Xiaomi recently unveiled its new Redmi Note 15 5G in the Indian market, priced at Rs 22,999 for the base model. For the past two years or so, the Redmi Note series, once the company’s darling product, hasn’t been getting as much love from consumers as it might have expected. Does the Redmi Note 15 help the series find its mojo back? Let’s try and check.
The Redmi Note 15 comes in a sleek package with rounded corners, measuring 7.4mm in thickness and weighing under 180g. It feels nice in the hand with that carbonated back. The back features the squircle camera setup near the top and the Redmi branding near the bottom. The right side houses the volume buttons as well as the power/lock key, both of which are quite narrow but do a good job in terms of pressure needed to register a tap. The top carries the infrared port and one outlet for loudspeakers, while at the bottom you have the other outlet for stereo speakers, a USB Type-C port, as well as the dual SIM card plus microSD hybrid card slot tray.
The 6.77-inch full HD+ (1080x2392) AMOLED display supports up to a 120Hz refresh rate. I had to crank up the brightness pretty high to read the text under direct sunlight, but when done, it’s comfortably usable. The display handles higher resolution videos and images fairly well, such that you wouldn’t be missing out on details, with good punch in colours and contrast.
Equipped with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 6 Gen 3 chipset (up to 2.4 GHz octa-core processor and Adreno 710 GPU) along with 8GB LPDDR4X RAM and either 128GB or 256GB UFS2.2 internal storage that’s expandable up to 1TB using a microSD card, the phone is running on Android 15-based HyperOS 2.0. The phone handles day-to-day tasks – calling, messaging, scrolling inside social media apps – fine, though every now and then, there’s a bit of a hiccup that did become less frequent after the last software update. It’s not a gaming device for sure, beyond playing CoD at medium settings. I didn’t see the phone get too warm under any conditions, which was nice to see. I did see a lot of pre-loaded apps, which can be uninstalled, but then there are also ads thrown inside Xiaomi’s apps like File Manager when you open it. While the chipset itself is a good upgrade from the Redmi Note 14's, it would have been nice for Xiaomi to lower down on push notifications and ads out of the box for its Redmi Note to come out better in terms of user experience.
Coming to the camera performance, there's a 108MP (f/1.7) main camera (with OIS) and an 8MP (f/2.2) ultra-wide camera. I found the cameras to be quite good for taking portrait shots and doing a decent job of capturing colours and details in scenes with good to medium light. There are now 4K video recording capabilities with OIS. You can take well-lit shots in daylight with sufficient dynamic range but at times, they are too noisy in low light. The front-facing 8MP (f/2.2) camera is good enough for video calls and selfies shows in medium to well-lit scenes with very little shutter lag. The camera app is quite smooth and feature-rich and isn’t too complicated to use.
Powered by a 5,220mAh silicon carbon battery (not very common at this price range), the phone lasted me a day on heavy to moderate usage 9/10 times and didn’t show any unusual battery drains during my usage. The bundled 45W fast charger can charge it from 1 per cent to full in a little over an hour.
Call quality on the Redmi Note 15 is top-notch, though WiFi and GPS performance felt a little glitchy at times initially, the last update seems to have made it trouble-free.
In a nutshell, the Redmi Note 15 is a good new device from Xiaomi to get the Redmi Note series back on track. Could they have done a bit more? Sure, especially on the software side, starting with a more Android 16 out of the box, but on the other hand, a better chipset and good battery life seem to set them on the right path.