Redmi Note 8 Review & Unboxing (In-Depth Full Review)

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthree or four weeks ago I reviewed this the xiaomi redmi note 8 pro happen to like it it is a very good phone but we've got the cheaper version that's been in the studio for a week now this is the redmi note 8 that i've been testing and using it has the snapdragon 665 so not using media check now there was a lot of media tech hate in the review of the ribbon note 8 pro a lot of people just don't want to touch media tech and I can completely understand why when you look at their previous gen chips they were never really that good compared to their Qualcomm counterparts now there are still some things that remain like the efficiency of the chips you notice that Qualcomm is going to be better now is there a huge difference between both of these phones I will do some comparisons just small ones in this particular video here but it is after all my review of the ribbing Note 8 so let's check this one out in depth in detail and see if it's a worthy phone and is it worth the money to go for the pro or should you actually get the Qualcomm mobile instead so every Note 8 here this is a lone unit that was provided to me from trading change in comm and we've got a TPU case in the box which is good that manufacturers are pretty much always now including cases straight out of the box for their phones they do realize that they're covered with glasses slippery so we've got decent protection there so we have an 18 watt charger it will fully charge the phone in 1 hour and 52 minutes type-c cable and instruction leaflet sintel let's first take a look at the build of the phone so we have apparently Gorilla Glass 5 front and back and I like this effect we head you can see that a wave effect on the glass and it does have 2.5 D edges so it doesn't feel sharp in hand or anything like that rip me branding and I love the way that it shifts from this purple at the bottom into a blueish almost green look there is quite unique now the cameras here we've got four of them so we have an ultra wine which is 8 megapixels at the very top below that is the 48 megapixel sensor it doesn't have any optical image stabilization and then we have 2 2 megapixel sensors so one is just for macro shots so very low resolution and then we have the other one just for depth information for your portrait photos there is a dual tone LED flash and you can see the rare capacitive always-on fingerprint reader so this phone is eight point six millimeters thick with the camera bulge it has been ten point four millimeters so we've got an IR transmitter there on the top and the secondary mic and then along the bottom here singled out speaker so the no jus loudspeakers here type C port and what looks like jewel microphones I believe is just one microphone but it's got two holes there and a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack so the bezels are not the slimmest they've taken the advantage of their chin size here to put the actual ring me branding in here with a blue accent around it and on the side there I do actually like this look it's a little bit different from what you typically see and so many phones now they just all look like clones of each other so they're separated out and makes it look just a little different what a drop notch that houses our 13 megapixel camera than f 2.0 aperture just above it's an earpiece now this earpiece outputs normal kind of quality and I don't have any complaints with call quality with this phone it sounds fine to me top left side of the phone you'll find our sim tray so it's metal reinforced it does have a guest get around it and this is really good we've got a micro SD card slot there but it will also take at the same time to nano SIM so no more having to give up one of those SIM cards you can run both and the micro sd all at the same time now the phone does have a status LED that's in the top left or the top bezel and you'll see that when I plug it in it'll come on just a tiny little light there and it goes off once you have fully charged and one hour and 51 minutes approximately then then just leaves our buttons which on the right hand side they're very easy to access and they don't rattle overall the build quality is good it's a solid well put-together phone now this is to be expected of course because they really note a pro is a more expensive phone but to me it has a superior screen on it and it's not just the brightness it's also the color reproduction that you get with it so maximum brightness on the Ruby note 8 Pro is 490 Lux approximately versus the about 360 we're getting on the redmi note 8 so there's a much duller screen and when you take a look at their overall build quality I like the way they've done things here with the Remmy Note 8 Pro having the cameras in I think just looks a little bit better but not only that it's got the curved rear glass as well which in hand just makes the phone feel a little better to hold the screen gamer on the note eight comes out to be around about 1.8 here - almost - ideally it should be 2.2 but most mobile phones will not have this spot on especially out of the box calibration so this is not actually a bad screen don't get me wrong for an IPS panel in this category of phone it's quite good because I'm not seeing the shadowing issues on the corners around the water-drop notch that you used to see and especially the first phones from Xiaomi to have IPS panels with that water-drop notch it's not really that bad but you do notice the difference between the provision and that is course understandable now ROM performance is something that I'm not happy at all with because it's just not well optimised you see a lot of full screen gesture leg