**The Xiaomi Redmi Phone Review: A Budget Beast with Crazy-Sounding Specifications**

I just witnessed a smartphone charged completely from empty to full in less than 10 minutes that doesn't even feel real. I kind of feel like the phone is lying to me, but I can see the 100% battery in the corner and a sub to the channel would be mean. Blowing the only remaining question mark that remains is whether the performance and this crazy-sounding camera will live up to the hype.

**Performance: A Mid-Range Chip with a Mid-Range Performance**

The Redmi phone is powered by a mid-range chip called the Dimensity 1080, which scores just under half of the top-end phones on benchmarks. This translates to still being able to play every modern game but at closer to the entry-level settings as opposed to the ultra-byei versions. However, this is a very new mid-range chip that does keep the phone very current with features like 5G support and a 200 megapix camera resolution.

**The Camera: A Budget-Beating 200 Megapixel Sensor**

To talk about this what does a budget 200 megapixel camera even mean? Like if you were a non-Tey person, you'd probably take that number to assume this is the best camera in the world. But if you're a techie person like me, you're probably thinking it's just a major marketing ploy made possible by a technicality. The answer is actually somewhere between the two. Smartphone camera sensors are nowhere near big enough to properly take advantage of 200 megapix resolution, but here's the thing because it's shooting for such a high figure that even though it doesn't reach it, it still lands way above most phones in terms of detail.

**The Camera Test: A Side-by-Side Comparison**

To get one thing straight, smartphone camera sensors are nowhere near big enough to properly take advantage of 200 megapix resolution. But here's the side-by-side comparison on the left we have the Redmi using its 200 megapix mode and on the right we have the iPhone 14 Pro Max. I genuinely think you would have a hard time arguing for the iPhone here, this is repeatable, give it pretty much any well-lit scenario and this $300 phone will take a more detailed photo than most flagships on the market simply because of this insane resolution.

**The Camera Limitations: Not a Better Overall Camera System**

Now that's not to say it's a better overall camera system. There are flaws here like the fact that the video quality kind of sucks or that the selfie camera on the front is mediocre. Or that you can basically forget that this is a multi-camera system meaning that while technically as well as that main 200 megapix camera, you do have an 8 megapix ultra-wide and a 2 megapix macro lens for close-ups. The quality gap is so vast partly because the main camera is really good partly because the secondary cameras are really bad.

**The Value Proposition: How Did Xiaomi Do It?**

So while I do think this would be a better phone if it was more balanced, if it had a lower megapixel count but a larger sensor. If it charged a bit slower but had a bigger battery. I definitely can't argue that this is anything but ridiculously great value for hardware.

But how did they do it? To really understand what Xiaomi has done you have to zoom out from the phone and realize that Xiaomi's entire business model operates around a higher volume of sales instead of a higher profit per sale. There are two sides to this one side, which is good for the consumer is that because they're not focused on profit per unit, they can afford to take a lower percentage cut per sale no joke literally 5% profit.

**The Dark Side: A Higher Volume of Sales and Less Software Support**

However, the other side, which is less good for the consumer is that to get the volume of sales their strategy also relies on people upgrading their phones more often. And one of the most effective ways of doing that is to just give your budget phones less software support. Like well this phone will get one major Android update maybe two if you bought a mid-range Samsung right now, there's a good chance you'd get four.

