It’s been a while since I’ve looked at a phone from Xiaomi, and even longer since I’ve played with something in the more midrange market. Offering some solid hardware with a colossal battery though, is the Redmi Note 17 Pro Max one worth picking up?

A Solid Package

As far as modern phones go, the Note 17 Pro Max is a pretty complete package. Looking beyond the device itself, you’re also getting a wall plug, a USB A to USB C cable, a simple case, a SIM ejector, and a wad of paperwork. Though most phones do still come with a cable and a bit of paperwork, the plugs are getting rarer and rarer to see included in the box. Let alone one that can go up to 100W of power. Sadly with the one included here being a European plug, it’s not something I could try, though you should get the correct one for your region if picking it up for yourself. 

The phone itself is relatively standard-looking, though does pack a surprising amount of desirable features for its £499 price point. We’re looking at a 6.83 inch AMOLED display with a resolution of 2772 by 1280. It’ll go all the way up to 120Hz and a 3500 nits peak brightness. Add to that the modern niceties of NFC, dual SIM support, an under-screen fingerprint sensor, some reasonable speakers, and an astounding 9210mAh battery? What’s the catch? Well that’d be what’s powering it. With a Snapdragon 6 Gen 5 under the hood, we’re looking at markedly midrange performance. But at this price point, can you really say that’s an issue? 

Before jumping into those performance metrics though, I will just touch on the flavours that are available for the Note 17 Pro Max. The black model I have here is likely to be the least interesting of the bunch, with there being a particularly interesting “Cloud Blush” colourway made available too. The pink body and cloudy motifs actually stand out as something pretty unique. I’m not sure what kind of case that model comes with though; anything short of transparent would be a waste. Beyond the Cloud Blush, there are also green and purple models available, with the RAM and storage configurations being:

• 8GB RAM + 128GB Storage
• 8GB RAM + 256GB Storage
• 8GB RAM + 512GB Storage
• 12GB RAM + 256GB Storage

What’s particularly interesting there is that the model with the most RAM doesn’t necessarily pack the most storage. It should also be noted that the entry model makes use of UFS 2.2 storage for its 128GB, while the others are a much faster UFS 4.1. The model I have here is in the middle of the pack with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. We weren’t told the price directly from Xiaomi, but going by other coverage that’s out now, it’s expected to be at that £499 price point touched on earlier. 

Midrange Performance

Though it is a pretty recent release, the Snapdragon 6 Gen 5 is by no means leading the pack when it comes to performance. The Snapdragon 6 series sits soundly in the mid-range tier for their hardware, being a tier above the Snapdragon 4 series, and a tier below the Snapdragon 7 series. It’s markedly clearer than it used to be, but what does that actually mean for day to day performance? For most people it’ll be just fine. For those who like looking at numbers, you can find the Geekbench 6 results below. In terms of older Snapdragon chips, the closest point of comparison I could find to these numbers was the 865, with the 6 Gen 5 coming out just a touch ahead of the 2019 flagship in both single and multi-core performance. 

The real test is in the day to day operation though, and the 6 Gen 5 is more than capable of keeping Android running smoothly. Navigation through the OS feels good, with the 120Hz OLED display given enough headroom to look its best. In my few weeks using the phone, I’ve not experienced any kinds of slow down juggling messaging apps, calls, and other minor activities. Where you will start to notice the lacking power is in gaming. 

To be fair here, it’s not so cut and dry as to say you can’t play games on the go here. What you’ll find is that most of the games you’re wanting will run fine, even if you can’t push everything to the highest tier of graphics. My small suite of Android games is admittedly on the easier to run side of things, but each of them had absolutely no problems. These games included Disgaea 1 Complete, Stardew Valley, Dead Cells, Danganronpa 1 and 2, and the first Professor Layton game. Pokemon TCG Pocket does have some stutters when opening packs and moving between menus, but it’s hard to hold that against the phone too much. It’s not the most well-optimised game all things considered. 

On the emulation side you’ll have no problems with the oldies. Everything up to N64 is a shoe-in, with a controller like 8BitDo’s FlipPad or GameSir’s Taco probably doing quite well here. Traditional telescopic controllers will also have no problems. There is a camera bezel to take into account, but it doesn’t seem particularly more egregious than other phones on the market; it had no problems slotting into my Razer Kishi Ultra. GameCube emulation is around where you start to hit the limit of what the 6 Gen 5 is capable of. Most games will run, but you will struggle to go beyond native resolution for the majority that do. We’re not looking at an industry leader in emulation performance, but for a quick session when you’re out and about, I can see this being enough for most.

