- A 200 megapixel camera.Credit: Mrwhosetheboss
- A 120hz HDR 10 plus display.Credit: Mrwhosetheboss
- 256 gigabytes of storage.Credit: Mrwhosetheboss
- 210 watt charging.Credit: Mrwhosetheboss
And it costs just over $300. The value proposition is better than quite possibly any other piece of tech on the planet.
Phone:
This is Xiaomi's redmi note 12 Discovery Edition. It's a phone so packed with high-end features that it just begs the question:
How on Earth it's possible?
We'll get to that but first you get the insert. A clear case on top pretty standard and squidgy.
Then the phone. A USBC cable
and then there's 210 watt charging brick.
Which is not as big as you might expect. Given its Preposterous specification and that's because it swapped out the Silicon that most Electronics have traditionally usedf or the much more efficient material Gallium Nitride.
There's a lot of stuff to show you here but obviously the very first thing we should do is charge. They said this could be charged from Flat in nine minutes but that kind of sounds too good to be true. So we're gonna test that theory just for some perspective.
- Google's new pixel 7 Pro supports up to 23 watts of charging power.
- The iPhone 14 pro Max can charge with up to 27 watts of power.
- Samsung's Galaxy s22 Ultra can charge with up to 45 Watts.Credit: Mrwhosetheboss
These are all $800 plus smartphones. So you can understand why I'm taken aback by this $300 phone that can charge it up to 210 watts and that unlike those other flagships actually comes with the 210 charging brick but you need to achieve that and this is already where it starts to get a little weird because if you search up 200 watt charging bricks you will struggle to find a genuine one for lesst han 150 on its own and even those won't actually be able to send 200 watts of power through a single port like this one.
Again but it's more than that because it's not just that. You have to bundle learn a powerful charging brick for this phone to be able to receive charge that quickly xiaomi have also had to split the 4 300 mAh power battery into two separate cells.
And install no less than three dedicated chips within it to be able to manage all of that juice coming in as for how fast all of this makes the charging well. Since I plugged it in about three minutes ago we are on 40. How many iPhone cables would that be the equivalent of see how long it takes to get to a hundred and while it does that we need to talk about the rest of it because even putting the charging aside the redmi note 12 Discovery is quite a unique specimen I mean for starters the design of this phone is bang.
It's got that sharp look without that sharp feel.
It's not particularly luxurious. It's basically glass on the front and back and then plastic in the middle.
- They've put an IR blaster on top.
- There's a side mounted fingerprint scanner which is my favorite type of fingerprint scanner.
- The phone has a headphone jack.
- It's officially certified as ip53 water anddust resistance which is one of the easiest things to skip when you're trying to keep to a budget.
Even as you look around the rest of the phone's features it's not massively crippled in any way. Only further begging the question of how there's like 280 pounds here in the UK.
Which is less than half of the price of the iPhone SE with the same amount of storage and no charger.
The screen is a nice big flat 1080p 120hz panel.
That let's put it this way has enough contrast that it Blends into the physical borders of the phone and almost completely hides the camera when you've got it up against a black background it has a slightly over sharpened look to it which comes out when watching videos but that's standard for phones. This price stereo speakers one of the front that uses the phone's earpiece and then a more powerful one at the bottom and they're not bad either.
Even the software has been really strong for me.
This has given me the real chance to appreciate some of the more fun nuances of the MIUI 13 Android skin that it runs on like for the photo editor they have built into the gallery. It's actually insane. The amount of options it gives you it's got everything from object removal, people removal, Shadow removal, to the ability to swap out the sky using AI make it look like it was snowing to make a daytime shot looked like it was taken at night time this is the kind of really nerdy stuff that I get completely lost in. I've been messing around with all the sidebar features and it's taken till now for me to realize it gives you an option that allows you to play YouTube videos with your screen off which is usually meant to be a YouTube premium feature but you can do it for free. Here MIUI has one of the most painless casting features you just Tap a button and you can be on just about any Smart TV of any brand with nothing extra required.
My point being that software is yet another thing that isn't lacking here there's fundamentally no difference between what you can do on a $300 xiaomi phone and what you can do on a thousand dollar xiaomi phone.
(100% Okay Stop Timer Nine Minutes Fifty Seconds)
Okay so they might have used some slightly favorable rounding but I just witnessed a smartphone charged completely from empty to full in less than 10 minutes.
Doesn't Even Feel Real
Kind of feel like the phone is lying to me but I can see the 100 battery in the corner. The only remaining question marks then are the performance and this crazy sounding camera.
Performance:
The performance is pretty good this redmi is powered by a mid-range chip called the Dimensity 1080
And it scores just under half of the top-end phones on benchmarks which translates to still being able to play every modern game
But at closer to the entry level settings as opposed to the ultra beautified versions. However, because this is a very new mid-range to it. It does keep the phone very current with features like it's the reason why this phone can have not one but two 5G Sims. Although how much of a perk really is that it gives it upload and download speeds that very much keep up with current flagships
Camera:
It's what allows this phone to even support a 200 megapixel camera resolution and so before we get to how xiaomi's made this thing so affordable we should talk about this what does a budget 200 megapixel camera even mean like if you were a non-techy person. You'd probably take that number to assume this is the best camera in the world but if you're a techie person like me you're probably thinking it's just a major marketing Play made possible by a technicality but the answer is actually somewhere between the two. Okay to get one thing straight smartphone camera sensors are nowhere near big enough to properly take advantage of 200 megapixels of resolution but here's the thing because it's shooting for such a high figure then even though it doesn't reach it.
It still lands way above most phones in terms of detail like check this side by side on the left we have the redmi using its 200 megapixel mode on the right we have the iPhone 14 pro Max and I can't believe I'm saying this but I genuinely think you would have a hard time arguing for the iPhone here and this is repeatable give it pretty much any well-lit scenario and this $300 phone will take a more detailed photo than most flagships on the market simply because of this insane resolution.
Video Quality:
Now that's not to say it's a better overall camera system there's a lot of flaws here like the fact that the video quality kind of sucks or that the selfie camera on the front is mediocre or that you can basically forget that this is a multi-camera system meaning that while technically as well as that main 200 megapixel camera. You do have an 8 megapixel ultrawide and a 2 megapixel macro lens for close-ups.
The quality gap is so vast partly because the main camera is really good partly because the secondary cameras are really bad that you will almost always just be better off taking a few steps back or a few steps forward and using the main camera for everything but still the fact that in 30 of my photos this is a clear-cut winner versus the iPhone 14 pro Max it is kind of insane.
While I do think this would be a better phone if it was more balanced if it had a lower megapixel count but a larger sensor if it charged a bit slower but had a bigger battery. I definitely can't argue that this is anything but ridiculously great Value Hardware so how do they do it for 300 dollars well you won't find out by looking at the phone to really understand what they've done you have to zoom out from that and realize that xiaomi's entire business model operates around a higher volume of sales instead of a higher profit per sale.
And there's two sides to this one side which is good for the consumer is that because they're not focused on profit per unit they can afford to take a lower percentage cut per sale. No joke literally five percent profit but then the other side which is less good for the consumer is that to get the volume of sales. Their strategy also relies on people upgrading their phones more often and one of the most effective ways of doing that is to just give your budget phones less software support so like while this phone will get one major Android update maybe two if you bought a mid-range Samsung right now there's a good chance you'd get four which saved xiaomi a lot of Manpower and therefore money which they can also pass on to the consumer and it makes their older phones obsolete faster encouraging more of those upgrades. This is still a good phone but just remember nothing comes for free.
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