and stutters when you multitask sometimes for example you bring up Playstore and you just see that things can be a little bit choppy at times now where I've noticed it the most is when the phone hasn't been used for say one hour it's in a deep sleep you wake it up you unlock it and then you go to swipe up to home to apps and you can even see then some of the animations it's just not there it should be much much more fluid than what it is it's not the chipsets fault clearly it is the ROM now notifications they should be showing at the top here but they are not we've got that same issue yet again that is back I think it was fixed with some of the beta roms so if I go to it install for example asphalt 9 here ok you'll see then that it's going to show up the top there's all my notifications there back again now just swipe up here ok that wasn't too bad game with the animations alright so let's run through a couple of things so when you first get the phone you're gonna have a little bit of bloatware and that's not that great but most of it you can actually remove so I've got of course the 128 gigabyte version here you get 110 gigabytes free and of course you can use microSD so that is great dear I'm on the latest firmware by the way at the time of this video so no Widevine level one suit unfortunately so that translates into Netflix Amazon Prime video and other streaming services all stuck in stand definition hopefully a firmware update will fix this now this is really good camera API to support is level 3 the maximum so Google camera ports will be working i think the reports out this for this one already and here we've got gps so it works just like any other qualcomm phone you're gonna get accuracy around three to four meters and no real issues to report it was very quick to get lock internal storage is not the fastest as you can see but it's not going to bottleneck the system here install random reads and writes they're actually pretty good for this price range of phone here is our antutu scores so now this is the entry to version 8 now Google Play Store is only serving us this version here so schools are a little different and off and wireless okay why is performance isn't amazing but the game for what it is this phone for its price it's it's actually ok you can go to the other side of the apartment here the studio and I'm still getting over the 100 meters per second I like to see oh that's just gaming call of duty won another round that shouldn't be in here code most importantly battery life very good ok screen is always going to be your biggest hardware consumer of course screen of time it's a little hard to make out there but eight hours so very good you can probably squeeze this out to nine this was over the space of just one day of quite heavy use you can see I was gaming a lot Call of Duty I'm kind of addicted to the game and that is why I wouldn't call this your normal kind of use it's very heavy but you can see there is a bit of a wakelock issue so it keeps waking up here this was during the night so I lift it when I went to sleep to see how much I would lose in terms of better life and there's a bit of standby drain issue I lost it was 8% overnight and most phones would be about half of that or maybe 5% so there's something going on within the ROM that's causing it to not go into a deep sleep now audio something that is actually quite good here on this shell me the 3.5 millimeter output I've got really no complaints with it sounds great to me no twelve limbs and we do have just a single loudspeaker you kind of expect that for what this phone is the price of it so here's a sample now out that loudspeaker just put some audio and a little bit of voice and some music and it does sound good to me it's lacking a little bit as expected but your ringtones do come through very loud for receiving calls call quality sounds good as mention with the earpiece that no problems if it was qc4 spec then it would be one hour we get a 3.52 type C adapter so for gaming performance this is Call of Duty now set it on to the max framerate which should be I believe 60 frames per second or 45 I think it's 60 here on high now very high does get a little bit more stutters and lag so I wouldn't recommend it as high is gonna run actually fine I've been able to win complete rounds here with Battle Royale but let's take a look at the performance so the performance overall is good you're able to get kills run around just fine you will see the occasional little frame dip now and then that it does trigger some lag on the high settings because the graphics after I mean look at it very visually demanding so just moving around there it's a little choppy and especially when you zoom in but overall I think the high setting is probably the setting to go for if you want the good visuals but of course if you want the improved framerate then lower things down let's take a look now at a more demanding game and that is shadow gun legends which can really choke on some mobiles so shadow gun legends I've noticed that it's running on high 60 frames per second reasonably well but you will see some noticeable just frame dips and stutter like right now you can probably see it all these enemies here shooting at me it's a little choppy so I would lower the sitting down on this game to medium and for those asking about pub G that pub G is gonna run fine on this but just keep it on lower settings don't force it onto the high settings so real gaming performance for the type of mobile and the phone it is it's to be expected it's not the best but you can still play all those new demanding games out there and that's the main thing now onto the face unlocking and fingerprint reader so look at it tap and you can see it was a little slow