Redmi Note 11

Review

At the beginning of February, we had the opportunity to see Redmi Note 11 before the launch. Now, after a month of use, I can comment on the possibilities of this model in more detail - and say whether they are adequate for the price.

Solid build, beautiful screen

The housing is aesthetic and slim, and above all solid. The matt material does not get dirty a lot, and during a month of use, I hardly managed to scratch it, even though I did not use the silicone cover that came with the set.

The flat-cut sides of the housing together with the characteristic camera bezel add style to the device, although this styling of the frame seems a bit exaggerated to me. You can also complain about a fairly wide border around the display, but with this price shelf it is the norm. Overall, the look is positive - I liked the blue colour variant the most.

Unfortunately, the display gets dirty much easier than the housing, and after a month it also managed to collect a few scratches. Despite this drawback, I had a positive impression of the screen - it is AMOLED, which provides us with high brightness (up to 1000 nits) and rich, saturated colours and deep blacks. The screen technology makes a big difference, so it's nice to see AMOLED on a phone like Redmi Note 11. In addition, the screen has a size of 6.43 inches, Full HD+ resolution and refreshes the image at a frequency of 90 Hz.

Memory won't run out

These are not all the nice things you can see on the top of the phone. On the edges we find a minijack slot, three card slots, and a brilliant fingerprint reader. Perfectly located, working perfectly fast and perfectly secure - this is one of the best readers I have used recently, and remember, it's a rather inexpensive phone! The stereo speakers are also pleasantly surprised, and we also have an infrared transmitter - so you can use the phone instead of the TV remote control.

What is inside? The device is powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 680, supported by LPDDR4X operating memory (4 or 6 GB) and internal UFS 2.2 (64 or 128 GB). It is worth mentioning here again about the triple slot - without giving up the Dual SIM, you can enlarge the memory by up to 1 TB with the help of a microSD card.

Lots of options and a bit of clipping

Redmi Note 11 uses the Android 11 operating system and MIUI 13. I like this one as much, although minimalists may disagree with me. The fact that we get a lot of unnecessary apps for the start, but they can be removed, and I like the multitude of options related to personalizing the interface - especially the wide range of options for personalizing the appearance of the screen in the Always on Display function.

In general, I would not have any objections to the system, if it were not for the fact that after using the phone for over a month, I started to observe minor trimmings. They are sporadic, but still - at the beginning they were not there. Maybe this is due to the fact that I have more and more data on my phone and now it is more cluttered - I admit, I used the built-in system maintenance application very rarely.

Besides, I didn't experience any performance issues. Of course, at this price, you cannot expect outstanding gaming performance, but for everyday use it will work without any problems - throttling or overheating should not be a problem.

Long distance battery

The battery can definitely be praised - it has a capacity of 5000 mAh, which, with this low-energy model, means two or even three days without charging - and without great sacrifices. The included 33W charger will fill your phone in just over an hour.

I have no objections as to the quality of connections and communication modules. Maybe only the proximity sensor could work better. There is also no 5G - at this price it is understood by itself.

Pictures - not bad for a potato

Redmi Note 11 is a type of phone that we use for communication rather than playing with multimedia, so there is nothing to be suggested by the effective camera frame. Nowadays, decent daytime photos can even make potatoes - Redmi Note 11 can also. Sometimes it comes out really nice, especially if we use the main camera in the middle of the day.

After dark, unfortunately, it is much worse. At night we see a clear degradation of details and colours, the image seems blurry and excessively smoothed, and the night mode only partially solves the problem. The overexposed points in the frame will be dimmed well, more details will emerge from the background, the image will be brighter, but with the brightness there will be more noise. Something for something.

Similarly with the wide-angle lens - it works well during the day, but it has a much worse aperture and the photos taken with it differ from those taken with the main ones, both in terms of brightness and colours. At night, it's better not to even try. I do not necessarily recommend the use of digital zoom - this minimum approximation somehow works, although you can already see that it is done digitally, but the further the worse - the higher digital zoom values rather give it up.

The other two cameras also do not stand out - the portrait one cuts off the background quite well, the macro also works properly, but I don't know why access to it is hidden on the top bar instead of in the mode tray in the general camera menu. You can see that even the interface itself doesn't take these two frame fillers seriously.

The videos are as average as the photos - Full HD and 30 FPS are all we can count on. In addition, we cannot switch between the main lens and the wide-angle lens during filming.

So, the set of lenses does not impress in any way - but you cannot say that Redmi Note 11 is below average in its category. By no means, with this price range you cannot expect much better performance.

King of budgeters

So how about the price? In its cheaper variant, i.e. 4/64 GB, Redmi Note 11 costs only about 220 EUR. For this price, we get a good AMOLED screen, a neatly made housing, a nice interface and a long-lasting battery, as well as some interesting accessories such as a minijack, stereo speakers and an infrared transmitter, as well as a triple slot that can accommodate two SIM cards and a microSD card at the same time. The photo quality and performance will be decent, don't expect only miracles.

In addition, you can also praise the manufacturer for adding a cover and a quick charger in the set. This is typical Redmi - much for little! There are some drawbacks, but in my opinion, the price compensates for them quite well, so when looking for a budget phone feel free to enter Redmi Note 11 on your shopping list.

Source GSMchoice.com