Redmi Note 8 (ginkgo) 4GB RAM /64GB ROM: After a Year of Daily Drive Usage

[TukangUsapEmenq]

Heck, I don't know what to do, so I figured why don't I review something on this. This is my really first try to review something so...

 

Spec sheet here.

 

Bought it on October 25, 2019, roughly at US$ 156.75 (IDR 2.200.000, with 14.035 IDR/USD). Source below.

Spoiler

I bought it to replace my previous daily driver, an even cheaper (and a lot slower) Redmi 5A, was priced at just one million IDR (roughly 70.63 USD lol) because I'm desperate of a phone to use for college. It didn't do well for just 1.5 years of usage because, yeah, it's a really cheap budget phone, and you know the cheaper phone you get, it would be getting 'slow' faster, that I have to sell it to a friend that willingly to use it anyway for cheap. Heck, despite the lots of slowdowns and lags, it still fully functional nicely and even the battery's still good.

 

Bought the Redmi Note 8 online, and to be honest I'm lucky af to get it on a flash sale (fun fact: I have the Redmi 5A on the same web's flash sale either years ago. How lucky am I.), with the normal price would be around USD 171 on October 2019, at least. Arrived just a day later. 

 

I got the black variant one and inside the box, I get the phone itself, an USB A to Type-C cable and it's 5V/2A charger, SIM ejector, some papers that I wouldn't read anyway, and a kind-of-transparent black rubber silicon case that's actually a really nice soft case, even considering it a quality one, with "Designed by Xiaomi" emboss text on the bottom left side, and some kind of flip able 'plug' that close the Type-C port. I still use the soft case until I write this, somehow that 'plug' actually 'removed' itself because the rubber wears out with time, and I'm fine with it as it's ridiculous to see that cover anyway.

 

The first time I handle the phone itself, indeed it felt just like it's brother the Redmi Note 7 (a cousin of mine have one), both on handling, weight, and screen, except for the notch (mine's slightly wider), I don't mind much of the notch somehow, but the "Redmi" brand on the bottom side of the bezel somehow kinds of bothering me on the first time. As like a new phone do, performance feels good, barely noticing any shutter and lags, especially when you actually upgraded from a 70 dollar phone. Fingerprint's good enough for me, despite got some around 0.3-0.5 sec delay on it. Battery life's good, and signal reception's somehow fine.

 

The 1080p 19.5:9 ratio IPS screen, it's actually pretty good to see, at least on my budgetary eye, but got a problem that I'll state below. I prefer AMOLED somehow, as I used a Galaxy A8 2018 for a month and damn I kind of poisoned how good AMOLED is, and kind of sad to actually not take the Samsung's M30 because I thought the performance would be more needed. lol. I'd get an AMOLED for my next daily driver for sure.

 

Speaker's normal, just like how budget phones are, wouldn't have the quality tho, as long as it's there and functional. As I said, I used a Galaxy A8 2018 for a month, and the speaker... Far. Really far quality, I really prefer the A8 if I have to. Audio output's kind of good at least for me (fyi I'm kind of audiophile on the budget, so I care of how the 3.5mm output sounds like), used Knowledge Zenith KZ-ED2 for daily use, changed to dbE DJ100 headphone (because one of the earphone's dead on the KZ) and still sounds good. The MIUI's Mi Sound Enhancer is the sugar of the cake somehow, it's why it sounds good.

 

Camera? Can say it's kind of meh compared to Samsung's, but it's there. 4k 30fps is supported, despite you wouldn't use that much as it eats lots of memory anyway and I usually only use 1080p 60fps. Actually compared the 4k with my brother's Galaxy S9 (yeah he have the flagship while I got the budget phone since he saved lots more money than myself), yeah kind of difference it have some. The 13MP main shooter's kind of good somehow, the front selfie camera somehow kind of so-so, the another 3 cameras behind the phone.. I barely use it. For real, I kind of only use the phone just for standard daily-driving and I barely shoot pictures from it so.. I don't really compare the quality with others. I just use it and it's good for me. Main shooter's focus are kind of slow unfortunately.