This means that Xiaomi saves on manpower and therefore money which they can also pass on to the consumer and it makes their older phones obsolete faster, encouraging more of those upgrades. This is still a good phone but just remember nothing comes for free.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis Smartphone has a 200 megapix camera a 120 HZ HDR 10 plus display 256 GB of storage 210 wat charging and it costs just over $300 the value proposition is better than quite possibly any other piece of tech on the planet this is xiaomi's redmi note X Discovery Edition and it's a phone so packed with high-end features that it just begs the question how on Earth it's possible we'll get to that but first you get the insert with a clear case on top pretty standard and squidgy then the first a USBC cable and then this 210 W charging brick which is not as big as you might expect given its Preposterous specification and that's because it swapped out the Silicon that most Electronics have traditionally used for the much more efficient material gallium nitride right there's a lot of stuff to show you here but obviously the very first thing we should do is charge the thing so it's completely dead right now so let's plug it into the mains they said this could be charged from Flat in 9 minutes but that kind of sounds too good to be true so we're going to test that theory just for some respected though Google's new pixel 7 Pro supports up to 23 WS of charging power the iPhone 14 pro Max can charge with up to 27 WS of power Samsung's Galaxy s22 Ultra can charge with up to 45 WS these are all $800 plus smartphones so you can understand why I'm taken back by this $330 phone that can charge it up to 210 wats and that unlike those other flagships actually comes with the 210 charging brick but you need to achieve that and this is already where it starts to get a little weird cuz if you search up 200 W charging bricks you will struggle to find a genuine one for less than $150 on its own and even those won't actually be able to send 200 wat of power through a single port like this one can but it's more than that because it's not just that you have to bundle in a powerful charging brick for this phone to be able to receive charge that quickly xiaomi have also had to split the 4,300 mAh battery into two separate cells and install no less than three dedicated chips within it to be able to manage all of that juice coming in as for how fast all of this makes the charging well since I plugged it in about 3 minutes ago we are on 38% and it's literally going up in front of my eyes it's on 40 how many iPhone cables would that be the equivalent of see how long it takes to get to 100 and while it does that we need to talk about the rest of it because even putting the charging aside the redmi note 12 Discovery is quite a unique specimen I mean for starters the design this phone is bang on halfway between the flat iPhone like aesthetic that a lot of companies have started jumping on recently and the more traditional curved back and it's kind of The Best of Both Worlds it's got that sharp look without that sharp feel it's not particularly luxurious it's basically glass on the front and back and then plastic in the middle and I didn't go as far as to say that the color and the Finish are boring considering how interesting the phone itself is but nonetheless it's comfortable because the shape makes a lot of sense and it is surprisingly friendly to the consumer they've put an IR blaster on top there's a side mounted fingerprint scanner with which is my favorite type of fingerprint scanner the phone has a headphone jack plus it's officially certified as ip53 water and dust resistant which is one of the easiest things to skip when you're trying to keep to a budget and even as you look around the rest of the phone's features it's not massively crippled in any way only further begging the question of how this thing is like £280 here in the UK Which is less than half of the price of the iPhone SE with the same amount of storage and no charger like the screen is a nice big flat 1080p 120 HZ panel that let's put it this way has enough contrast that it Blends into the physical borders of the phone and almost completely hides the camera when you've got it up against a black background it has a slightly oversharpened look to it which comes out when watching videos but that's standard for phones this price there's a set of stereo speakers one on the front that uses the phone's earpiece and then a more powerful one at the bottom and they're not bad either even the software has been really strong for me you know I was half expecting it to be riddled with ads to make up for the low cost of the phone but I haven't seen a single one and the time that I've spent with this has given me the real chance to appreciate some of the more fun nuances of the Miu Y3 Android skin that it runs on like for the photo editor they have built into the gallery it's actually insane the amount of options it gives you it's got everything from object removal people removal Shadow removal to the ability to swap out the sky using AI make it look like it was snowing to make a daytime shot look like it was taken at nighttime this is the kind of really nerdy stuff that I get completely lost in I've been messing around with all the sidebar features and it's taken till now for me to realize it gives you an option that allows you to play YouTube videos with your screen off which is usually meant to be a YouTube premium feature but you can do it for free here Mii has one of the most painless casting features you just tap a button and you can be on just about any Smart TV of any brand with nothing extra required plus the option to hide all your embarrassing notifications from showing up on the TV my point being that software is yet another thing that isn't lacking here there's fundamentally no difference between what you can do on a $300 xiaomi phone and what you can do on a $1,000 XI phone or a 99 come on come on come on 100 okay stop timer 9 minutes 50 okay so they might have used some slightly favorable rounding but I just witnessed a smartphone charged completely from empty to full in less than 10 minutes that doesn't even feel real I kind of feel like the phone is lying to me but I can see the 100% battery in the corner and a sub to the channel would be mean blowing the only remaining question marks then are the performance and this crazy sounding camera and the performance is pretty good this redmi is powered by a mid-range chip called the dimensity 1080 and it scores just under half of the top end phones on benchmarks which translates to still being able to play every modern game but at closer to the entry level settings as opposed to the ultra beyi versions however because this is a very new mid-range chip it does keep the phone very current with features like it's the reason why this phone can have not one but two 5G Sims