on here which has some minor changes. As far as display goes, Bezels on here are quite thinner there’s no Redmi branding in front like the Note 8 and also there’s a little bit of bleeding on the edges, which I talked about on the Note 8 as well. You get Dark mode on the Note 8 Pro as well like the Note 8 it affects all the other native app but not the messages app. You can also do ridiculous things like hide the notch but I don’t know why you’d want to do that anyway.

Screen resolution on here is Full HD+ at 2340 by 1080 and it goes up to 500 nits of brightness and a minimum of 420 nits. It’s got a decent contrast ratio of 1500 to 1 for an LCD display so better color accuracy, supports HDR and it’s very viewable outdoors. I found streaming videos to be very clear although it’s capped at 1080p, it still did look plenty sharp and intact, it streams in HDR as well and the colors were just beautiful to look at. Of course there’s only a downward facing speaker to the Redmi Note 8 Pro and I did find that whenever I watched videos, there was a tendency to block the speakers since it’s not a stereo output speaker. So using headphones, wireless ones as well would seriously help.

Speaking of stereo, what is actually stereo on the Redmi Note 8 Pro are the microphones on top and on the bottom. I tested the sound quality as well as the microphone quality and here’s how they sound. The sound quality on the Redmi Note 8 Pro was quite high in terms of music and playback on YouTube and it got loud quite to the point of sort of vibrating the whole phone, which may not be a bad thing. The microphone quality picked up more high than low or base levels as expected but it was clear. Do let me know your thoughts about the sound quality in the comments below.

Thanks. The Processor of the Redmi Note 8 Pro is a specific one. The Redmi Note 8 Pro is the first device to come shipped with the Helio G90T Gaming Processor and of course, it’s an Octavos-core processor with Mali G&6 GPU for Graphics and I did play some games. All the games played on the device had no lags and it did hold up well. In my experience with the Note 8 Pro, gaming did stress the phone’s battery a bit and I did notice the phone getting warmer after a while but it did cool up pretty fast, intact, much faster than the Redmi Note 8.

This can be attributed to the liquid cooling system I mentioned in earlier. In terms of battery life though, we’ve got a 4,500 mAh built in battery on this guy and after gaming on the device for 30 minutes battery went down by 15%, from 35% at the time to 20%. In terms of medium to heavy daily use, I couldn’t really drain the battery to 0%, I usually ended in 20 - 35% approximately at the end of the day so I’d say it’s a pretty impressive battery life. As I mentioned it comes with an 18W charger and charging speed wasn’t too different from the regular Note 8, In 30 minutes, I got 0 - 30% on the Note 8 while this was just 33% both switched off while charging and in 1 hour was where the difference started to show, I got from 30% on the Note 8 to 55% while on the Note 8 Pro it was 66% after an hour. I didn’t think it was too much of a difference since they both charge in under 2 hours to charge but the Redmi Note 8 Pro was just minutes faster than the Note 8 to charge fully.

The Note 8 Pro comes with MIUI 10 based on Android 9, with just minimal bloatware on it. My version here is with 6GB RAM and 64GB storage and the highest available one from the brand has the same 6GB of RAM but 128GB of storage but of course, a 256GB micro SD can enlarge the device’s storage. If you are obsessed with updating your phone’s apps well Xiaomi has a system app updater right there in the settings but that’s for native apps or mi apps. About the phone’s security features, it took less than 2 seconds to set up Face ID and of course Xiaomi tells you that it’s less secure. It’s fast but I wouldn’t recommend it.

In fact I only needed to capture a portion of my face for it to register. What I like though is that the fingerprint reader is flush with the camera bump making it sleek and not something separated. I think it looks cool and it works fast. So 10/10 would recommend. Unlike the Note 8 which has Bluetooth 4.2, this has Bluetooth 5.0 so you can do this like sharing wireless audio. It supports the new Glo 4G Band and in terms of call quality, texting and basic functionality, I didn’t have anything to complain about.

If someone brought this device to me to guess the price, I’d have said it’s about 150,000 Naira but this my particular model here with 64GB of storage costs 96,600 Naira on Jumia so that’s something. In terms of additional features that may be hidden sort of, Subtle things you can do is what shows up in your notification shade. That small tiny corner at the top right of your phone you can either make it a Search button to search Google or Settings. I’ll leave it as settings. You also get Quick Ball which is very handy if things like Taking a screenshot, multitasking, going home and locking your device are things you do frequently.

and of course you can even customize or remove and delete which short cuts you have. You can for instance toss in a torch light in there. Then there’s second spaces which is like having a 2-in-1 phone. Or a business and work phone. So I can either unlock the second space with a short L pattern and I’ll see just the default apps or any apps I put there and then first space with long L pattern and my regular day to day apps.