just then do it one more time there we go okay so it normally takes about a second it's not as fast as the Remi Note 8 Pro I've noticed right there same goes for the fingerprint reader so I will tap it now you can see that was a good second ok a little bit faster then one more time alright it's not too bad it's just not the fastest I have seen from Xiaomi a brief look now at our camera apps it's pretty straightforward show me here if you want the macro sensor then you tap this right here and if you want that ultra wide you tap this little button there so that brings out the ultra wide and if you want to times digital that's straightforward 48 megapixel mode and night-shot mode so I'm gonna quickly compare here they really note 8 Pro to their note 8 because I know a lot of people gonna ask this now that's just a low-light comparison daylight they're pretty much the same really not a huge difference I'd have to say that I think daylight photos are actually better on the note 8 pro but low-light you can see they're trading blows here for selfie shots in lower light conditions the Remmy note 8 pro is going to get the win but you can see here we know 8 Pro with the rear camera does have a lot of noise in this photo so though kind of trading blows in low light both of them have terrible night shot photography I think I don't think they're that good compared to other brands out there but hey find yourself a working google camp or if you want improved low-light photography so here are some samples now shot on the note 8 video stills and a few more low-light samples so this is a sample with the rear camera here so we get 4k 30 frames per second maximum no 4k 60 and unfortunately we do not have any electronic image stabilization with 4k only with 1080p and 720p footage which is unfortunate I'm seeing a lot of us with Shomi phones they just don't seem to want to enable it I mean it is enabled in the settings the other thing - the audio quality it's okay but the bitrate could certainly be a little bit better and possibly maybe better microphones because their competitors like real me are definitely pushing forward with better audio quality than this so the focus that's working okay now a front-facing video it's just 1080p maximum here at again no electronic image stabilization which hopefully with a firmware update Xiaomi will add alright go so you saw from the camera performance there when I did that little short comparison just for the low-light because that's where things get a little bit more tricky they kind of trade blows there's a lot more noise I noticed in some of the readme note 8 pro shots but then when you hate take a look at the Remi Note 8 it wasn't quite as good or as detailed with selfies at least in low-light notes so they are kind of similar we've got 48 megapixels 64 64 more megapixels doesn't actually always mean it's better in my experience but the phones I've used now with the IMX 5 8 6 which is the 48 megapixel sensor sensor I find it's actually bitter what's normally better when it has optical image stabilization enabled with it as well but this phone doesn't have it neither these do here so we get the typical Xiaomi problems and there is no Widevine level search one to netflix and standard definition with the redmi note 8 also with this one too let's focus more on the of course no date after all it's the review of this phone that I'm talking about so the better life I think it's pretty good but the wrong performance is definitely a little bit stuttering and laggy now this is probably the worst I've seen EU wait in running and some time and it's not the chipset that's to blame it's just show me so there'll be some firmware updates I'm sure in the works coming that will probably correct this now the electronic image stabilization missing on the front facing camera missing in 4k it's there for 1080p but why can they not enable that I don't know the audio quality is a little bit scratchy in video and we're not seeing notifications at least in the current state is phone with the icons at the top sometimes they show other times they don't as I showed you through the settings of the ROM that it is enabled but it's just the performance that's really leading it down the optimization that show-me needs to figure out I rule it's got a nice screen but if we're talking about comparing both of these the extra you have to pay for the rim you know a pro I believe is well worth it because the performance is just day and night here this one is so much smoother it's current software state that is the firmware that's on there is just running so much better you also have a more potent chipset and for the Indians out there ranting on about overheating issues but for them to get warm gaming this one gets a little warmer but as I pointed out with my mini videos on the room you know eight pro so check the channel for that too as well that it's really not actually an issue so for me it's a no-brainer if you've got the cash get the pro version over just the normal note 8 because it is far superior in almost every single way there and wait for the Google camera ports to improve that terrible low-light photography their night mode that you get them both of these is quite poor really when you pair it to other manufacturers even in this segment real me they are doing low-light photography a lot better they're also doing video audio much better so there's good competition going on Shami needs to step up their game in terms of software correct their bugs and prove their performance thank you so much for watching this review remember I do have a review of this one so check it out in the channel and if you are new here and you like this detailed lengthy review then subscribe to the channel and able and