Xiaomi Redmi Note 10 Pro long-term review

Speakers

The Redmi Note 10 Pro has perfectly decent stereo speakers that do the job very well without really being the best at anything. They're not the loudest we've ever heard, but they're going to be good enough for most use cases (aside from when you are in loud environments), and they're not the best sounding we've ever heard by any stretch of the imagination but they're not bad either.

One thing to note is that while the earpiece pulls double duty as the second speaker, there's an additional opening in the top of the frame for sound to go out of. This enhances the way things sound when you're consuming media, but it also means that when you're on a phone call there's more leakage from the other side of the call than you'd get from a device with just an earpiece grille up top.

Proximity sensor

Speaking of calls, the proximity sensor is slow but decently reliable. The slowness may put you off, though, as sometimes it takes around a second or two for it to do its thing and change the screen's state. We've never had it randomly not work on us, but that slowness is something you need to keep in mind.

If for the first second or two after you put the phone back to your ear you aren't very careful, you may find that your face has touched something on the screen inadvertently. The easy solution to this is to hold the screen away from your face for the first second or two, and then the screen finally turns off, and you're safe.

The proximity sensor's working area also seems to be quite small, so you'll have to be rather precise with positioning the upper part of the phone close to your ear, otherwise, the sensor might think the phone is away and you need the screen turned on. We'd be careful about propping up the phone between your shoulder and face "hands-free" as it were since in this scenario the sensor does tend to turn the screen on (after the aforementioned delay) a lot of times - and that results in plenty of accidental face-touches (for lack of a better term).

Connectivity issues

While we haven't had any issues with Bluetooth (reconnecting to previously paired devices has historically been a problem for most midrange smartphones we tested, but thankfully not this one), we did consistently run into some niggles with Wi-Fi connectivity.

In places where no other phone has had problems with an Internet connection, the Redmi Note 10 Pro simply refused to load anything. It was still connected to our Wi-Fi network, mind you, and showing about 50% signal, but no data was traveling either way. Sometimes the phone figured this out itself and switched us to mobile data, but most times we would have to manually turn off Wi-Fi to get access to the Internet again.

This never happened in the same room as the router but did consistently happen in another room that's about 10m away from the router (and with two walls between them). Again, we want to stress that we have had no such problems, in the same spots, with any other phone - and we've been using the same router for years.

This might be one of those rare instances where two pieces of Wi-Fi equipment for whatever reason don't talk well to each other (a much more prevalent issue many years back), or something could be wrong only with our specific Redmi Note 10 Pro review unit. But we thought we'd mention it even so, as it could also be a more widespread problem with this phone model.

Overall, we'd recommend you only get it if you don't mind something like this happening for you. For us, it was just a mere annoyance as our mobile data plan is unlimited, but if yours is capped you may find it more of a problem.

Biometrics

Although the Redmi Note 10 Pro has an AMOLED screen, it has a side-mounted fingerprint sensor just like its predecessor, the Redmi Note 9 Pro, which sported an LCD. This is probably down to the price differential between such a capacitive sensor and an under-display one, we assume. Maybe by the time the Redmi Note 11 Pro launches the under-display ones will go down enough in price to be included.

Anyway, the fingerprint scanner on offer here is pretty much the standard side-mounted fare for this day and age. For some people it seems to be more reliable than for others, and this reviewer is unfortunately in the latter camp, finding that such sensors are less reliable than most in-display ones. Keep in mind that fingers are quite unique, so this may not apply to yours at all.

We think the issue is how narrow the sensor necessarily has to be in order to fit inside the power button in a seamless fashion. This means you need to take extra care when enrolling your fingers to cover as much surface area as possible, otherwise there will be no stored patterns to recognize.

Despite doing this very carefully, we still found that we had to re-touch the sensor around 4 out of 10 times. That gives a general reliability of about 60%, which is very bad. We've gotten used to it, but can't say we like it. Again, your mileage may vary significantly on this one, which is why we're not being (even) more critical.

And it's not just this particular sensor in this particular phone - all recent side-mounted ones have had a similar bad behavior for this reviewer, although the others we tested so far were more like 80-90% reliable from the first try. This one does stand out as being even less so.

Biometrics settings

As usual, you can decide if you want to only touch the power button for your fingerprint to be scanned, or press it. And also as usual, we went with the latter option, because it feels much more natural that way - after all, pressing the power button to wake up the screen is a very automatic thing we do multiple times a day. This way, there's the added benefit of the unlocking happening at that time too.

Face unlocking is present but as you'd expect it's only using the selfie camera and thus offers way less security than the fingerprint scanner. It is fast, though, for what it's worth - but since you're usually pressing the power button to trigger face unlocking, you see how this can be very redundant, since pressing that button also triggers the fingerprint scanning.

Vibration motor

The Redmi Note 10 Pro has a perfectly average vibration motor that's absolutely nothing to write home about. This is definitely not one of those high-end ones used even in some 'flagship killer' type devices nowadays. It's there if you need it, but you will definitely not be amazed by the vibrations it produces. This was clearly one area where costs needed to be cut in order to get the phone to its price.

Haptic feedback settings

MIUI still has some gentle nudge-vibrations here and there throughout the UI, but they seem to be less than on other models, and we assume this is because of the vibration motor here - since it's not among the best, you don't get the same feeling of physicality when encountering one of those 'nudges' as you do on higher-end Xiaomi devices.

Overall then - the vibration motor is there, it works, but you will definitely not remember it as contributing in a great way to the experience of using the phone.