Review: Redmi Note 14 Pro+ 5G, Xiaomi's new global mid-tier phone with compelling features

Following on from this week's announcement of Xiaomi's new handsets and wearables, the Redmi Note 14 series is now officially out to global markets, and I bring you here today the Note 14 Pro+ 5G which I have been testing for a while now and putting it through its paces.

As is typical with various phone models these days, this is the global variant aimed at Europe, which means no charger is in the box, but for a limited time if buying from the Xiaomi store, then it does appear that the official charger will be added as a free gift, though I would personally recommend a third party one off Amazon at half the price if you miss this deal, since the handset is cheaper still via the Xiaomi Amazon store at the time of writing.

I was unable to source one of Xiaomi's 120W chargers and Xiaomi were unable to send them to accompany this review, although a silver lining is that the Redmi line does not use any proprietary charging technology, if the charger complies with USB-PD, then it will charge up to 120W. More on charging a bit later.

I should note that whilst the specs table below shows some nice hardware, at least on paper, the Indian and Chinese version of this handset has better features, such as a 6200 mAh silicon battery, a dedicated telephoto camera, a higher IPX rating, although as a trade, we get the 200MP main camera whereas the Chinese/Indian version gets a 50MP sensor, though as you will see from the camera feedback later, this 200MP sensor isn't as optimally performant as I'd like, at least not with the current version of HyperOS which is running on an Android 14 base.

"Following the launch of the Redmi Note 14 Series on Friday, 10 January 2025, Xiaomi is delighted to unveil exclusive deals for the new series. These limited-time offers will be available on Mi.com/uk and Amazon from Wednesday, 15 January to Friday, 31 January 2025." - Xiaomi UK

Xiaomi told me that HyperOS 2 for the Note 14 series, based on Android 15, launches on January the 31st via an update. I will be testing this out and providing an update section at the end of this review with new features and changes observed once that happens.

Construction

This is where I was immediately impressed. I was lucky enough to be one of the few to get early hands on with the Note 14 Pro+ 5G and what stood out to me right away was just how premium the phone feels. If there was not branding on the back, then I can see how someone could mistake it for something by a more well-known brand around these parts of the world.

The other thing I liked was only after I got the boxed retail version home and discovered a high quality TPU case included, as well as a screen protector pre-applied. Meanwhile, Samsung, Google, Apple and so on don't even entertain such ideas.

Xiaomi also state that the Pro+ models have impact resisting foam structure on the inside which helps boost the drop damage resistance by 200% - Couple that with Victus 2 on the front and Gorilla Glass 7i on the back should result in a phone that sees little to no damage for many years, with or without a case. There's not really a reasonable way to test the 200% claim due to the way probability and physics works, so I will just take Xiaomi's word for it on this one.

Note: The screen protector was removed for the purpose of this review.

I've had the Galaxy S24 Ultra, and now have the Pixel 9 Pro XL, my personal view is that the XL feels superior in the hand than the Samsung, and as you can see above, the Note 14 Pro+ doesn't look a million miles apart in quality to the Pixel, tastefully executed I'd say.

Flipping them over and setting both to their most colour accurate outputs, a similar observation is made when looking at some of my photos that I know the true colour of:

The only thing that lets the quality slightly down is the use of curved AMOLED edges. It's a thing that's been done to death by Samsung so much that its creator has since abandoned it, and the implementation on the Note 14 Pro+ isn't to my liking either. I often found I was accidentally missing swipes or gestures, the calibration of palm rejection could be improved, too. It reminds me of my old Galaxy S7 Edge, though the curve is less extreme here, thankfully.

Nevertheless, Xiaomi have colour calibrated this 6.7" AMOLED panel beautifully and it is not only crisp, but also bright at a rated 3000 nits in direct sunlight.

The side buttons are plastic and tactile to press, the feel just as they do on any other phone, nothing too noteworthy.