although how much of a perk really is that it gives it upload and download speeds that very much keep up with current flagships plus it's what allows this phone to even support a 200 megapix camera resolution and so before we get to how xiaomi's made this thing so affordable we should talk about this what does a budget 200 megapixel camera even mean like if you were a non- Tey person you'd probably take that number to assume this is the best camera in the world but if you're a techie person like me you're probably thinking it's just a major marketing Ploy made possible by a technicality but the answer is actually somewhere between the two okay to get one thing straight smartphone camera sensors are nowhere near big enough to properly take advantage of 200 megap of resolution but here's the thing because it's shooting for such a high figure then even though doesn't reach it it still lands way above most phones in terms of detail like check this side by side on the left we have the redmi using its 200 megapix mode on the right we have the iPhone 14 pro Max and I can't believe I'm saying this but I genuinely think you would have a hard time arguing for the iPhone here and this is repeatable give it pretty much any well-lit scenario and this $300 phone will take a more detailed photo than most flagships on the market simply because of this insane resolution now that's not to say it's a better overall camera system there there's a lot of flaws here like the fact that the video quality kind of sucks or that the selfie camera on the front is mediocre or that you can basically forget that this is a multi- camera system meaning that while technically as well as that main 200 megapix camera you do have an 8 megapix Ultra wide and a 2 megapix macro lens for close-ups the quality gap is so vast partly because the main camera is really good partly because the secondary cameras are really bad that you will almost always just be better off taking a few steps back or a few steps forward and using the main camera for everything but still the fact that than 30% of my photos this is a clear-cut winner versus my iPhone 14 pro Max it is kind of insane so while I do think this would be a better phone if it was more balanced if it had a lower megapixel count but a larger sensor if it charged a bit slower but had a bigger battery I definitely can't argue that this is anything but ridiculously Great Value Hardware so how did they do it for $330 well you won't find out by looking at the phone to really understand what they've done you have to zoom out from that and realize that xiaomi's entire business model operates around a higher volume of sales instead of a higher profit per sale and there's two sides to this one side which is good for the consumer is that because they're not focused on profit per unit they can afford to take a lower percentage cut per sale no joke literally 5% profit but then the other side which is less good for the consumer is that to get the volume of sales their strategy also relies on people upgrading their phones more often and one of the most effective ways of doing that is to just give your budget phones less software support so like well this phone will get one m major Android update maybe two if you bought a mid-range Samsung right now there's a good chance you'd get four which saves xiaomi a lot of Manpower and therefore money which they can also pass on to the consumer and it makes their older phones obsolete faster encouraging more of those upgrades this is still a good phone but just remember nothing comes for free to see why 5G kind of sucks right now that video is herethis Smartphone has a 200 megapix camera a 120 HZ HDR 10 plus display 256 GB of storage 210 wat charging and it costs just over $300 the value proposition is better than quite possibly any other piece of tech on the planet this is xiaomi's redmi note X Discovery Edition and it's a phone so packed with high-end features that it just begs the question how on Earth it's possible we'll get to that but first you get the insert with a clear case on top pretty standard and squidgy then the first a USBC cable and then this 210 W charging brick which is not as big as you might expect given its Preposterous specification and that's because it swapped out the Silicon that most Electronics have traditionally used for the much more efficient material gallium nitride right there's a lot of stuff to show you here but obviously the very first thing we should do is charge the thing so it's completely dead right now so let's plug it into the mains they said this could be charged from Flat in 9 minutes but that kind of sounds too good to be true so we're going to test that theory just for some respected though Google's new pixel 7 Pro supports up to 23 WS of charging power the iPhone 14 pro Max can charge with up to 27 WS of power Samsung's Galaxy s22 Ultra can charge with up to 45 WS these are all $800 plus smartphones so you can understand why I'm taken back by this $330 phone that can charge it up to 210 wats and that unlike those other flagships actually comes with the 210 charging brick but you need to achieve that and this is already where it starts to get a little weird cuz if you search up 200 W charging bricks you will struggle to find a genuine one for less than $150 on its own and even those won't actually be able to send 200 wat of power through a single port like this one can but it's more than that because it's not just that you have to bundle in a powerful charging brick for this phone to be able to receive charge that quickly xiaomi have also had to split the 4,300 mAh battery into two separate cells and install no less than three dedicated chips within it to be able to manage all of that juice coming in as for how fast all of this makes the charging well since I plugged it in about 3 minutes ago we are on 38% and it's literally going up in front of my eyes it's on 40 how many iPhone cables would that be the equivalent of see how long it takes to get to 100 and while it does that we need to talk about the rest of it because even putting the charging aside the redmi note 12 Discovery is quite a unique specimen I mean for starters the design this phone is bang on halfway between the flat iPhone like aesthetic that a lot of companies have started jumping on recently and the more traditional curved back and it's kind of The Best of Both Worlds it's got that sharp look without that sharp feel it's not particularly luxurious it's basically glass on the front and back and then plastic in the middle and I didn't go as far as to say that the color and the Finish are boring considering how interesting the phone itself is but nonetheless it's comfortable because the shape makes a lot of sense and it is surprisingly friendly to the consumer they've put an IR blaster on top there's a side mounted fingerprint scanner with which is my favorite type of fingerprint scanner the phone has a headphone