Some of the choices that Xiaomi has made with respect to the Redmi 6 Pro may seem odd at first, but when considered in its entirety, this is also a phone that may set new benchmarks in India’s budget segment.
You can run, you can hide, but you can’t escape the notch. This is a trend that started with the iPhone X last year, first trickled down to the mid-range segment, and is now coming to budget smartphone. If a phone does not have a notch these days, seems it is not considered modern enough. May be that is the reason why the Xiaomi Redmi 6 Pro has a notch.
After giving some of its other phones a taste of the notch, Xiaomi is now giving the same treatment to its budget Redmi series. The Redmi 6 Pro, launched in India on Wednesday, is the first Redmi phone to have a design in-sync with the new industry trend. And being a Redmi phone, it still manages to pack everything consumers have grown to love about these phones. Solid build quality, a good screen, capable hardware, and a massive battery. Just like any other Redmi phone, the Redmi 6 Pro, is also quite affordable.
The Redmi 6 Pro comes with an almost full-metal body, with top and bottom edges being plastic with brushed metal finish. There is curved 2.5D glass on the front. It has rounded edges with reinforced corners to minimise drop impact and polished antenna lines that together up the premium quotient of the phone. One thing that’s surprisingly new this year is how much the new Redmi weighs. It weighs quite a lot, and also it is quite thick for a Redmi phone. At 8.8mm and 178 gram, the Redmi 6 Pro is one of the chunkiest Redmi phones ever. But this is not to say that it is not manageable.
The Redmi 6 Pro uses a 5.84-inch screen but because Xiaomi has shaved off much of the bezels, the phone looks and feels smaller than what its specs would have you believe. This results in a phone that is very pocketable. Xiaomi does not mention if the Redmi 6 Pro has any sort of protective coating on top, nor the kind of metal that it is using in making it, so I suggest you keep the bundled clear case at hand at all times. Xiaomi will be offering the Redmi 6 Pro in four colours: black, gold, blue and red.
Like other Redmi phone, the Redmi 6 Pro also comes with a rear-mounted fingerprint scanner, which is ridiculously fast and accurate. The Redmi 6 Pro also supports face unlock, which is okay as long as it works, but I will not be betting my money on its accuracy or reliability.
The phone has on-screen buttons or soft keys for navigation with the option to turn on a few gestures from settings. Talking of settings, the Redmi 6 Pro doesn’t allow you to hide the notch for now. A software update will hopefully change that soon.
Because the Redmi 6 Pro is a Pro version of the Redmi 6, it gets a few extra goodies. It comes with a better screen. The Redmi 6 Pro offers a FHD+ IPS LCD display with a 19:9 aspect ratio, while the standard Redmi 6 maxes out at HD+ and 18:9 aspect ratio. Not only you get more pixels, the Redmi 6 Pro also gives you more screen-to-body ratio. The screen of the Redmi 6 Pro can get pleasantly bright and colour reproduction is fairly spot-on too but there’s room for improvement. Although the phone’s default apps use the display cut-out well, many third-party apps will leave you asking for more. But that’s more an Android thing, and less about Xiaomi.
The same cannot be said about Xiaomi’s choice of core hardware though. This is because, Xiaomi could have done better here and yet it chose to go with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 625. For the nth time now. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 is an ageing processor, that although packs in lots of efficiency also leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to raw power. At a time when Honor is launching a gaming phone like the Honor Play for less than Rs 20,000, and Xiaomi itself has launched the Mi A2 with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 660, the Redmi 6 Pro feels left out. Probably, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 636 would have been better. That the Redmi Note 5 and the Redmi Y2 already have the same processor around similar prices doesn’t help the case of Redmi 6 Pro.
You can expect good all-round performance from it in terms of day-to-day usage, and you’ll also get good battery life, but what if you want more? The Asus ZenFone Max Pro M1 or Xiaomi’s Redmi Note 5 Pro would make more sense if you’re part of that group.
Speaking of battery life, the Redmi 6 Pro uses a massive 4,000mAh battery — a typical trait of most Redmi phones in this price range — that charges over micro-USB. There is no fast charging. The Redmi 6 Pro will be available with up to 4GB RAM and up to 64GB storage. The phone supports expandable storage through a dedicated micro-SD card slot.
The dual-SIM Redmi 6 Pro runs Android 8.1 Oreo-based MIUI 9.6 software out-of-the-box.
The Redmi 6 Pro comes with dual rear cameras: another thing that makes it a “modern phone”. It seemingly uses the same primary image sensor that is inside the Redmi 5, Redmi Note 5, Redmi Y2 but adds a secondary sensor for features portrait photography. The Redmi 6 Pro has a 12MP + 5MP rear camera system. There is also EIS for videos. The results are in line with what we have seen from phones like the Redmi 5, Redmi Note 5 and Redmi Y2, which means that the Redmi 6 Pro is also a capable camera phone in ideal conditions but may not dazzle you in low light.
The Redmi 6 Pro can capture some good-looking photos in good light with good amount of detail and mostly spot-on colours. Dynamic range could have been better, but overall, it should suffice in ideal lighting. Low light photos have lots of noise although you can get slightly better results using the phone’s HHT mode. Much like the Redmi Y2, the Redmi 6 Pro can also capture good bokeh shots, which is a welcome change in this price segment. Here are a few camera samples.
On the front, the Redmi 6 Pro comes with a 5MP camera which is also capable of shooting software-assisted portrait selfies.
Clearly, the Redmi 6 Pro checks many boxes, including that of sensible pricing. You can say that the biggest competition that the Redmi 6 Pro will be getting is from Xiaomi’s own phones like the Redmi Note 5 and Redmi Y2. The Redmi 6 Pro is meant for those looking for everything and a notch design, on the cheap, and it should serve that audience well.
