The mobile market is full of models and variations with little differences and is only available to people with limited budgets and special needs. Xiaomi, for example, has launched over a dozen variants. Whether prioritizing processor performance, RAM and storage, camera capabilities or battery life, Xiaomi offers buyers ample options so you don't even need to see what their competitors are offering. But this is a difficult balancing task.
The Redmi series launched Xiaomi Redmi Note 8 that surprised the company, alongside the Redmi Note 8 Pro, has been designed to hit the critical price points. Xiaomi could make the phone cheaper, but explains that they don't want to compromise on specifications at all. It covers more than one price segment. We are looking at the higher priced version, but we continue to analyze how these two options are intended for their target audience.

All about Redmi Note 8 in short-
Xiaomi Redmi Note 8 smartphone runs on Android v9.0 (Pie) operating system.It is powered by Octa core (2 GHz, Quad core, Kryo 260 + 1.8 GHz, Quad core, Kryo 260) processor.It runs on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 665 Chipset. It builts by 4 GB RAM and 64 GB internal storage.Note 8 has a IPS LCD display. It measures 158.3 mm x 75.3 mm x 8.3 mm and weighs 188 grams. The screen resolution is 1080 x 2340 pixels and 409 ppi pixel density. It has an aspect ratio of 19.5:9 and screen-to-body ratio of 81.56 %. On camera front, people will get a 13 MP f/2.0 Primary Camera(1.12µm pixel size) and on the rear, there's an 48+8+2+2 MP camera with features like Digital Zoom, Auto Flash, Face detection, Touch to focus. It has a 4000 mAh battery life.Connectivity features in the smartphone include WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, Volte, and more.

Highlights-
* 4 GB of RAM and 64 GB of disk space.
* A Full HD+ screen and a 4000mAh battery.
* 4 rear cameras including a 2MP macro camera.
Redmi Note 8 Design-
* 158.3 x 75.3 x 8.4mm
* 190g
* Gorilla Glass 5 front and back
* Waterdrop notch
* Rear fingerprint sensor
* USB-C

If you expected the Redmi Note 8 to be the low-cost version of the stylish Redmi Note 8 Pro, you would be a little disappointed. The phone on the front looks more like the recently launched Redmi 8 and Redmi 8A,with a chin thick enough to match the brand's logo. It's a pretty mediocre 2019 low-budget phone with a 6.3-inch screen almost covering the front and a water slot at the top. There is a small white LED above the screen for notification. Here Xiaomi adds a differentiated touch in the form of color accents that move around the edge of the front cup. My test kit is a Neptune Blue version, so a blue halo-like line runs along the sides and bottom. I really didn't like it and it was pretty playful. It's also annoying when you're trying to enjoy full-screen content. I hope there will be other versions of Moonlight White and Space Black.

The back of the phone also doesn't look like the Redmi Note 8 Pro or the Redmi 8 sibling. The camera panel is in the corner, not the center, and it really stands out. The phone vibrates unpleasantly when placed on the table. The leading edge of the camera is also quite rough. The Xiaomi Switches with Gorilla Glass 5 on the front and back of this phone and on both sides has rounded corners. On the back of the Neptune Blue module, there is a specular gradient layer that turns bright blue to purple. Keeping this finish free from smudges and fingerprints will be difficult. The power button and fingerprint sensor are easy to reach, but the volume rocker is too loud. Below are the USB Type-C port, 3.5mm audio jack and speakers. Above is an infrared transmitter, on the left is a compartment with two SIM cards and microSD cards.

Fortunately, the glass back was not slippery and I found the phone relatively easy to use and portable. The screen is large, but reaching all corners with one thumb is not that difficult. This is less noticeable when using the plastic cover that comes with the camera. Overall, the Redmi Note 8 is very solid, but nothing new or exciting in terms of design.

