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Performance and gaming
- 12nm Octa-core chipset
- Good for gaming
The Redmi 9 Prime is powered by the MediaTek Helio G80 chipset, which is a new gaming-centric processor destined for mid-rangers. It is paired with 4GB of RAM. It is a surprisingly capable package that can usually keep up with all tasks. Multi-tasking can take a bit longer, when compared to other phones, but we think that is more due to the time taken to launch these apps. Once opened, things are much smoother.
It doesn’t come with the heating complications that the G90 series brought, making it decent for long gaming sessions. Games such as PUBG run well on lower settings and can retain about 40fps consistently. There are occasional frame drops or lag, but not major enough to ruin your experience. In fact, it is one of the best gaming experiences at this price point as other phones will struggle to even match the frame rate or graphics. There was no heating either.
Software
- MIUI 11 based on Android 10
- No banned apps
As with all phones from the house of Xiaomi, the Redmi 9 Prime runs on MIUI 11 based on Android 10. If you’ve used one, you’ve used them all. It is a heavily customized skin that changes how the homescreen, app drawer, icons and settings screen looks.
Thankfully, during our time with the phone, we didn’t get too many ads or NSFW content, but that could change with extended use. The unnecessary notifications can be switched off with a single click, so that’s not really an issue. Similarly, there’s a ton of pre-installed apps, most of which can be uninstalled.
None of the recently banned apps will be on your retail unit.
MIUI also offers quite a bit of customization capabilities. You can add an app drawer, gesture to drop the notification shade, change icons and themes, as well as switch to a system-wide dark mode. Some of the aforementioned additions are pretty useful too, such as Game Launcher, Mi Remote as well as Google’s apps. The leftmost screen can also be set to Google Discover.
MIUI has come a long way and is much cleaner and functional than before. With the reduction in bloatware and ads, it is also easier to recommend. Just ensure that you disallow certain apps from pushing notifications.
Audio
Taking care of the second half of the content equation, we have a single mono bottom-firing speaker and a headphone jack on the opposite side. The output via the loudspeaker can reach very high levels, just be wary of the distortion. The pitch seemed a little higher than normal at times for music. Output via earphones was great.