A nice touch is that the top and bottom edges of the frame are segmented in a floating matte finish as shown above, though keen eyes will notice that the mid-frame is glossy instead of matte, I think this was a poor choice as glossy tends to micro scratch easily, and matte feels nicer in the hand. Google missed the beat here too with the XL, whilst the smaller Pixels have a matte frame, the mind boggles...

The camera hump is big, though it is wide enough that there's no wobble when the phone is on a table and touched. The base of the hump if surrounded by a nicely grooved metal ring, and I found myself running a fingernail along it often enough to use it as an alternative to a fidget spinner.

The underside houses just the dual-SIM tray, USB port and speaker grille. Notice that the SIM tray has some scuffs on it already from the ejection tool. It seems the paint on the tray's surface is not of the same quality as the rest of the phone.

HyperOS

Xiaomi has confirmed that the Android 15 update lands on January 31st for the global version of the Note 14 series. I asked what new features or enhancements we should expect from HyperOS 2 during the press event and was told the usual feature updates as per Android 15, along with improvements to existing HyperOS features.

Note that the Android security patch level is nearly 3-months out of date. Google release these patches every month and most other brands aren't far off either, so it was a bit odd to see a brand-new handset running security update level that is months old.

Xiaomi said at the press event that it now complies with the European ruling stating that phones must have at least 5-years of updates, and even though the UK isn't a part of the EU any longer, we are being included in that compliance, so it will be interesting to see how often HyperOS security updates happen after the update lands on the 31st of January. For reference, the ruling doesn't go into effect until June this year.

Back onto HyperOS, this time round there is a big focus on AI, from editing photos to taking them, as well as digital assistance and generative AI functions. Xiaomi bundle Google's Gemini with all handsets now too, but its own AI backend still exists alongside it which taps into in-house applications. The user has the option to pick which to use.

Here is what comes pre-installed with the Note 14 Pro+, I have crossed out SpeedTest as that is my doing:

I was able to uninstall all of the games, along with most of the stuff I don't care to have on this handset, such as Netflix, Xiaomi Community, Opera and so on leaving a much cleaner app list, but just like on Samsung and others, you still have the OEM's own apps, alongside Google's, and Google's apps you cannot uninstall, including things like YouTube Music if you never use it.

This is the first phone to release using Qualcomm's new mid-range SoC, the Snapdragon 7s Gen 3. I used the Note 14 Pro+ daily alongside my Pixel, and apart from a couple of app-loading stutters initially before they cache to RAM, the phone felt snappy and did mostly everything as quick as I expect a modern phone to do as far as the OS goes.

Animations and transitions are smooth, the notifications pull-down is quick and laid out nicer than Google's Pixel version and tapping on the clock in the notifications area loads the clock app, something that Samsung has not managed to learn to this day.

It's not all rosy, though, and I don't know if on this phone it is related to HyperOS or a hardware limitation, but the optical fingerprint sensor has a flaky accuracy rate. More often than I'd like I found that my thumb wasn't being read properly:

As you can see, it can take a couple of tries before it works, and I suspect it's because of the use of an optical reader instead of ultra-sonic as used by other handsets. It's been a long time since I used an optical one, but the REDMAGIC 7 also had one, and that too was dodgy.

In fact, generally speaking the capacitive touch sensitivity on this display isn't as precise as it should be I feel, and this feels like a software issue rather than hardware. Even using the camera, the shutter button doesn't register a tap on the odd occasion, or if I pull down the notification bar, it might miss one drag but not the other.

Other features are very welcome, though, things like gesture actions and back taps:

Gaming

This isn't really marketed a gaming phone, nor does it have a gaming chipset, but I ran a few games anyway and had no problems pulling 50-60fps on average, which then boosted to around 90fps thanks to a feature called Game Turbo:

It recognises whenever you install a game and adds it into the ecosystem. You can then tap to enable higher performance for any game installed.