I'll see you back in the channel with the next videothree or four weeks ago I reviewed this the xiaomi redmi note 8 pro happen to like it it is a very good phone but we've got the cheaper version that's been in the studio for a week now this is the redmi note 8 that i've been testing and using it has the snapdragon 665 so not using media check now there was a lot of media tech hate in the review of the ribbon note 8 pro a lot of people just don't want to touch media tech and I can completely understand why when you look at their previous gen chips they were never really that good compared to their Qualcomm counterparts now there are still some things that remain like the efficiency of the chips you notice that Qualcomm is going to be better now is there a huge difference between both of these phones I will do some comparisons just small ones in this particular video here but it is after all my review of the ribbing Note 8 so let's check this one out in depth in detail and see if it's a worthy phone and is it worth the money to go for the pro or should you actually get the Qualcomm mobile instead so every Note 8 here this is a lone unit that was provided to me from trading change in comm and we've got a TPU case in the box which is good that manufacturers are pretty much always now including cases straight out of the box for their phones they do realize that they're covered with glasses slippery so we've got decent protection there so we have an 18 watt charger it will fully charge the phone in 1 hour and 52 minutes type-c cable and instruction leaflet sintel let's first take a look at the build of the phone so we have apparently Gorilla Glass 5 front and back and I like this effect we head you can see that a wave effect on the glass and it does have 2.5 D edges so it doesn't feel sharp in hand or anything like that rip me branding and I love the way that it shifts from this purple at the bottom into a blueish almost green look there is quite unique now the cameras here we've got four of them so we have an ultra wine which is 8 megapixels at the very top below that is the 48 megapixel sensor it doesn't have any optical image stabilization and then we have 2 2 megapixel sensors so one is just for macro shots so very low resolution and then we have the other one just for depth information for your portrait photos there is a dual tone LED flash and you can see the rare capacitive always-on fingerprint reader so this phone is eight point six millimeters thick with the camera bulge it has been ten point four millimeters so we've got an IR transmitter there on the top and the secondary mic and then along the bottom here singled out speaker so the no jus loudspeakers here type C port and what looks like jewel microphones I believe is just one microphone but it's got two holes there and a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack so the bezels are not the slimmest they've taken the advantage of their chin size here to put the actual ring me branding in here with a blue accent around it and on the side there I do actually like this look it's a little bit different from what you typically see and so many phones now they just all look like clones of each other so they're separated out and makes it look just a little different what a drop notch that houses our 13 megapixel camera than f 2.0 aperture just above it's an earpiece now this earpiece outputs normal kind of quality and I don't have any complaints with call quality with this phone it sounds fine to me top left side of the phone you'll find our sim tray so it's metal reinforced it does have a guest get around it and this is really good we've got a micro SD card slot there but it will also take at the same time to nano SIM so no more having to give up one of those SIM cards you can run both and the micro sd all at the same time now the phone does have a status LED that's in the top left or the top bezel and you'll see that when I plug it in it'll come on just a tiny little light there and it goes off once you have fully charged and one hour and 51 minutes approximately then then just leaves our buttons which on the right hand side they're very easy to access and they don't rattle overall the build quality is good it's a solid well put-together phone now this is to be expected of course because they really note a pro is a more expensive phone but to me it has a superior screen on it and it's not just the brightness it's also the color reproduction that you get with it so maximum brightness on the Ruby note 8 Pro is 490 Lux approximately versus the about 360 we're getting on the redmi note 8 so there's a much duller screen and when you take a look at their overall build quality I like the way they've done things here with the Remmy Note 8 Pro having the cameras in I think just looks a little bit better but not only that it's got the curved rear glass as well which in hand just makes the phone feel a little better to hold the screen gamer on the note eight comes out to be around about 1.8 here - almost - ideally it should be 2.2 but most mobile phones will not have this spot on especially out of the box calibration so this is not actually a bad screen don't get me wrong for an IPS panel in this category of phone it's quite good because I'm not seeing the shadowing issues on the corners around the water-drop notch that you used to see and especially the first phones from Xiaomi to have IPS panels with that water-drop notch it's not really that bad but you do notice the difference between the provision and that is course understandable now ROM performance is something that I'm not happy at all with because it's just not well optimised you see a lot of full screen gesture leg and stutters when you multitask sometimes for example