Redmi has been popular in India for offering feature-packed, value for money smartphones at mouth-watering prices. Earlier the marque used to primarily compete in the 10 – 15k segment, but Redmi phones have become more premium year after year and now we have the Note 13 Pro+ 5G, priced upwards of Rs 30,000! Does the flagship Redmi justify its hefty price tag?
The Note 13 Pro+ 5G’s design leaves a fantastic first impression. The smartphone looks premium with its 6.67-inch curved AMOLED display, a gloss black back panel and matte-finished corners. At 204.5gm (199g for PU Leather variant) the Note 13 Pro+ 5G is fairly manageable and the curved edges at the front and back, make it an easy smartphone to operate with one hand. What’s impressive is that Redmi offers IP68 protection on this device which is a great feature to have at this price point.
The curved display supports up to 120Hz refresh rate along with Dolby Vision. The Gorilla Glass Victus protection for the display does offer good defence from accidental falls but the scratch resistance could have been better. Overall, the display with its slim bezels feels excellent to use for binge watching videos. It also offers decent visibility under direct sunlight.
With a 4nm MediaTek Dimensity 7200-Ultra processor coupled with 12GB RAM on our test unit, the Note 13 Pro+ handles day to day tasks without any hiccups. The gaming performance is decent too and I didn’t notice any frame drops during intensive gaming sessions. The only area where I found the processing power to be a bit lacking was when I tried to edit a reel on the Instagram app itself.
The Note 13 Pro+ currently runs on Android 13 with Xiaomi’s MIUI 14 on top. Given it is a flagship device, it should’ve gotten Android 14 out of the box. The software experience is average as you’ll see a fair bit of bloatware which thankfully can be avoided while setting up the phone. That being said, the overall graphics are quite smooth and the UI feels quite responsive.
The Redmi Note 13 Pro+ packs in an impressive camera setup with a 200MP primary lens from Samsung, an 8MP ultrawide lens and a 2MP macro lens at the rear and a 16MP front camera. Under good lighting conditions, the primary lens captures a good amount of detail and colour accuracy. The results in low-light conditions are quite good, but you do notice some amount of noise. The rear camera supports 4K videos at 30fps offering decent video performance.
Powering this smartphone is a massive 5,000mAh battery pack that supports up to 120W fast charging which Xiaomi claims, can up this smartphone from 0-100 percent in just 19 minutes. The real-world timings are somewhere around the 25 minute mark which is still impressive and the good thing is that the charging adapter comes bundled with the smartphone.
The Redmi Note 13 Pro+ impresses with its premium build, great display, adequate performance, battery backup and camera setup. It would have been the perfect package if the software was up to date and had less bloatware. That said, the Redmi Note 13 Pro+ is a great entry point to the upper mid-range segment of smartphones.
` 31,999 onwards (8GB + 256GB)
mi.com