Overall, the gaming experience was decent, and I can see a casual gamer being perfectly fine with the 7s Gen 3 chipset, even in graphics heavy titles like Call of Duty Mobile as shown above.

As some will ask, the Geekbench numbers look like this. According to the scoreboard, the GPU score falls in-line with the Xiaomi Mi 11X (2021), whilst the CPU score is closer to the OnePlus 8T 5G+ (2020) for single core and the OnePlus Nord 2 5G (2021) for multi-core.

So, these benchmark scores don't quite align with actual gaming and OS performance, which just highlights the importance of generational improvements in chipset efficiency and general software optimisation. On paper someone could easily disregard this phone for its benchmark scores, but reality shows that would be unwise.

All phones generate quite a bit of heat when using the camera, sometimes more so than when gaming. Processing large MP sensor data is quite heavy on the components. The thermal camera photo above shows the heat distribution after about 20 minutes using the camera.

The hottest point registered at 43.9 degrees on the exterior of the panel, so inside will have been much hotter still. There was no CPU thermal throttling that I experienced at any point.

Camera

This 200MP camera is marketed quite heavily by Xiaomi for this phone, but it's not a newer 200MP sensor. It is of course pixel binned to produce 12MP jpegs

it is Samsung's HP3 sensor which released in 2022. This sensor wasn't even used by Samsung on any Galaxy phone, instead Samsung opted to use the HP2 which released a year later which is better in all conditions.

I realised something was slightly off the moment I opened the camera app and saw the tell tale signs of an old gen sensor, low viewfinder exposure, a small bit of shutter lag, even though Xiaomi advertise a "zero lag shutter":

The other cameras are the 8MP ultra-wide and the tiny 2MP macro which is so terrible that it's hidden away behind a menu which is the only way to get to it every time.

The ultra-wide 0.6 does an OK job but it often blows out highlights such as bright clouds compared to the main sensor, and as there is no optical zoom, any zoom you do is digital, though Xiaomi does say that up to 4x is optical quality, so I put that to the test:

1x (wide):

2x (digital zoom):

4x (digital zoom):

As you can see, the Sun in the picture on the monitor shows blown highlight detail around the edge of the star, but otherwise the quality seems fine.

The macro lens however...

... Not so great, not only does it misrepresent the correct white balance, but the bokeh and general exposure is just poor compared to the main camera which can get very close to subjects anyway so there's no real need to use the 2MP camera and it's there to just waste space.

Testing out composed shots with a bit of detailing with the main lens does show good results, and regardless of what I said earlier about the HP3 being an old sensor, the general output of the 1x lens is good enough to satisfy most people for stills as shown above.

It's when you get outside with complex lighting, especially on an overcast day like this where things take a turn for the HP3's metering system. It's tried to average the overall exposure here, but this has resulted in a darker processed image compared to what it really should be. Of course, these things can be post processed in Google Photos or Lightroom Mobile to look much better, but having the most balanced original output is always best as it gives more to work with if you choose to edit later.

Video is where the camera is a bit of a let-down, though, chiefly because the 4K recording only captures at a maximum of 30fps, even though the HP3 sensor is capable of up to 120fps at 4K. Notice how the camera is struggling to maintain focus and how the OIS+EIS combo is jittering, you don't want to be seeing these sorts of artefacts in broad daylight captures and I would call this mediocre for a phone in 2024 let alone 2025.

I suspect the rest of the chipset is not quite capable to sustaining the bandwidth for this sort of framerate at 4K, plus, there is UFS 2.2 storage, too, which does not help matters.

Another area the camera isn't so hot is with night mode. This is an unfair comparison in a way because Pixels dominate in night mode using Googles Night Sight feature, but I have to highlight how much artefacting is going on with the way Xiaomi has implemented night mode processing when capturing a scene that is almost pitch black:

Those purple-ish areas of artefacting is a symptom of the sensor heating up coupled with heavy amounts of processing.

