Review: Xiaomi Redmi Note 13 Pro+

Midrange phones are constantly tightening the gap with top-tier phones. There are still plenty of pricey flagship phones, but with ever diminishing returns. How useful are the unique features you find in today’s flagships? It’s debatable. Xiaomi’s Redmi Note 13 Pro+ is a prime example of a midranger that can go toe-to-toe with far more expensive devices.

The Xiaomi Redmi Note 13 Pro+ looks lovely, has an excellent display, performs smoothly, and comes with ample storage. The camera is solid, the phone charges rapidly, and it is durable and waterproof. Sure, the auxiliary cameras are weak, there’s no wireless charging, and you have to put up with Xiaomi’s software, but you can't have everything. At £449 in the UK or €499 in Europe, the Redmi Note 13 Pro+ is relatively affordable.

Phones have gotten dull in the design department, and midrangers are often downright generic, but the Xiaomi Redmi Note 13 Pro+ is a looker. It may be a familiar curved glass sandwich with a metal frame, but it’s also slim and sleek. My Aurora Purple review unit has a lovely matte effect on the back with an interesting geometric flourish at the top, and subtle tone changes marking out the pronounced camera lenses on one side and the flash and Redmi logo on the other. It made me crave a slice of Battenberg. You can also opt for black or white, but the purple looks best.

Photograph: Simon Hill

A SIM tray and USB-C port sit on the bottom edge, and you’ll find the usual power button with volume rocker above on the right spine. There’s no 3.5-mm audio jack (the lesser Note 13 models still have one). The 6.67-inch AMOLED display is lovely and houses a fingerprint sensor at the bottom and a front-facing camera cutout up top. I found the fingerprint scanner mostly responsive, but I occasionally had to press my thumb down more than once for it to unlock.

The display supports a 120-Hz refresh rate for silky smooth action, but it defaults to 60 Hz and isn’t scalable. (Displays that can scale up and down to 1 Hz use less power.) The screen is sharp and bright, and it can hit 1,800 nits peak brightness for highlights. I didn’t have any issues reading it outdoors. There is support for Dolby Vision and HDR10+. Movies and games look good, and there are decent stereo speakers, though you are better off linking headphones or earbuds via the supported Bluetooth 5.3.

Happily for a phone in this price category, the Xiaomi Redmi Note 13 Pro+ scores an IP68 rating, so no need to worry about dust or water. There’s also Corning Gorilla Glass Victus to protect the display. These are two areas where midrange phones often compromise.

Photograph: Simon Hill

Buy the Xiaomi Redmi Note 13 Pro+ in the UK and you get a generous 12 GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage. It has a MediaTek Dimensity 7200-Ultra processor inside, which falls short of some competitors on paper, though I had no issues with it. There were no stutters as I switched from web browsing to email to recording video. It got a little warmer after a long gaming session of Dead Cells, but the frame rate was solid.

Battery life is good, and the Xiaomi Redmi Note 13 Pro+ made it through busy days without dying. You could maybe squeeze two days between charges with light use and no gaming. After 20 minutes of racing in Asphalt 9: Legends, the battery dropped by 6 percent. The battery is rated at 5,000 mAh and can be fully charged from dead in around half an hour with the 120-watt charger in the box.

Photograph: Simon Hill

The tri-lens camera here is a mixed bag. The main shooter is rated at 200 megapixels with an f/1.65 aperture, a large 1/1.4-inch sensor, and optical image stabilization (OIS). By default, it uses 16-in-1 pixel binning to produce higher-quality 12.5-MP shots, but you can also choose to shoot 200-MP images in the camera app. The 2X and 4X zoom just crop images from the main lens.

Daytime shots with the main camera are detailed, with a decent depth of field, but it doesn’t always nail the exposure, and colors sometimes appear oversaturated. There’s a warm, pink tone evident in several of the photos I took. You can get a touch of natural bokeh using the main camera if you tap to focus on your subject, and there’s a portrait mode if you want a more pronounced blur on the background. When the sun goes down, you can expect noise to start creeping in, and bright areas can get blown out. But hold still and night mode does a decent job.

Disappointingly, the main camera is flanked by an average 8-MP ultrawide and a virtually useless 2-MP macro lens. The ultrawide takes photos with slightly cooler colors, but it’s much noisier than the main camera and struggles in low light. I can’t see the point of the macro lens at all, as it only seems to produce unfocused low-resolution shots. The main camera takes better close-ups.

The poor secondary cameras might not be a big deal, since most folks will stick to the main shooter. There is also a decent 16-MP front-facing camera for selfies and video calls. The best-quality video option is 4K at 30 frames per second, or you can opt for 1080p at up to 240 fps. The video I shot looked reasonably smooth and sharp.

Photograph: Simon Hill

Beyond the inconsistent camera, the other major compromise here is the software. The Xiaomi Redmi Note 13 Pro+ runs Android 13 out of the box, with Xiaomi’s busy and frustrating MIUI over the top. I would have preferred Xiaomi’s revamped HyperOS over Android 14, as you get with the Xiaomi Poco X6 Pro (7/10, WIRED Review). You get three years of Android updates and four years of security patches with the Redmi, which is the minimum we would expect.

Bloatware is an issue, with a host of apps and games that you will likely want to uninstall immediately. But the phone comes with Google’s Play Store out of the box and will happily accommodate your favorite apps, with bags of storage available. The Xiaomi Redmi Note 13 Pro+ does support 5G and worked just fine here in the UK, but check the specs page for bands. It also supports Wi-Fi 6, rather than 6E or 7, but that will suffice for most folks.

Ultimately, the Xiaomi Redmi Note 13 Pro+ is a solid option for the money. The biggest quandary I see for shoppers looking at the Xiaomi Redmi Note 13 Pro+ is that the comparable Xiaomi Poco X6 Pro is almost £100 cheaper. In this price bracket, you should also consider Google’s Pixel 7A (8/10, WIRED recommends) and Samsung’s Galaxy A54 5G (8/10, WIRED recommends). You can find more options in our Best Android Phones guide.