Xiaomi Redmi Note 13 Pro 5G Smartphone 8+256GB, Midnight Black (UK Version + 2 Years Warranty)

Uncertain about the best phone to purchase for approximately £250 that is truly good?I'm delighted to say that, after over a month of using the Xiaomi Redmi Note 13 Pro, I'm really pleased with my purchase 😊Battery life is almost two days with typical use (or at least one full day with heavy use).The stereo speakers are crystal clear/base and loud.Nice and bright outside, even in direct sunlightGood strong signal for both sims.Call quality is excellent on both hands-free and regular calls.Excellent camera quality—obviously not S24 ultra—but still quite good for a low-cost phone, especially when using the 200 megapixel option with the 6 X zoomUtilising the included 67w charger for rapid chargingultra-fast facial recognition and fingerprint scanningEasy to apply screen protectors as has a flat panel (comes with a pre installed protector)Very hard to find a phone with these specs that is actually fit for purpose these days but i can honestly say you won't be disappointed 🤗

As good if not better than the 2 other major brands. Photo quality is great. Processing speed is faultless. Sound quality from the phone stereo speakers is really pretty good and through Bluetooth is amazing. All in all a fantastic phone. Highly recommended.

Good stuff: Headphone jack, under screen finger print reader, decent camera, decent sound quality, very fast charging, adaptive 60/120hz refresh rate.Some complaints: No SD card slot. Lots of apps to uninstall/disable; there's only a few that don't give me the option to do this (mostly Xiaomi apps, fair enough, but YouTube Music?). Battery life didn't seem great at first but now will only drop ~20% during the day if not used much. The interface (HyperOS) is reasonably customisable but one thing it does not allow is setting the Always On Display past 10 seconds, which is pretty dumb considering the name of the feature. However a single tap shows it again, and if a notification comes in it activates, so it is still handy to be able to glance over, or tap when necessary. I appreciate this restriction is to advocate battery life but it would be nice to be given the choice with a warning.One technical issue: when there is bold black text on a white background, there is what I would describe as bright white smearing under the text downwards. I compared this to a Samsung A52s a friend has and theirs also does this, so maybe a problem with the type of OLED panel. I think it was more noticeable on this phone though. However once in dark mode the issue is gone. Of course if you hit a web page/app with bold black on white, you will see the same thing.Phone can get warm at times (charging/downloading) but nothing to worry me; not like phones with the snapdragon 888 which get crazy hot. The charger provided can get quite hot.I read somewhere, and so I was expecting ads in the OS interface, but it seems these are limited to just some Xiaomi apps themselves (eg Themes app). If you don't use them, I've seen no ads.Overall I'm very happy with this after being disappointed with Samsung's offerings with a headphone jack, and Sony's 10 VI sound quality from the headphone jack. I'll likely be sticking to the Chinese for future phones.

...and you can take that to the bank! I've bought Umidigi phones in the past and I've been impressed, but was really disappointed with their latest 5G offering, which I returned. I came across a UK YouTube channel called 'Tech Spurt' - Chris Barraclough is unbiased, funny and super informative. After watching several of his videos, I took the plunge and bought this phone. A little more expensive than my previous phones, but man, this is the business - super slick, fast and a camera lens with jaw-dropping quality (my partner is an amazing photographer with a serious Sony alpha camera. She was so impressed with the lens on my phone, she bought the plus version - well she just had to, didn't she!). Battery life is ok for me and I can get by for two days on average use before I need to charge it - the charger is lightning fast and takes around 20 minutes to charge from 20%. Really easy to set up, although like every phone you buy these days it's full of manufacturer's bloatware which is easy enough to get rid of. Buy this phone - 'nuff said!

Previous Xiaomi phones I have bought are brilliant, and this Redmi Pro 5G is no different. Battery performance is excellent, the app interface is as good as an iPhone, it’s fast, the camera is better than the one on some of my DSLRs, screen is crystal clear, and it looks great. The build quality is also great.I was told about these phones 3 years ago by a digital guy I worked with, they are a fraction of the cost of iPhones and just as good. My two teenage kids (16 & 19) each have the 11 & 13 models, and they love them.The only drawback is that because it is a Chinese phone the metadata is collected by them, so you need to be ok with that.

After normal work for two weeks this device started to be unresponsive and then rebooting every 10 - 60 mins. Sometimes files are missing after reboot. I've already wasted days of my life in reading forums how to fix the issue but can't figure out. A couple more attempts and I'm looking forward to return it. Very disappointed. Don't buy this if you don't want potential problems.

Excellent camera

Superb. Fantastic camera. Ideal really.