Using night mode in an area with a little more light however drastically improves the processed output, though it's still not capturing as much dynamic range as it probably could do, and this is a thing that can definitely be improved with software updates as I've seen it before when Samsung had very similar issues with the 200MP HP3 sensor when the first round of phones were released using it.

Battery

I've covered some info and tips about the official charger already, but how quick does the Note 14 Pro+ 5G charge if you don't have the official 120W wall wart?

Firstly, I had to enable the faster charging option from the battery settings screen, then

I used the Cuktech 10, a 150W output power bank with a stats screen showing the real-time wattage being drawn by the phone. I used a 100W USB-C to C cable, this meant that I was not going to reach the 120W capability of the phone, which Xiaomi claims will charge the phone to full in 30 minutes, though I should still get very close I thought.

I let the battery drop to 5% and then began the test whilst recording my findings at 10-minute intervals, here's what I saw:

• 10 mins 5% to 39% @ 75W settling to ~23W

• 20 mins 39% to 68% @ ~25W to ~37W

• 30 mins 68% to 94% @ 23W to ~30W

• 37 mins 94% to 100%

Peak wattage was only observed at up to around 40% charged, beyond that the highest was 37W. It seems the intelligence charging system is dynamically controlling power delivery from the charger, whether for heat or other factors is unknown as the phone does not get very hot even at 75W.

Regardless, even at 75W the phone charged to full in 37-minutes, slightly above the claimed rating. This is excellent but also raises a few questions, as I now want to find out if a 120W charger from a mains outlet is any faster. The first 50% was reached in under 20 minutes but bear in mind all phones charge slower by design once you approach 70% and beyond, which is nicely demonstrated by my rudimentary recording above.

I don't think it's necessary any more to go into detail about battery life on modern phones. Regardless of class, they all seem to give a full day of heavy use, and whether you are at home, work or on the go, then a super-fast top up can be always nearby.

The Note 14 Pro+ was not an outlier here, it lasts a full day and beyond, but if I did need a boost, then 10-minutes on the charger would take me to full whilst I went to make a cup of tea, which is something both Google and Samsung can only dream of for the time being.

Although one area where they are laughing is with wireless charging, since Xiaomi has no plan to add Qi wireless charging to any modern handset sold in our region for the time being, wired only I'm afraid.

Conclusion

At a little over £300 when taking advantage of the voucher discount on Amazon right now, this phone ends up being a great bargain for what's on offer. If HyperOS 2 improves some of the niggles I have discovered, then it' end up an even greater deal. Not everyone wants to spend up to 4-figures that a flagship phone costs nowadays, even the smallest model Galaxy S24 is still around £700.

To have even some of the features of a flagship phone in something that costs £300 is quite compelling, though I think the Note 14 Pro+ 5G goes beyond flagship spec in some respects given its price. It has super-fast charging, it has the impact foam built into the frame, a superb quality AMOLED panel that is nearly just as colour accurate and bright as the best from Google and Samsung, it is dust and water resistant to a level that even Xiaomi have marketing videos of it being used under water, did I mention it is currently just a bit over £300?

The stereo speakers aren't anything revolutionary but they do get loud, though even with Dolby Atmos support, the punch in bass could be a little better.

In years gone by I would have given these sorts of phones a pass, but here in Europe, thanks to the new regulation, phone makers have to by law provide at least 5 years of updates, so this opens up the range of phones I can recommend to people depending on their needs, whereas only a tiny handful of brands were on the list which revolved around those that provide a long update cycle, amongst some other features.

As a phone, voice and general call quality seemed good, nothing out of the norm, and 5G reception was excellent at 400Mbps+ on my EE SIM. All features worked out of the box, too, including VoLTE and WiFi Calling.

It's a shame that the global variant ships with a much smaller and conventional technology battery with a crappy 2MP macro camera nobody will bother using. But hey, at least it supports adding an eSIM, something rarely seen on mid-range phones.