The Redmi Note 5 Pro is the first smartphone to have Qualcomm's newest Snapdragon 636 processor. While the 600-series has largely been rather here nor there, things are now starting to look up a little. The reason for that is the inclusion of the semi-custom Kryo 260 CPU, which is a combination of 4x Cortex-A73 and 4x Cortex-A53 CPU cores from ARM. It's the A73 part that really excites us, as that is exactly what's found inside the more powerful Kryo 280 on the Snapdragon 835.
While last year's Redmi Note 4 was no slouch, it did lack some of oomph from the Snapdragon 650 running Redmi Note 3 and was more serviceable than exciting. But the Snapdragon 636 has us excited again, not just for the Redmi Note 5 Pro but for all the mid-range devices that will be shipping with it in future.
Using the Redmi Note 5 Pro for a while reassured us that our excitement was well grounded. The performance on this device is a noticeably improved over its predecessor and genuinely good for most parts. There were times when someone could have told us there was a Snapdragon 835 inside and we would have believed with little hesitation. Other times, you do see some hitches while scrolling or opening apps but this could easily be fixed with some more optimization down the line.
Some of the credit for the performance likely also goes to the use of the more expensive LPDDR4X memory, which is an inspired choice, especially at a time when memory prices worldwide have gone up considerably.
Graphics performance has also seen a small improvement over its predecessor. It's not quite the same leap we saw over on the CPU side but the GPU is now powerful enough to play almost every game you throw at it perfectly fine. The device also maintains its temperature quite well during gaming and we didn't notice any undue heating.
We tried running our usual suite of benchmarks but for some reason, a lot of them refused to run on our test unit, so we only have limited results available at the moment.
Higher is better
Higher is better
Higher is better
Higher is better
Higher is better
Our review unit had no issues with call quality and network performance and both worked admirably. Both the earpiece and the loudspeaker are perfectly clear for calls and the loudspeaker is loud enough for ringtones but doesn't sound especially good for music.
It's good to see the Redmi series step up to Wi-Fi 802.11ac and Bluetooth 5.0, even though this is exclusive to just this particular model for now. IR continues to be part of these devices and the Mi Remote app works great with a bunch of devices. The phone also has a headphone jack as well as an FM radio.
One major bummer is the continued presence of microUSB, which really should have no place in the year 2018. Another issue is the continued use of hybrid SIM slot, which means you can't use two SIM cards if you choose to have a microSD card or vice versa. The 64GB storage on the Pro takes some edge out of this but still, we would like to see dedicated dual SIM and microSD slots as we see on some of the competition.
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