Display: A bright, contrast-rich and colour accurate IPS panel-
* 6.3-inch IPS LCD display
* 19.5:9 aspect ratio
* Full HD+ resolution
* Gorilla Glass 5
The display on the Redmi Note 8 isn’t bad, but in a sea of great panels it comes across as a bit underwhelming. Out of the box, the color tuning skews too far towards cooler tones. This has a profound effect on how images and videos look on the display. That said, it is easy to switch to a more neutral color profile that immediately makes content look a lot more natural.

Unlike some competing devices, such as the Moto One Macro, the Redmi Note 8 has a Full HD+ display. Stretched across 6.3-inches, the resolution is more than adequate. Icons and text look perfectly crisp and reading long web pages is a pleasurable experience.
We measured peak brightness levels of about 430 nits with the display set to the standard mode. This is just under Xiaomi’s claimed 450 nits peak brightness level. The Redmi Note 8 is certainly not the brightest phone in the segment, but unless you spend a lot of time walking about in direct sunlight you shouldn’t face much of a problem.

Redmi Note 8 Software-
* MIUI 10.3.3
* Android 9 Pie
I am beginning with the Qualcom Snapdragon 665 processor.This is an update to the Most known Snapdragon 660, and is declared to be more powerful processor.It features the same arrangement of four performance cores and four efficiency cores, as well as better integrated graphics.
The base variant has 4GB of RAM with 64GB of storage, and costs a little high.While the Realme 5 and Vivo U10 might have more reasonable starting prices.People can also get the Redmi Note 8 with 6GB of RAM with 128GB of storage for a little bit higher price range and this is the variant I'm analysing.It competes more with the likes of the Samsung Galaxy M30s,Vivo Z1 Pro and Realme 3 Pro.

The screen measures 6.3 inches and has a full-HD+ 1080x2280 resolution,that is well enough to see at this price point.This is an IPS panel but its colour reproduction is only rated at 84 percent of the NTSC colour gamut. It's also certified by TUV Rheinland for blue light reduction when using it in reading mode.Note 8 has a 4000mAh battery, support for 18W fast charging (the 18W charger is there), Bluetooth 5, and Wi-Fi 802.11ac support.

The screen measures 6.3 inches and has a full-HD+ 1080x2280 resolution, which is good to see at the sub-Rs. 10,000 price point. This is an IPS panel but its colour reproduction is only rated at 84 percent of the NTSC colour gamut. It's also certified by TUV Rheinland for blue light reduction when using it in reading mode. Other noteworthy specifications include a 4000mAh battery, support for 18W fast charging (the 18W charger is included), Bluetooth 5, and Wi-Fi 802.11ac support.

This review unit was running MIUI 10.3.1 running on Android 9 with the September 2019 security patch.People can read many capabilities it offers in my review.There's still lots of preloaded bloatware, most of which can be uninstalled. You'll have to live with infamous spammy notifications and ads unless you carefully tweak the permissions for certain troublesome apps like the GetApps store and MIUI browser.

Performance-
* Snapdragon 665 chipset
* 4 x 2.0GHz Kryo 260 Gold & 4 x 1.8GHz Kryo 260 Silver
* Adreno 610
* 4/6GB RAM
* 64/128GB storage
* Dedicated microSD slot

Snapdragon 665 chipset's performance doesn’t differ too much from the Snapdragon 660 chipset that powers the Redmi Note 7S. The chipset is based on an 11nm architecture, which should make it a bit more frugal. The 665’s CPU is a touch slower than the 660, while the 665’s GPU is a tad more powerful. All-in-all, the performance gains and losses should even out.

As pee the general experiences,phone is usually able to keep up with whatever you throw at it. Jumping between apps will on occasion cause frame drop and a bit of irritation.
The gaming experience is not that much good. Pushing the graphics setting in PUBG results in noticeable lag and dropped frames. It doesn’t help that the phone heats up a fair bit over just a few minutes of gaming. The Snapdragon 66x family of chipsets are being outpaced by their successors, and it shows here.
The phone manages a score of 170,973 points in AnTuTu, which is ahead of both the Redmi Note 7S that it replaces and the Moto One Macro. Graphics performance, however, benchmarked worse than the Redmi Note 7S and especially the Moto One Macro.