 

18W fast charge, even Xiaomi's not giving us a fast charger. Samsung's phone on the same price point limits it to 15W, unfortunately. I ended up getting a Aukey's Turbo Charger (details on my signature) so as sometimes time to charge's important on some case, and plus it's a better quality charger (heck, it doesn't even get warm at all while charging, even on fast charging). Yes, it charges kind of faster but I actually never paid attention how many minutes I actually saved. It kinds of warm while I fast-charge it, even worse when I turned on wireless tethering on it (which is normal obviously) since my whole family's using my tethering for internet, nearly 24/7 unfortunately as 4G router's kind of the same price with a cheap phone, so sometimes I have a fan laying around just to keep it cool while charging and tethering.

 

This phone thermal's amazing. It BARELY runs hot like, at all, even on some gaming session for two hours. I played PUBG on extreme framerate yet at smooth quality (more fps's better for me), Mobile Legends with HFR off and medium quality, CoD, and most of it runs fine and.. Only warms the hand for a little. For real, it barely runs hot. Mobile Legends on HFR on would made the phone run hotter (but still good enough to not bother much) somehow. On standard usage, like social media or anything else, it doesn't even get warm at all.

 

Battery? I charge my phone just once in a day while I'm using it normally without gaming, and when not downloading something over free wi-fi. In one case even I ever had 40% left when I left for college from 7AM to 6 PM. I usually charge when it reaches 50-60% tho to conserve the battery longevity. Sometimes twice if I have to tether at home again, especially after those times that I barely left home.

 

• Problems I faced so far

Currenly at MIUI 11.0.7 Global. I only did factory reset the phone, once, because of a bug that actually lots of Android 9.0 have . I made a wallpaper but changed the color space on Photoshop other than sRGB, so, yeah, infinite loop from the main screen and can't do anything beside have to reset it (so you guys, check the wallpaper's color space before you apply it, because of the reset I kind of losing some of important college data, unfortunately I didn't backup those), and I look upon Reddit and XDA, turns out lots of devices had the same problem.

 

I play Mobile Legends on the phone, even it's so barely that only once or twice every month, and it needs so long for months for the high-framerate mode (60fps) to arrive on the phone, probably nearly a year after I bought it. Not the phone's fault or even MIUI one, but duh 30fps on games hurts my eye.

 

Screen retention. Yes. Kind of AMOLED's screen burn-in if you stay on one frame and don't move much for like 10-15 mins, but it's temporary and won't damage the screen so far I see. This actually kind of scared the sh** out of me when I firstly noticed it, yet turns out it would gone anyway. People said because this phone's using a not-good quality IPS panel or something like that. The fix so far I read is using the "Cool" color scheme on the phone settings, but I don't bother to change the scheme as the 'cooler' color kind of weird to see, especially when you do Netflix.

 

Another when you'd know how MIUI using ads inside their own OS to gain revenue, you could disable it completely somehow, but it still kind of bothers me if Xiaomi actually do this approach, although I understand how Xiaomi have to make money either.

 

Even from the first few weeks of usage until now, amount free RAM on this phone actually never exceeds 2.1 GB, at least of what I saw on the Recent App window. It made lot worse when I actually turned on Work Profile for the sake of my college using G-suite, since then my phone felt kind of more sluggish if I left the Work Profile on, but if I turned it off I can only do it on 'free times' when there's barely a job to do on college.

 

I browse 9GAG, kind of occasionally, currently on app version 6.89.07. This app, unfortunately, just lags the hell lot after I browse inside it for around 10-15 mins, even dropping the free RAM to only 700 MB left. Simple fix are just quit the app, and reopen it again, but it bothers me that I have to do it every single time it lags. And, it runs warm too (the same kind of warm while I game) while it's not even bothering to get warm on browsing on another app (Vivaldi browser, Twitter, Instagram, etc), like, probably it's the app itself are not optimized nicely.

 

 

Probably that's all what I can write for kind of 2 to 3 hours on my spare time somehow.