The mid-range smartphone market is a crowded segment. Any brand fighting to carve a niche here needs to be ultra-confident in what it is offering. And more than that, the product needs to outshine its numerous competitors at a given price point. The Redmi Note 14 Pro is the latest to arrive, wanting to battle it out as the new shiny mid-range smartphone and here’s if it manages to stand out.

Design & Display

The first thing that strikes me about the Redmi Note 14 Pro is the unique finish on the rear panel. The pastel Ivy Green variant sports a lovely dual-tone texture. There is also the Phantom Purple colour variant, which is quite unique, apart from the regular Black variant.

The smartphone weighs around 190 grams and is sleek enough to be unobtrusive while handling.

It features a 6.67-inch AMOLED display which is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass Victus 2 against scratches. The display offers refresh rates of up to 120 Hz, depending on the content. There’s a fair bit of bloatware when I started using the phone, but I delayed uninstalling them because I wanted to catch the latest episode of A Virtuous Business on Netflix. The colours of the 90s women-centric comedy drama really brightens up the screen. The dual speaker setup delivers decent audio but can get tinny at higher volumes.

Camera

The smartphone has a three-camera setup at the rear — a 50 MP camera with OIS, an 8 MP ultrawide camera with 120 degrees field-of-view and a 2 MP macro lens. Most shots that I took on the Redmi Note 14 Pro were in overcast conditions. While the camera captures some decent shots it does amp up colour saturation in general to make the photos pop. The photos taken in 1x had a fair amount of detail but on occasion even at 2x photos would start looking quite grainy. The best photos I clicked on this device were outdoors in ample natural light. The ultra-wide shots do capture a lot in terms of the landscape, but it also means that the fish-eye distortion is quite acute. Macro photos were a hit-and-miss on the device. Sometimes it was able to focus well on its own and sometimes delivered a few blurred images despite manually tapping on the viewfinder to focus on a certain object. The most annoying aspect of the camera however was the shutter speed. It’s definitely not the snappiest I’ve used in this price segment.

The smartphone has a 20 MP front camera which performs just about fine for selfies and video meetings. It can get noisy quite quickly if light sources are limited.

For post-processing, there are features such as the AI Erase Pro, which offer granular control over what you want to erase, but the results are almost always a mixed bag. I was very fascinated by the ‘Sky’ tweak which switches up how the sky looks based on the time of the day or the aesthetic I want. Selecting multiple photos and videos makes the ‘Creativity’ option pop up under I can choose for the device to make me a video clip of using existing content. I could also make cutouts and collages with this option.

Tech Specs

The Redmi Note Pro 14 runs on MediaTek Dimensity 7300 Ultra processor and the unit I reviewed had 8 GB RAM and 256 GB storage. The first time I used the smartphone it seemed to take some time to warm up and function. Navigation across both displays and apps always seemed to have a bit of a stutter. This settled down just a bit in the long run. However, closing gaming apps or YouTube would randomly entail a lag or a stutter in general. The smartphone runs Android 14 and the brand has promised up to three major OS upgrades in the upcoming years.

There’s Xiaomi’s HyperOS which brings in functionalities such as linking to other Xiaomi devices for easy access, as well as to Windows laptops. Users can use this to drag and drop files across devices or even take phone calls on a laptop.

Battery

The Redmi Note Pro 14 houses a 5,500mAh battery and definitely one of the better experiences on the device. With moderate usage that involved about 30 minutes (or less) of casual gaming, an hour of watching videos, checking emails, reading articles, and taking photos and videos, the device would still only be at the 50 per cent mark at the end of the day.

Verdict

The Redmi Note Pro 14 has some things going for it – a lightweight build, decent battery life, appealing colour variants and a camera that can deliver some nice shots given the right conditions. However, at its core, it’s not the smoothest device in this price range. A little more finesse to multitasking and absolutely no lags during any point in the usage would have made this device a worthy mid-range contender.