jack plus it's officially certified as ip53 water and dust resistant which is one of the easiest things to skip when you're trying to keep to a budget and even as you look around the rest of the phone's features it's not massively crippled in any way only further begging the question of how this thing is like £280 here in the UK Which is less than half of the price of the iPhone SE with the same amount of storage and no charger like the screen is a nice big flat 1080p 120 HZ panel that let's put it this way has enough contrast that it Blends into the physical borders of the phone and almost completely hides the camera when you've got it up against a black background it has a slightly oversharpened look to it which comes out when watching videos but that's standard for phones this price there's a set of stereo speakers one on the front that uses the phone's earpiece and then a more powerful one at the bottom and they're not bad either even the software has been really strong for me you know I was half expecting it to be riddled with ads to make up for the low cost of the phone but I haven't seen a single one and the time that I've spent with this has given me the real chance to appreciate some of the more fun nuances of the Miu Y3 Android skin that it runs on like for the photo editor they have built into the gallery it's actually insane the amount of options it gives you it's got everything from object removal people removal Shadow removal to the ability to swap out the sky using AI make it look like it was snowing to make a daytime shot look like it was taken at nighttime this is the kind of really nerdy stuff that I get completely lost in I've been messing around with all the sidebar features and it's taken till now for me to realize it gives you an option that allows you to play YouTube videos with your screen off which is usually meant to be a YouTube premium feature but you can do it for free here Mii has one of the most painless casting features you just tap a button and you can be on just about any Smart TV of any brand with nothing extra required plus the option to hide all your embarrassing notifications from showing up on the TV my point being that software is yet another thing that isn't lacking here there's fundamentally no difference between what you can do on a $300 xiaomi phone and what you can do on a $1,000 XI phone or a 99 come on come on come on 100 okay stop timer 9 minutes 50 okay so they might have used some slightly favorable rounding but I just witnessed a smartphone charged completely from empty to full in less than 10 minutes that doesn't even feel real I kind of feel like the phone is lying to me but I can see the 100% battery in the corner and a sub to the channel would be mean blowing the only remaining question marks then are the performance and this crazy sounding camera and the performance is pretty good this redmi is powered by a mid-range chip called the dimensity 1080 and it scores just under half of the top end phones on benchmarks which translates to still being able to play every modern game but at closer to the entry level settings as opposed to the ultra beyi versions however because this is a very new mid-range chip it does keep the phone very current with features like it's the reason why this phone can have not one but two 5G Sims although how much of a perk really is that it gives it upload and download speeds that very much keep up with current flagships plus it's what allows this phone to even support a 200 megapix camera resolution and so before we get to how xiaomi's made this thing so affordable we should talk about this what does a budget 200 megapixel camera even mean like if you were a non- Tey person you'd probably take that number to assume this is the best camera in the world but if you're a techie person like me you're probably thinking it's just a major marketing Ploy made possible by a technicality but the answer is actually somewhere between the two okay to get one thing straight smartphone camera sensors are nowhere near big enough to properly take advantage of 200 megap of resolution but here's the thing because it's shooting for such a high figure then even though doesn't reach it it still lands way above most phones in terms of detail like check this side by side on the left we have the redmi using its 200 megapix mode on the right we have the iPhone 14 pro Max and I can't believe I'm saying this but I genuinely think you would have a hard time arguing for the iPhone here and this is repeatable give it pretty much any well-lit scenario and this $300 phone will take a more detailed photo than most flagships on the market simply because of this insane resolution now that's not to say it's a better overall camera system there there's a lot of flaws here like the fact that the video quality kind of sucks or that the selfie camera on the front is mediocre or that you can basically forget that this is a multi- camera system meaning that while technically as well as that main 200 megapix camera you do have an 8 megapix Ultra wide and a 2 megapix macro lens for close-ups the quality gap is so vast partly because the main camera is really good partly because the secondary cameras are really bad that you will almost always just be better off taking a few steps back or a few steps forward and using the main camera for everything but still the fact that than 30% of my photos this is a clear-cut winner versus my iPhone 14 pro Max it is kind of insane so while I do think this would be a better phone if it was more balanced if it had a lower megapixel count but a larger sensor if it charged a bit slower but had a bigger battery I definitely can't argue that this is anything but ridiculously Great Value Hardware so how did they do it for $330 well you won't find out by looking at the phone to really understand what they've done you have to zoom out from that and realize that xiaomi's entire business model operates around a higher volume of sales instead of a higher profit per sale and there's two sides to this one side which is good for the consumer is that because they're not focused on profit per unit they can afford to take a lower percentage cut per sale no joke literally 5% profit but then the other side which is less good for the consumer is that to get the volume of sales their strategy also relies on people upgrading their phones more often and one of the most effective ways of doing that is to just give your budget phones less software support so like well this phone will get one m major Android update maybe two if you bought a mid-range Samsung right now there's a good chance you'd get four which saves xiaomi a lot of Manpower and therefore money which they can also pass on to the consumer and it makes their older phones obsolete faster encouraging more of those upgrades this is still a good phone but just remember nothing comes for free to see why 5G kind of sucks right now that video is here\n"