Redmi Note 13 Pro+ Review
The Redmi Note 13 Pro+ 5G is a massive upgrade over its predecessor in most areas – it gets a new premium design, an IP68 rating, almost double the screen brightness, a faster processor, an improved camera, an in-display fingerprint sensor, and more. These upgrades also make it stand tall amidst competition but there’s one area where it falls behind – performance. The likes of the iQOO Neo 7 Pro and OnePlus Nord 3 blow past the Redmi Note 13 Pro+ in synthetic benchmarks and real-world gaming.
The renowned Redmi Note series from Xiaomi has consistently brought premium features to the masses in India at an affordable price. And this year is no exception. The Redmi Note 13 series ushered in the New Year’s with a couple of class-leading features, a brand-new design language, and impressive specifications. I got the top-end Redmi Note 13 Pro+ 5G for review and was immediately floored by the design language.
The favourable first impression lingered as I browsed through the high-end specifications. Upon testing, there were many things I loved about this new phone; but some issues surfaced too. Priced at ₹31,999, it competes against some heavyweights in the segment including the iQOO Neo 7 Pro (review), OnePlus Nord 3 (review), and Motorola Edge 40 (review). Let’s delve into the detailed review of the Redmi Note 13 Pro+ 5G to find out if it’s worth your dough.
The Redmi Note 13 Pro+ 5G is a svelte smartphone with a distinctive design. The vegan leather rear panel features a colour block design with different pastel purple, blue and green hues adorning the back. This is the Fusion Purple colour variant, where the design is most prominent. It sets itself apart from the competition with its unconventional yet stylish looks. The coloured blocks each house a particular component or logo – the leftmost one houses the triple camera stack, the top right one features the dual LED flash, and the one below it has the Redmi branding. The bottom-most one keeps it simple with just a 5G logo.
The phone is quite slim and feels comfortable to hold due to its curved front and back panels. However, it is not as lightweight as the Moto Edge 40 which weighs merely 171 g. Either way, the Redmi Note 13 Pro+ looks streamlined and elegant for the price. The frame is made of plastic but looks deceptively like aluminium – lending it a more premium look. The buttons are nice and tactile, but not to a distasteful degree.
On the front, the curved display looks very premium and elegant. The bezels are pretty slim with the phone sporting an 89.7 per cent screen-to-body ratio. One of the best features of the phone is its IP68 dust and water resistance rating; something only the Moto Edge 40 also offers at this price point.
Xiaomi went all out with the display of the Redmi Note 13 Pro+. The phone is equipped with a 6.67-inch AMOLED panel with 1.5K resolution and 120 Hz refresh rate. Not just that, it comes with both Dolby Vision and HDR10+ support and a claimed peak brightness of 1,800 nits! Add to that, Gorilla Glass Victus protection and this is the best-specced display in this price range.
The display is extremely vibrant and crisp – viewing angles are fantastic. I got a reading of 1,400+ nits in our brightness test, so there are no issues in viewing the display even under harsh sunlight. HDR content looks fantastic with excellent colours and great detail. The phone supports 68 billion+ colours, the highest in this segment. Furthermore, it also sports 1,920 Hz PWM dimming, meaning it is relatively safe for your eyes even in low light. The phone also houses Dolby Atmos-enabled stereo speakers, however, I found them to be a tad too soft. You’d be better off using earphones.
With blazing-fast competitors such as the iQOO Neo 7 Pro and OnePlus Nord 3, the Redmi Note 13 Pro+ has its work cut out for it in the performance section. Regrettably, the Redmi Note 13 Pro+ doesn’t match the raw power these competitors offer. The phone houses the MediaTek Dimensity 7200-Ultra chipset with 8/12 GB of LPDDR5 RAM and 256/512 GB of UFS 3.1 storage. The Dimensity 7200-Ultra has a maximum clock speed of 2.85 GHz, which is significantly lower than the processors in the iQOO Neo 7 Pro and OnePlus Nord 3.
As expected, the Redmi Note 13 Pro+ 5G doesn’t fare exceedingly well in synthetic benchmarks. The phone’s scores in AnTuTu and GeekBench are soundly defeated by the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 SoC in the iQOO Neo 7 Pro and the Dimensity 9000 SoC in the OnePlus Nord 3. However, the phone does manage to beat the Motorola Edge 40 in AnTuTu only to lose to it in GeekBench Multi-Core later. It does manage to pull off a decent PCMark Work score of 11,983 though.