Video Performance-
The primary camera supports 4K shooting at 30fps and 1080p footage at either 30 or 60fps. The wide-angle camera can shoot 1080p at 30fps while the macro sensor is limited to 720p at 30fps. In terms of quality, video performance is quite average. 1080p/30fps footage offers good detail preservation and punchy colors but we noticed strong studders and choppiness when panning. EIS is enabled by default and stabilizes handshakes and walking movements quite well. 4K videos resolve a great amount of detail and unlike the 1080p videos, they don’t suffer from any choppiness or flickering. However, the video stabilization is totally ineffective in the 4K mode and this produces really shaky footage if you’re walking and moving.

For some odd reasons, the support for 1080/60fps is missing at the time being. Xiaomi says it will add the option in a future OTA but we haven’t received such an update just yet. – it’s likely it will be added with the upcoming MIUI 11 update but we’re not totally sure.

Battery-
* 4,000mAh
* 18W fast-charging support
* Fast charger included in the box
* No wireless charging

Although the Redmi Note 8 Pro has received an upgrade in the battery department with a 4,500 mAh cell, the Redmi Note 8 continues to make do with the 4,000 mAh unit that has been around since the Redmi Note 3. Competitors like Realme and Samsung have up the ante by packing bigger batteries on their smartphones and that means the Redmi Note series can no longer boast the class-leading battery performance. Still, the 4,000mAh isn’t a paltry figure by any means. In fact, the Redmi Note 8 lives up to the legacy of the Redmi Note series when it comes to delivering a reliable battery performance. With my admittedly heavy usage, I was regularly getting more than one day of battery life, with around 25-30% juice still left in the tank at the end of the day. With moderate usage that doesn’t include a lot of heavy gaming, I would imagine you can comfortably squeeze out a few more hours and get close to two days of battery.

This time around Xiaomi has also included a fast charger (18W) inside the box. With the supplied charger, the device takes 40 minutes to reach 50% from the empty state. Meanwhile, a full charge takes around an hour and 50 minutes. To put things into perspective, with a 10W charger it takes 2 hours and 30 minutes to reach 100% mark.

Camera Quality-

Rear Cameras:
* 48MP main (Samsung QW1), f/1.8, 0.8-micron pixel size, PDAF
* 8MP ultra-wide, f/2.2
* 2MP macro, f/2.4
* 2MP depth sensor, f/2.4

One of the biggest selling points of the Redmi Note 8 is its rear quad-camera setup. The main one is a 48-megapixel f/1.79 camera which takes 16-megapixel shots by default and can record video at up to 4K 30fps or 1080p 60fps. Next, there's an 8-megapixel f/2.2 wide-angle camera, a 2-megapixel macro camera, and a 2-megapixel depth sensor. If you think that sounds familiar, a lot of these specifications are shared with the Realme 5.

MIUI's camera app is fairly simple but does have some quirks. The way you switch between cameras isn't especially intuitive — there are three dots above the shutter button which correspond to 0.6X, 1X, and 2X. As you might have guessed, the first two switch between the wide-angle and primary cameras, but 2X just does a digital zoom. If you want to use the macro camera, there's a separate toggle above the viewfinder where the flash and HDR controls are

We struggled a little bit with locking focus in low light and when using the macro camera on the Redmi Note 8. We often had to tap the screen to get the Redmi Note 8 to lock on what we wanted. Another odd issue was the over-aggressive Pocket Mode, which resulted in the screen locking up very often when we held the phone in landscape to take a photo, because the proximity sensor was covered.

When it comes to photo quality though, we were impressed overall. The primary 48-megapixel camera on the Redmi Note 8 gave us crisp, bright shots with very good detail. Subjects at a distance tended to be grainier than we would have liked, but closeups came out looking great. Colours were good and there was some nice natural depth of field.

