Recently, Xiaomi unveiled the company's brand new budget phone Redmi 10 Prime in India.
It comes in two variants-- 4GB RAM + 64GB storage & 6GB RAM + 128GB storage--for Rs 12,499 and Rs 14,499 on Amazon, Mi.com, Mi Home, and Mi Studio stores in addition to partner retail outlets.
The 2020-series Redmi 9 Prime was a solid budget phone. As you could read in my review, it excelled in all key aspects compared to the rival brands. Now, the Redmi 10 Prime is here to succeed. Does it deliver the goods? let's check it out.
Design, display and build quality
Our review unit is the Bifrost Blue model. It sports a familiar Evol design language inspired by Redmi Note 10 series. It has a glossy shell with dual-tone colours having sky blue at the base and beautifully blends with silver-grey at the top. It is visually gorgeous in the sunlight, but the only qualm I have is the back is a fingerprint magnet.
Xiaomi all also offers two more colour options--Phantom Black and Astral White- and they are good too.
An interesting aspect of the Redmi 10 Prime, is that it is very slim (9.6mm) for a device, which houses a massive 6,000mAh battery.
It has a sturdy premium frame around the edges offering a really good grip and if you put the silicone cover, the phone becomes a bit chunky, I won't complain as it reduces the anxiety in me of damaging the phone due to accidental fall. Also, the case on the front protrudes a bit over the edge on the front panel and this protects the screen from cracking when the phone falls with the display facing the solid ground.
It features rubberised seals all around the phone's openings to ensure the phone is protected from accidental water splashes and rains. Also, the company notes that the spaces such as Type-C ports, speaker grills, 3.5mm jack port have anti-corrosion coating. This will further improve the longevity of the device.
Xiaomi Redmi 10 Prime features a 6.5-inch full HD+ (2400 x 1080p) IPS LCD screen with 90Hz adaptive refresh rate. It is protected with the Corning Gorilla Glass 3 shield. The display is very bright and works well outdoors too. There is a special feature hidden in the Display brightness setting to turn on the Sunlight mode to deliver better viewing of content under direct sunlight. This is a thoughtful value-added feature, which is missing in most of the budget phones in the market. There is also Reading Mode 3.0 too.
Furthermore, the phone comes with an adaptive brightness option, which changes the brightness according to the room conditions. The display can also dynamically change the refresh rate from 45Hz to normal 60Hz to superfluid 90Hz depending on what the user is doing on the phone such as reading or browsing the internet. It will reach max level while playing games.
It also features a side-mounted fingerprint sensor, Infrared Blaster, and triple slots ( nano SIM-1 + nano SIM-2 + microSD). The biometric sensor works wonderfully in terms of quick response to the finger impression and unlocking the screen.
Performance
It comes with a 12nm class MediaTek Helio octa-core (2.0Hz Arm Cortex-A75 x 2 cores + 1.8Ghz Arm Cortex-A55 x 6 cores ) chipset with with 1000MHz ARM Mali-G52 2EEMC2 GPU backed by Android 11-based MIUI 12.5 OS, 4GB/ 6GB LPDDR4x RAM, 64GB/128GB eMMC 5.1 storage (expandable).
The interesting thing about the Redmi 10 Prime is that users can bump up the physical memory with up to 2GB for the 6GB RAM model and up to 1GB for the 4GB RAM variant. No other rival branded phones support this feature in this class. This will help boost the speed of app loading and operating tasks on the phone and it delivers the goods.
The Redmi 10 Prime performs smoothly in terms of day-to-day tasks such as browsing the internet, reading news feeds on social media platforms and operating a camera.
Even while recording videos or playing games, the phone managed to control the heating of the back panel. It never went off the mark.
The new phone houses a mammoth 6,000mAh cell and truly lives up to the hype. It consistently offered more than two days of battery life under normal usage. Even under extreme usage including binging of videos for long hours, it still had juice left in the tank and last a half-day the next day.
It comes with a 22.5W charger, but for now, it is limited to 18W charging. It takes a little over two and half hours to fully charge the device.
Also, it supports 9W reverse charging capability to power up your friend's or family member's phone. This is another really handy value-added feature.
Photography
The Redmi 10 Prime boasts quad-camera module-- main 50MP (f/1.8) + 8MP(f/2.2) 120-degree ultra-wide sensor + 2MP (f/2.4) macro + 2MP (f/2.4) depth sensor with LED flash. It takes fantastic images with great details in the broad day light.
However, I noticed the subjects like flowers with colours red and pink, they appear blown out a bit, a little unnatural to the human eyes. But, they appear good, worthy to be posted on social media platforms.
The ultra-wide-angle shots too come off really great. As far as the Night mode, it takes decent photos for my liking, but far better compared to rival brands in its class.
The Redmi 10 Prime captures decent and stable full HD videos. It can record 1080p at 30 fps (frames per second), 720p HD at 30 fps and 720p Slo-Mo at 120fps.
On the front, it features an 8MP (f/2.0, 1.12um pixel size) snapper. It takes good selfies in the natural sunlight and to an extent in the indoors.
It also offers value-added features such as Portrait, Auto HDR, AI scene detection, Time burst, AI beauty mode, AI Watermark, Movie Frame, Palm Shutter for selfies. It also supports Short Video, Kaleidoscope, Movie frame, Time-lapse video recording capabilities in addition to normal 1080p & 720p at 30fps.
Final thoughts
Since the announcement of the Covid-19-induced lockdown in early 2020, I have been asked quite a lot by friends and colleagues for suggestions to buy budget phones, good for online classes.
I usually guide people to go for any of the latest Samsung, Realme and Redmi Note series phones with big displays and large batteries. Now, the Redmi 10 Prime is my new favourite and sits at the top of my list of recommendations.
This is by far the best value-for-money phone under Rs 15,000 in 2021. It is the true successor of the Redmi 9 Prime. It has premium looks, solid build quality, good big display, excellent photography hardware, dependable processor configuration and most importantly, lasts more than a day even under extreme usage.
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