you bring up Playstore and you just see that things can be a little bit choppy at times now where I've noticed it the most is when the phone hasn't been used for say one hour it's in a deep sleep you wake it up you unlock it and then you go to swipe up to home to apps and you can even see then some of the animations it's just not there it should be much much more fluid than what it is it's not the chipsets fault clearly it is the ROM now notifications they should be showing at the top here but they are not we've got that same issue yet again that is back I think it was fixed with some of the beta roms so if I go to it install for example asphalt 9 here ok you'll see then that it's going to show up the top there's all my notifications there back again now just swipe up here ok that wasn't too bad game with the animations alright so let's run through a couple of things so when you first get the phone you're gonna have a little bit of bloatware and that's not that great but most of it you can actually remove so I've got of course the 128 gigabyte version here you get 110 gigabytes free and of course you can use microSD so that is great dear I'm on the latest firmware by the way at the time of this video so no Widevine level one suit unfortunately so that translates into Netflix Amazon Prime video and other streaming services all stuck in stand definition hopefully a firmware update will fix this now this is really good camera API to support is level 3 the maximum so Google camera ports will be working i think the reports out this for this one already and here we've got gps so it works just like any other qualcomm phone you're gonna get accuracy around three to four meters and no real issues to report it was very quick to get lock internal storage is not the fastest as you can see but it's not going to bottleneck the system here install random reads and writes they're actually pretty good for this price range of phone here is our antutu scores so now this is the entry to version 8 now Google Play Store is only serving us this version here so schools are a little different and off and wireless okay why is performance isn't amazing but the game for what it is this phone for its price it's it's actually ok you can go to the other side of the apartment here the studio and I'm still getting over the 100 meters per second I like to see oh that's just gaming call of duty won another round that shouldn't be in here code most importantly battery life very good ok screen is always going to be your biggest hardware consumer of course screen of time it's a little hard to make out there but eight hours so very good you can probably squeeze this out to nine this was over the space of just one day of quite heavy use you can see I was gaming a lot Call of Duty I'm kind of addicted to the game and that is why I wouldn't call this your normal kind of use it's very heavy but you can see there is a bit of a wakelock issue so it keeps waking up here this was during the night so I lift it when I went to sleep to see how much I would lose in terms of better life and there's a bit of standby drain issue I lost it was 8% overnight and most phones would be about half of that or maybe 5% so there's something going on within the ROM that's causing it to not go into a deep sleep now audio something that is actually quite good here on this shell me the 3.5 millimeter output I've got really no complaints with it sounds great to me no twelve limbs and we do have just a single loudspeaker you kind of expect that for what this phone is the price of it so here's a sample now out that loudspeaker just put some audio and a little bit of voice and some music and it does sound good to me it's lacking a little bit as expected but your ringtones do come through very loud for receiving calls call quality sounds good as mention with the earpiece that no problems if it was qc4 spec then it would be one hour we get a 3.52 type C adapter so for gaming performance this is Call of Duty now set it on to the max framerate which should be I believe 60 frames per second or 45 I think it's 60 here on high now very high does get a little bit more stutters and lag so I wouldn't recommend it as high is gonna run actually fine I've been able to win complete rounds here with Battle Royale but let's take a look at the performance so the performance overall is good you're able to get kills run around just fine you will see the occasional little frame dip now and then that it does trigger some lag on the high settings because the graphics after I mean look at it very visually demanding so just moving around there it's a little choppy and especially when you zoom in but overall I think the high setting is probably the setting to go for if you want the good visuals but of course if you want the improved framerate then lower things down let's take a look now at a more demanding game and that is shadow gun legends which can really choke on some mobiles so shadow gun legends I've noticed that it's running on high 60 frames per second reasonably well but you will see some noticeable just frame dips and stutter like right now you can probably see it all these enemies here shooting at me it's a little choppy so I would lower the sitting down on this game to medium and for those asking about pub G that pub G is gonna run fine on this but just keep it on lower settings don't force it onto the high settings so real gaming performance for the type of mobile and the phone it is it's to be expected it's not the best but you can still play all those new demanding games out there and that's the main thing now onto the face unlocking and fingerprint reader so look at it tap and you can see it was a little slow just then do it one more time there we go okay so it