Details were sometimes lost when shooting brightly coloured objects, or in scenes with contrasting backgrounds. Shots taken with the wide-angle camera on the Redmi Note 8 tended to suffer in terms of clarity and exposures were not balanced as well, but there was little to no warping at the edges of our frames.

Other than the issue with autofocus detection, we found that our low-light shots were sometimes blotchy and noisy, and there could be some motion blur if we weren't very still. Quality was decent but nothing to get excited about. Again, the wide-angle camera produced far less detail.

The macro camera on the Redmi Note 8 can be fun to use and lends itself to creative framing. We managed to get some interesting perspectives. The depth of field it produces can make subjects stand out, but they aren't captured in very high quality. We had to experiment a while before figuring out how far we needed to stand from our subjects, and we found it hard to capture anything that was moving.

Front Camera -
* 13MP, f/2.0
* 4K 30fps, Full HD 30/60fps
* Slow-motion 120fps
The 13 MP front-facing camera takes decent looking selfies in good lighting, although sharpness and exposure levels are not great. The selfies are good enough for posting on social media in my opinion.

Audio-
* Headphone jack
* No aptX support

Headphone audio from the Redmi Note 8 veers between passable and good. Even with quality headphones, there is a noticeable hiss in the background. Music sounds warm with an emphasis on bass. It isn’t the most neutral presentation, but should be good enough for listening to music while commuting.
The single loudspeaker isn’t the loudest around, but it is serviceable for listening to podcasts and alarms. Just don’t crank it up to play music — there’s not much of bottom end here and the highs can sound a bit too shrill.

Connectivity: Dual-SIM and microSD card slots-
The Redmi Note 8 includes a notification LED, IR blaster, a 3.5 mm jack and supports Miracast for wirelessly connecting to external monitors. The device supports the USB On-The-Go (OTG) protocol too for connecting external peripherals like keyboards and mice, although the Type-C port only operates on the older USB 2.0 standard.

Our review unit has 128 GB of eMMC flash storage, of which around 108 GB was available when we first booted the handset. If 108 GB is not enough for you, then you can add up to a 256 GB microSD card. The integrated reader supports the SDHC and SDXC standards and can read the exFAT file system too. The device also has dedicated dual-SIM card slots, so you need not compromise between dual-SIM functionality and microSD card expansion.

Telephone Features & Call Quality-
Our review unit has unremarkable call quality when connected to the Vodafone network in Germany. The earpiece reproduces voices clearly, as do the built-in microphones. We had no issues with using the front-facing camera for Skype calls either, although voice quality deteriorates if the speaker is set to maximum volume.

The Redmi Note 8 supports dual voice over LTE (VoLTE), but this will only work if carriers provision the device on their network. Since our review unit is a Chinese model, there is little chance of that happening with network providers in Germany or beyond. You may have more luck with the global variant, though. Neither version supports Wi-Fi calling.

Pros-
*High-quality IPS panel
*dual SIM
*microSD card slot
*3.5 mm jack
*good mono speaker
*well-built
*looks premium
*Qualcomm Snapdragon 665
*fast Wi-Fi

Cons-
*Only BT 4.2
*UFS storage restricted to the Pro model
*No LTE band 20 or Widevine L3 in the Chinese model
*Weak cameras in the flagship model
*Ergonomic

Conclusion - a powerful overall concept:
The Xiaomi-rated Redmi Note 8 smartphone Redmi Note 8 is another successful entry-level smartphone from Xiaomi that offers a lot of energy to those on a tight budget. The hardware that Xiaomi offer is amazing. However, this price is only valid for the imported version. The same goes for high quality workmanship and craftsmanship, but he's also a big fan of IPS panels. The latter does not provide the contrast of an OLED panel, but uses PWM to adjust brightness. This is a bonus for those who are sensitive to this type of vibration. The amount of memory and 6 GB of RAM in the older model is almost the same as the Mi 9T or Mi 9 SE. The Redmi Note 8 is suitable for siblings in many areas, but I can't keep up with the camera performance.