Just like the Note 8 too, spaces also work with fingerprint, For instance my left fingerprint is mapped to the second space and my right fingerprint is mapped to the first space with all my main apps. Now to the cameras of the Redmi Note 8 Pro, wow. Well, just like the Note 8, we also get 5 total cameras on the Redmi Note 8 Pro. There’s a 20MP f2.0 aperture sensor upfront for selfie photos and videos which records at a maximum of 1080p and also 720p, both in 30fps The main 64MP sensor on the back has an aperture of f1.89 and it’s dubbed the ultra-high resolution camera. The second camera is an 8MP 120 degree ultra wide lens, followed by a 2MP macro lens and 2 megapixel depth sensor separated from the sides.

The back camera records in 4k at 30 fps. In the camera app, we get slow motion which shoots at 120, 240, and 960 Frames per second, we also get short video mode, and you can even add music to it while recording but its a maximum of 15 seconds, you’ve got video mode, photo mode with AI, HDR and Macro Modes, 64M camera mode with a huge aspect ratio, Portrait Mode, Night Mode, Panorama and Pro mode. You even get Panorama for the front selfies as well, no night mode in the front of course but we have portrait mode, no 64MP mode, but we get the rest of photo video, short video and no slow motion. The back camera gives you a total of 10x in terms of digital zooming and photo resolutions are at a ridiculously high 9248 by 6936 pixels. So I did a little calculation and wanted to find out how large it is, right.

At 60DPI, I put the figure for the vertical pixels and it was a hundred and fifty four inches. For instance my MacBook Pro is 15 inches diagonally. Imagine taking this side and multiplying it 10 times. That’s how large it will be, pixel for pixel but. How did it look like in real world tests? Wide Angle shots were all the way up to 2X shots looks good.

I did notice some discoloration in the wide angle shots, it was softer and warmer and that’s attributable to it’s lower 8Megapixel In terms of portrait on the back camera though, Note 8 Pro did look miles better than the regular Note 8 both interms of contrast, saturation and the overall colors. Comparing a regular shot to a 64MP shot on the Note 8 Pro seems off at this point. First off, on the phone itself, regular shots only get up to a one time zoom in gallery when you double tap and double tap again. In the case of 64MP shots, when you double tap once, you get a 1x preview and the second time you do that you get a High Definition Preview which lets you see more detail in the shots On the computer there’s also a clear difference between regular shots and the 64MP shots and they did translate in social media posts. I also did notice that the 64MP is slightly brighter than the regular one and of course in terms of size.

On average, it’s 5 times bigger than the regular shots of the same thing in terms of file size. Colors on the Note 8 Pro really pop, greens looked very pleasant and reds were also deep. One small tiny difference to note is that if you turn tags on, you would be able to see which lens took which shot. Like AI vs 64MP cameras. Selfies are plenty sharp, like really sharp of course if you turn off Xiaomi’s default beauty filter.

Portrait selfies are also sharp but you can tell they are software driven because of how I’m separated from the back but in a different situation, it would look pleasant. I did enjoy carrying around the camera but for taking pictures and I think if you’re looking to get it for pictures, it’s a go. In terms of video I’ll start with slow motion.960FPS is the highest slow mo on the Note 8 Pro and video looked smooth and even though it was recorded at that Frame rate, the smartphone compresses it and makes it a whole new video on its own so you can’t slow it down by yourself in a computer for instance if you wanted to edit it but it looked okay if you ignore some detail losses. The Redmi Note 8 Pro can be very good for a vlog where you can record and edit for the most part, 4K video quality on this camera came out really nice and sharp but it’s just capped at 30fps which could be okay for some. One part of the video quality of the camera on this Note 8 Pro in terms of the camera is the stabilization.

Both the Note 8 and 8 Pro as far as I know don’t have stabilization. The Note 8 Pro tries but the Note 8 isn’t just as good and in a rough situation you would get shaky footage. That’s it for my review of the Note 8 Pro, I’ve spent quite some time with this device to make this video for you guys so let me know what you think about it and if there’s anything I missed or any quesitons you might have let me know in the comments section down below. Do like if you enjoyed this video, and hit the subscribe button below so you’ll be notified about when I drop this video. Thank you for watching this one and I’ll talk to you guys in the next one.

Source : Fisayo Fosudo