The most expensive-when-it-was-new phone I ever bought, was a Samsung Galaxy S3, that would have been in 2012, I think, but that was second-hand. 4G had just come out, and the S3 was only 3G. It was painfully slow, as well. I read about some no-name Chinese phones, and bought a Cubot X12. The Cubot was 4G, cost me about £42 brand new, could take two SIM cards, and, most importantly, despite having only 1Gb RAM memory, could easily outrun the Samsung. Once I had bought the Cubot, I decided to experiment with the Samsung, and rooted it. Once rooted, I installed a 3rd party plain Android system, and then it flew. It was the bloatware that Samsung had added to their version of Android, that slowed it down. Since that experience, I’ve been reluctant to try another Samsung phone, and have used various Chinese phones with varying degrees of success. My wife’s daughter follows the fashion and has an Apple iPhone. She barely uses any of its features and expects me to know how to sort things out on it. Drives me mad trying to figure out its controls. So that’s the two top brands out of my reckoning!
One of the reasons I changed phones from time to time, was that, as with computers, apps kept being upgraded with features I didn’t necessarily want, but they required more RAM memory. If 1Gb had remained viable, I’d have stayed with my Cubot. As it turned out, most of the phones I owned were around the £100 mark.
When I saw some stuff about the Xiaomi Redmi Note 13 Pro Plus, I noticed that the top-of-the-range model, had 16Gb RAM, and 512Gb ROM. So, believing that this phone would keep me going a good few years, possibly the rest of my life given my age, I splashed out the most I had ever paid for a phone: £345. Being before the official international release of the model, I bought it off an eBay trader in China, and it eventually arrived 8 days ago (at the time of writing). It’s the Chinese version, and includes only one Western language, which is English. What I hadn’t thought through was that it is American English, and I have a pet peeve about the way they write dates! Surely the left-most part of the date should be either the most significant (as in the Far East) or least significant part (as here in Britain), but, no, they write dates Month, Day, Year. It makes no sense to me! Fortunately most, not all, apps can use their own settings.
The manufacturer, Xiaomi, has its own local (non-Google) version of Play Store. Fortunately, the trader had deleted all but eight of the built-in Chinese apps, and installed Play Store. From there it was up to me. It’s quite free to have a choice as to whether or not to install all the basic Google Apps. I haven’t, for example, installed Google Chrome, Google Mail or YouTube, preferring Vivaldi Browser, BlueMail and FreeTube. Now when I put my GMail details in a particular app, they don’t become system-wide. So it has its advantages. A disadvantage is that some apps, that other apps make use of, are not automatically installed, as we’ll see shortly. It has meant that, over the last week, I’ve been finding out stuff and adding apps, as I’ve gone along.
Apart from that, Xiaomi’s “MIUI 14” operating system is built on Android 13, but has its quirks. The fact that I am using a selection of (but not exclusively) Google Apps on a phone with a non-Google environment, means that I’ve had to go into Settings to sort out a number of issues.
On my old phone, I could set a timer for Do Not Disturb mode. In this mode, that phone was silent, but with the Redmi, media is still played. Also, with the Redmi, thanks to changes made in Android 13, the Alarm Clock didn’t go off when the screen was locked. To fix that, I had to change some power saving options for the Clock app. On my old phone, Do Not Disturb made everything silent, including playing media. This version does not, so if I start fiddling with my phone while my wife is asleep next to me, I have to also put it on silent. Also with the previous Android version, when you set an alarm, it also ended Do Not Disturb mode. I can set Mute so that it mutes everything except the alarm which still goes off. But I have to remember to manually change the Do Not Disturb mode, and the Mute mode, when I get up in the morning! I can’t set Mute start and end times.
One nice feature is Fast Charging. Every morning, I get out of bed, go downstairs, put my coffee in the cafetiere, feed the cats, then make my wife’s tea, finally pour out my coffee and take our drinks back to the bedroom. Well the phone, when used with the supplied 120w charger, is supposed to charge in 19 minutes. I’ve not tested it, but if I plug it in before I go down, and bearing in mind that it’s not totally flat, it’s back up to 100% when I get back with the drinks. Much better than leaving it plugged in all night.
For years I’ve been using a program called GoKeyboard. Back in the day it was so much more powerful than GBoard (formerly Google Keyboard), which used to be very basic. Sadly, GoKeyboard (or at least the version I used) won’t work properly with Android 13. I tried loads of keyboards before deciding that I might have to use GBoard. Wow, it has improved out of all recognition, and you can also set what it can and can’t report back. I certainly won’t be looking back to see if GoKeyboard is working again!
Another thing about GBoard is that you can install a variety of keyboards on it. I added British English, but it took me a while to get rid of the default American English. You can’t delete a language on the same page as you add them, you have to go to a different screen. While I had them both, I set the American one to work by handwriting. I can’t believe it can be so accurate when my index finger is impersonating a spider crawling across the screen!