In GPU tests, the phone refused to run our usual set of benchmarks including 3D Mark and GFXBench. So, I switched over to testing gaming in real life and the results were pretty solid; not as path-breaking as the class-leading iQOO Neo 7 Pro, but solid nonetheless. I was able to run Call of Duty: Mobile at high graphics and frame rate with minimal stutter and lag. The phone also did a good job keeping the temps in check.
In day-to-day tasks, the phone rose to the occasion with impressive multitasking abilities and solid overall performance with very few hiccups. So, even though it may not break records in benchmarking tests, this is still a fast and reliable phone that will appease most users.
It is not the performance but the UI that takes points away from the performance department. The Redmi Note 13 Pro+ 5G comes with MIUI 14 based on Android 13 out of the box – so, you will not get HyperOS out of the box and you will also be greeted with a TON of bloatware preinstalled on your phone. This includes random apps such as PhonePe, Netflix, Snapchat, Linkedin, YT Music, and nine preinstalled games. There are also a bunch of Xiaomi apps pre-bundled with the phone. Software support has improved though, with 3 years of promised OS updates and 4 years of security updates.
The Redmi Note 13 Pro+ boasts an all-new triple camera setup comprising of a 200 MP Samsung ISOCELL HP3 camera with OIS and EIS capabilities, an 8 MP ultrawide shooter, and a 2 MP macro camera. This sensor is capable of pulling in quite a bit of detail in ideal lighting conditions, but in my experience, it did struggle to some extent in low light.
The main camera captures crisp and detailed shots with decent colour. The dynamic range is a bit of a hit-and-miss in some situations, but in most instances, you get a solid, social-media-worthy shot. Natural bokeh is strong because of the size of the lens and the camera also focuses on subjects pretty easily in good lighting conditions.
Portrait mode images look vibrant and the edge detection is impressive, but there is some softness present. The 8 MP ultrawide lens does a good job of clicking detailed images in daylight with minimal softness around the edges. The 2 MP macro camera is a disappointment though, with blurry and shaky shots. The 16 MP selfie camera is decent but nothing to write home about – you can expect good shots in daylight, and soft images in low light.
In low light, I saw a considerable amount of noise creep into the pictures, and the dynamic range took a hit as well, especially in the shadow areas. As for video, it is disappointing since the rear camera only supports 4K video at a maximum of 30 fps and the front camera doesn’t support 4K at all. The stabilisation of the rear camera video has improved compared to the previous generation though.
Housing a 5,000 mAh battery, the Redmi Note 13 Pro+ 5G powers through a day’s worth of usage with relative ease. The battery life is as good as its competitors, although it is not path-breaking. I got through a day of gaming, benchmarking, clicking photos, and browsing the web with 10 per cent battery remaining at 9 PM. In our 4K video loop test, the Redmi Note 13 Pro+ lasted a decent 13 hours and 9 minutes.
The phone does support super fast 120 W charging though which obliterates the charging speed of most of its competitors. You can charge this phone from an empty battery to full in just over 20 minutes (you need to turn on maximum charging speed in settings first), which is extremely impressive. The phone does get quite hot during this process though.
The Redmi Note 13 Pro+ 5G is a massive upgrade over its predecessor in most areas – it gets a new premium design, an IP68 rating, almost double the screen brightness, a faster processor, an improved camera, an in-display fingerprint sensor, and more. These upgrades also make it stand tall amidst competition but there’s one area where it falls behind – performance. The likes of the iQOO Neo 7 Pro and OnePlus Nord 3 blow past the Redmi Note 13 Pro+ in synthetic benchmarks and real-world gaming.
Furthermore, the phone doesn’t come with HyperOS and Android 14 out of the box – something that the upcoming POCO X6 Pro is getting. The phone is rife with bloatware which takes away from its premium factor. If you can look past the bloatware, the Redmi Note 13 Pro+ is undeniably a well-rounded phone; it’s not going to win any raw performance awards – but it will be popular given the slew of features and specifications it offers for sure.
