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The Xiaomi Redmi Note 10 Pro is one of the best Android bargains till date, assuming you can live without 5G. You get a great screen, fast performance, long battery life and a solid camera all fir under R5,500 from Smartphone Shop South Africa including free nationwide delivery.

As our Xiaomi Redmi Note 10 Pro review will explain, this is one of the biggest smartphone bargains around. It gets so close to the day-to-day experience and performance of a R10,000 phone you’d never guess it costs less than R6,000

There’s only one missing feature and that’s the lack of 5G. This is a 4G device. It will always be a 4G phone and at that price point you can’t expect more.

Therefore make sure you’re happy with 4G LTE, for now 5G still seems like a hot and miss in many parts of South Africa anyway.

The Xiaomi Redmi Note 10 Pro has a large 120Hz OLED screen. Its Snapdragon 732G brings the goods for gaming, and the phone has some of the best speakers we've heard at the price.

You get a solid 108MP camera. And while you shouldn’t put too much faith in that ultra-high megapixel count, it produces nice photos and has access to a good night mode.

There’s also a highly unusual, and unusually good, macro camera. Most budget phones macro cameras are barely worth using. This one is great for nature photography.

The Redmi Note 10 Pro's battery also lasts a long time, even if you use the 120Hz screen mode for smoother scrolling.

DESIGN:
• Glass back, plastic sides
• Relatively slim, not too heavy
• Side-mounted fingerprint scanner

The Xiaomi Redmi Note 10 Pro has a mix of high-end and low-end design traits. It’s a blend we like a lot.

For example, you get a headphone jack, like cheap phones. But the Redmi Note 10 Pro’s back is lightly curved Gorilla Glass, not the plastic many far more expensive phones use today.

The only obvious sign that the Redmi Note 10 Pro is an affordable phone is that its sides are plastic rather than metal. We’ve used the phone largely with its bundled case, and like that you can’t tell the difference anyway.

The Redmi Note 10 Pro’s Speakers are excellent for a cheaper phone. They are loud, offer some bass, and there are two drivers. One sits on the bottom, the other above the screen. And Redmi gives this top one two outlets, on the top and the front. This maxes out the stereo sound field and makes sure you won’t block it when playing a game.

The OLED panel is also a great showcase for the high refresh rate. ‘120Hz’ means the image is refreshed at twice the standard rate, and it makes your app drawer scroll by much more smoothly than it would in most other affordable phones.
PERFROMANCE:

• Good general performance
• Games run well even with the mid-range hardware
• The speakers help with gaming

The Xiaomi Redmi Note 10 Pro also has exactly the sort of chipset we’d hope for in a phone of this class. It’s the Snapdragon 732G, a mid-range processor with some optimizations for gaming, which boils down to a higher-clocked graphics section.

CAMERA:
• Fun-to-use macro camera
• Solid night mode
• Primary camera offers good image quality

The Xiaomi Redmi Note 10 Pro has a 108MP f/1.9 primary camera sensor. It’s an eye-catching spec.

However, the part of this phone’s camera array that stands out the most is something else, the 5MP f/2.4 ‘tele-macro’. It’s one of the best phone macro cameras we’ve tested to date.

BATTERY:
• Great stamina, with the 60Hz or 120Hz refresh rate
• Charges to 55% in 30 mins

The Xiaomi Redmi Note 10 Pro has a 5,020mAh battery, which seems a fairly high capacity for an affordable phone this slim.

Fire up the Redmi Note 10 Pro for the first time and it will revert to its 60Hz display refresh rate, just half of its maximum. This is likely to give the best first impression of battery life, as higher refresh rates consume more power. We left it on this setting for the first few days and were more than happy with the results.

The Redmi Note 10 Pro is a great phone for gaming. While slightly more powerful phones are available at a similar price, this one has a solid gaming-series processor bolstered by excellent stereo speakers, long battery life, and a great OLED screen.

Pros
• Excellent stereo speakers
• Big and bold 120Hz OLED screen
• Long battery life

Cons
• No 5G
• Lacks stabilization for 4K video
• No telephoto camera