One of the initial problems I had was that the system kept overlaying messages on the screen which got right in the way, and they seemed to stay there for ages. Searching on the net, I found this was caused by an Accessibility setting — aimed at giving certain lesser abled users more time to see it. In order to set it more realistically, I had to go to the Settings Program, then to Additional Settings, and on to Accessibility. Once there, there are four tabs at the top of the screen, the last of which is “Physical”. The setting you have to adjust is called “Time to take action”, which, to me, makes no sense at all. If you set it to Default, the messages clear in about 3 seconds. Other times are 10 seconds, 30 seconds, 1 minute and 2 minutes! It seems that some of these phones are being set wrongly before they reach the user! Well if you get one, now you know the answer!
There’s another app which I think contains a load of dependencies and is installed by default on the Global versions of these phones, but not on the Chinese one. It’s simply called “Google App”. Without it, Google Translate and Google Lens can’t translate text using the camera. I don’t know what other apps require it, because now I’ve installed it, any other programs don’t complain about it being missing! Google Lens seems to be better, because it identifies the language you are pointing the camera at, whereas with Google Translate you have to select your source language.
Another app I’ve used over the years, is Nova Launcher, a superior replacement Home Page app. Because Google haven’t made some system calls public, third party developers have to find ways to access them. I read that in Android 13, there are problems when you set Nova to use gestures for Home, Back and Recent. However, I’m using it with the 3 old-fashioned buttons, and that works perfectly. Strangely enough, I have got used to this far more quickly than in the past when I switched from buttons to gestures.
Another one that’s behaving a bit weird is “Weather and Clock Widget”. It works great if you use GPS tracking to determine your locality for the weather forecast, but another feature is to do a text search for localities and store these places under the title “My Cities”, enabling you to switch between forecasts for different locations. Sadly, the search only locates places in China! I have written to the writer of this app, maybe there’s another Google background program I need to install. I found an alternative called Weawow, which is both free and ad-free unless you want to add certain features which I don’t need. The writers just ask for donations.
A thing I didn’t like about this version of Android/MIUI was that when I tried to add my own sounds for Alarms, Notifications and Ringtones, to the usual folders, they did not appear in the list of available sounds. I had already added all my music files, and when I tried to search for the sound files, I just got a flat list of all the sound files on the phone, without any folder hierarchy, and in no particular order. There was a solution, though! I was able to set the order of files in this massive list to “Smallest to Largest”. Obviously the Ringtone and Notification sounds are smaller and were easily found at the top of the list. Nothing wakes you up in the morning better than the bells sequence at the start of Pink Floyd’s “Time”.
In terms of hardware features, the phone comes with all sorts of stuff. It’s water and dust resistant, it has a 200 megapixel camera, and a 16Mp front-facing one. Also two lesser cameras on the back for ultra-wide and macros (close-ups). I’ve not taken many photos yet, but I took a few of the cats, and they look far better than the ones I took on my old phone. So that’s an improvement. I have written another article about the camera.
It also has better sound quality. When I play music through its internal speakers, I can actually hear the bass guitar! Not massively loud, but it’s there. The real revelation is when I play music through bluetooth to my headphones via a cheap Aliexpress bluetooth receiver, the sound quality is noticeably much better than my previous phone. I’m using the same program to play it (Gone Mad Music Player). I really didn’t think it would make a lot of difference playing it via bluetooth, but it does. What’s more, I don’t get any dropouts (so far), and it goes much louder. I can turn the volume up to dangerous levels, too, if I want!
The fingerprint reader is on the front of the phone, under the screen, and I’ve not yet had any occasions when I have to try several times before it accepts my digit.
My wife reckoned my voice sounded clear when I phoned her from the nearby shops and she was at home. Which is amazing because there was an event going on with lots of noisy people. And I could hear her better as well. When I sit at my computer in the living room, there’s a dead spot, probably caused by a combination of thick walls and the nearby internet router’s wireless signal. I had to phone my wife today when she was out and I was sitting there. The call was clear and continuous. Although the signal still looks very weak on the top line of the phone, I’ve taken calls there and I’ve not had problems with anyone not hearing me clearly, and it’s not cut off when I’ve been sitting there. If there is an issue, it’s that the phone app doesn’t come to the front when I receive a call, so I have to use the fingerprint to unlock the phone before I can answer. This may be because I’m not using the built-in Xiaomi phone but “Should I Answer” in conjunction with the Google phone. Still working on that!
A few other things work differently to what I’m used to, but once you get used to them, everything about the phone is super-smooth. When you consider that Xiaomi, along with other lesser-known brands that are not Samsung or Apple, also sell phones for in excess of £1000, and the aforementioned biggies can cost even more, I have to say that the once you get past the mid-price level of this Redmi, you have to pay a lot more money for small improvements. I hope that I’ve hit the sweet spot in the Price vs. Performance stakes.
It’s certainly worth the effort to get past some of the eccentricities caused by both the MIUI operating system, and the Chinese ROM. I understand the price of the phone when released in the UK will be £383, £38 more than I paid for it.
