Xiaomi Redmi Note 15 Pro 5G Smartphone Review: Near bezel-less mid-range phone with IP68 rating and 30-hour battery life

The Xiaomi Redmi Note 15 Pro 5G offers a lot of smartphone for a street price of less than €400. Features such as Gorilla Glass Victus 2 for display protection, a straight, nearly borderless display, water and dust protection in accordance with IP68, long battery life of around 30 hours in our practical WLAN test, and six years of security updates are highly impressive in this price.

Plus, an extremely bright AMOLED screen, a decent main camera, usable speakers, and good positioning capability including SBAS for greater accuracy further add to the appeal. The housing only heats up slightly under load and the SoC throttling is quite minimal.

Visually, the Redmi Note 15 Pro 5G differs significantly from its predecessor. The display is no longer stretched across the corners but is now straight and the phone has a metal frame all the way around. 

The screen-to-body ratio has now been improved to 90% and clearly goes beyond the limits of this segment. All that remains is a very narrow black border around the screen, which is barely noticeable.

Other things on the housing are also unusual for the price range. Gorilla Glass Victus 2 is currently one of the best protective glasses for the screen and is installed in the Redmi Note 15 Pro 5G. 

Xiaomi has also put a lot of thought into durability and has equipped its phone with multi-stage shock absorption. However, you can twist the phone a little with your bare hands and cause it to creak, which reduces the impression of quality.

The Xiaomi phone is also protected against water and dust in accordance with IP68 standards, so it can be taken for a swim in shallow water. A special function then uses rapid vibrations to eject water and dust from the speakers.

The phone, whose matte back is available in Black, Light blue, and Titanium colors, is somewhat heavier than comparable phones but also comes with a more powerful battery.

If you step outside with the Redmi Note 15 Pro 5G, you will be located quickly and with a good accuracy of 2 meters. The SBAS system also helps here for even greater accuracy.

We also carry out our practical navigation test with a walk around the city to which we also take the Garmin Venu 2 smartwatch as a comparison device. Due to the weather, this time we take the car for a change.

Xiaomi's phone is very accurate when it comes to positioning, and we only detect deviations before the bridge crossing and on the bridge itself. These are also within an acceptable range, so we have no qualms in recommending the Redmi Note 15 Pro for navigation.

The Redmi Note 15 Pro 5G comes with important phone functions such as VoLTE and VoWiFi. VoNR (telephony via the 5G network) is also supported.

The voice quality is quite good in a test call. However, the other party sometimes sounds a little muffled.

Xiaomi remains faithful to the ISOCELL HP3 as the main sensor of the Redmi Note 15 Pro 5G — this was also installed as the main camera in the predecessor.

The 1/1.4-inch sensor uses 16-in-1 pixel binning as standard to achieve larger and more light-sensitive pixels, resulting in a resolution of 12.5 MP in most cases. The full 200 MP resolution can be used in a special mode.

A good quality zoom is possible by simply reducing the image section, allowing the Redmi Note 15 Pro 5G to take decent photos at up to 4x magnification even without a telephoto lens.

If you use the main camera without zoom in the standard setting, you get photos with decent brightness dynamics, but the general sharpness is only average. Individual details also appear somewhat washed out. Colors are partially oversaturated.

In low light, the autofocus struggles and sometimes produces blurred photos.

Panoramas can be photographed with a wide-angle camera. However, these look very muddy in detail and should therefore not be enlarged too much.

The selfie camera on the front has a 20 MP resolution. At first glance, the photos appear to be of good quality, although the details are somewhat blurred.

The screen is also slightly larger than its predecessor due to the slightly narrower bezels. The resolution is also slightly higher at 2,772 x 1,280 pixels to compensate for this.

In everyday use, the screen is about as bright as its predecessor with a maximum brightness of up to 1,155 cd/m². However, Xiaomi has once again increased the brightness in HDR mode — up to 3,000 cd/m² is now possible in this mode.

Color accuracy, however, is not as good this time around. In the original "Color Pro" mode, there is a slight blue cast. Blue tones in particular deviate slightly from the optimum.

The maximum temperature rise on the casing is 40.7 °C under prolonged load. This is noticeable by hand but not problematic.

In the 3DMark stress tests, we check whether the performance is also constantly available without throttling. We find the frame rates are still very similar even after several repetitions of the benchmarks.

The Xiaomi Redmi Note 15 5G has a speaker on the bottom edge and is also supported by the earpiece, which also has a grille on the upper edge of the housing allowing for slightly wider stereo effects.

The speakers can get quite loud, and the sound is balanced overall but shows slight dips in the mid-range treble. This can lead to an overemphasis of very high frequencies, which creates a somewhat unpleasant sound at high volumes.

If you want to avoid this, you can connect external speakers or headphones via USB port or Bluetooth. A wide range of codecs is available for wireless transmission and also for sound in Hi-Res Audio quality.