normally takes about a second it's not as fast as the Remi Note 8 Pro I've noticed right there same goes for the fingerprint reader so I will tap it now you can see that was a good second ok a little bit faster then one more time alright it's not too bad it's just not the fastest I have seen from Xiaomi a brief look now at our camera apps it's pretty straightforward show me here if you want the macro sensor then you tap this right here and if you want that ultra wide you tap this little button there so that brings out the ultra wide and if you want to times digital that's straightforward 48 megapixel mode and night-shot mode so I'm gonna quickly compare here they really note 8 Pro to their note 8 because I know a lot of people gonna ask this now that's just a low-light comparison daylight they're pretty much the same really not a huge difference I'd have to say that I think daylight photos are actually better on the note 8 pro but low-light you can see they're trading blows here for selfie shots in lower light conditions the Remmy note 8 pro is going to get the win but you can see here we know 8 Pro with the rear camera does have a lot of noise in this photo so though kind of trading blows in low light both of them have terrible night shot photography I think I don't think they're that good compared to other brands out there but hey find yourself a working google camp or if you want improved low-light photography so here are some samples now shot on the note 8 video stills and a few more low-light samples so this is a sample with the rear camera here so we get 4k 30 frames per second maximum no 4k 60 and unfortunately we do not have any electronic image stabilization with 4k only with 1080p and 720p footage which is unfortunate I'm seeing a lot of us with Shomi phones they just don't seem to want to enable it I mean it is enabled in the settings the other thing - the audio quality it's okay but the bitrate could certainly be a little bit better and possibly maybe better microphones because their competitors like real me are definitely pushing forward with better audio quality than this so the focus that's working okay now a front-facing video it's just 1080p maximum here at again no electronic image stabilization which hopefully with a firmware update Xiaomi will add alright go so you saw from the camera performance there when I did that little short comparison just for the low-light because that's where things get a little bit more tricky they kind of trade blows there's a lot more noise I noticed in some of the readme note 8 pro shots but then when you hate take a look at the Remi Note 8 it wasn't quite as good or as detailed with selfies at least in low-light notes so they are kind of similar we've got 48 megapixels 64 64 more megapixels doesn't actually always mean it's better in my experience but the phones I've used now with the IMX 5 8 6 which is the 48 megapixel sensor sensor I find it's actually bitter what's normally better when it has optical image stabilization enabled with it as well but this phone doesn't have it neither these do here so we get the typical Xiaomi problems and there is no Widevine level search one to netflix and standard definition with the redmi note 8 also with this one too let's focus more on the of course no date after all it's the review of this phone that I'm talking about so the better life I think it's pretty good but the wrong performance is definitely a little bit stuttering and laggy now this is probably the worst I've seen EU wait in running and some time and it's not the chipset that's to blame it's just show me so there'll be some firmware updates I'm sure in the works coming that will probably correct this now the electronic image stabilization missing on the front facing camera missing in 4k it's there for 1080p but why can they not enable that I don't know the audio quality is a little bit scratchy in video and we're not seeing notifications at least in the current state is phone with the icons at the top sometimes they show other times they don't as I showed you through the settings of the ROM that it is enabled but it's just the performance that's really leading it down the optimization that show-me needs to figure out I rule it's got a nice screen but if we're talking about comparing both of these the extra you have to pay for the rim you know a pro I believe is well worth it because the performance is just day and night here this one is so much smoother it's current software state that is the firmware that's on there is just running so much better you also have a more potent chipset and for the Indians out there ranting on about overheating issues but for them to get warm gaming this one gets a little warmer but as I pointed out with my mini videos on the room you know eight pro so check the channel for that too as well that it's really not actually an issue so for me it's a no-brainer if you've got the cash get the pro version over just the normal note 8 because it is far superior in almost every single way there and wait for the Google camera ports to improve that terrible low-light photography their night mode that you get them both of these is quite poor really when you pair it to other manufacturers even in this segment real me they are doing low-light photography a lot better they're also doing video audio much better so there's good competition going on Shami needs to step up their game in terms of software correct their bugs and prove their performance thank you so much for watching this review remember I do have a review of this one so check it out in the channel and if you are new here and you like this detailed lengthy review then subscribe to the channel and able and I'll see you back in the channel with the next video\n"