If there is one benefit to a less powerful device, it’s that it generally won’t be kicking out as much heat. In all the time I used the Note 17 Pro Max, I can’t think of a single time it got above the threshold of “slightly warm”. I sadly don’t have any kind of thermal camera to give you exact numbers to that fairly lacklustre description, but it’s impressed me enough to warrant mentioning at least. Even when charging, admittedly only at a peak of 55W with my charger, it remained perfectly comfortable. If you’re after a smart phone that really just does the things you’d need of a phone, as opposed to being an all-encompassing gaming and emulation titan, it really does tick a lot of the right boxes. 

Flagship Battery

Where the phone really shines though is in its astounding battery life. We’re just starting to see the adoption of silicon-carbon batteries, and this is exactly the type of advancement I’ve been waiting for. In this phone that looks no bulkier than your run of the mill device, sitting at a comfortable 225g, Xiaomi have managed to stuff a colossal 9210mAh battery. That goes up to 10,000mAh in certain regions. It’s setting a high bar that I will struggle to go back from.

To give you some idea of how long that can last, I didn’t charge the phone once in my 10 days of using it, and it was just about breaking the 40% mark after that. I will caveat that by saying that this probably does present an absolute best case scenario for the phone. This was using just a few chatting apps here and there, sending SMS messages, and answering a few traditional calls. For me though, that’s all a phone needs, and that is exactly how I personally use a phone from day to day. If you happen to be in a similar camp to me, it is unreal just how long it can keep going for. The entire time I kept the screen on maximum brightness, with it looking great both indoors and out in the wild. 

The fish were somewhat calming. 

Xiaomi actually advertise “worry-free use” for up to three days, and that does seem more indicative of a more regular phone user who might be watching YouTube on the train or scrolling whatever short-form content is currently all the rage. To give it a bit more of a media-centric stress test, I charged the phone back up to 100% and threw on a looping video of aquatic life for 12 hours on YouTube. This was on maximum screen brightness with the volume set to around 40%. The end result? The battery drained to 56%. To track that over time, it didn’t drop at all for the first hour, with a consistent 4% hourly drop from that point. It’s seriously impressive stuff, and something I hope to see proliferate to all genres of tech. Can you imagine Nintendo releasing a Switch 2 battery making use of this? We could have a genuinely exciting time ahead of us when it comes to how long our tech can go between charges. 

I will also just tack on here that the phone supports 27W reverse charging, meaning you can essentially use that 9210mAh battery as a power bank in a pinch. It’s something I’ve only really used briefly to confirm that it is indeed a feature, but I can see it being handy in those unfortunate moments when your headphones die on a long trip. 

Significant Bloat

With all my excitement over the hardware out of the way, it is important to throw some caveats in here, and a lot of those come down to the software experience. It’s not good out of the box, and that’s putting it politely. The Note 17 Pro Max has the most bloat I have ever seen in a phone, with more than a few apps not being removable through traditional means. One particularly bad app even goes so far as to throw adverts into your notifications. You can disable these notifications, but the fact they’re there at all is a colossal red flag to me. I did also have some issues with device security warnings in Google Wallet out of the box, though these do seem to have been fixed through an OTA update that came earlier today. 

The amount of bloat here went so far as to put me off using the app drawer, instead opting for the “Classic” home screen, throwing all the apps I don’t need into a junk folder. It’s all perfectly workable, but there certainly is a solid few hours of tweaking necessary to uninstall what you can uninstall, disable what you can disable, and finally mute the notifications of those that have to remain. It’s a pain, but if you’re savvy enough for it and have the patience, the end result does seem worthwhile. At least while this kind of stellar battery life is yet to hit the mainstream. 

To touch briefly on the cameras, they do the job. I sadly haven’t been anywhere especially far lately to be able to take some interesting pictures without giving the Geoguessr wizards among you enough information to track me down. The indoor shots using the 50MP main camera look fine enough to my eye though, with the larger camera app being responsive and easy to use. If the camera performance is particularly important to you, I would encourage you to explore other content to get more opinions on the topic. It’s enough to keep me happy, but different people come into these devices with different expectations. 

Worthy of Consideration

Despite my frustrations with the OS out of the box, I did manage to get it into a state I was happy with after an hour or two of fiddling. And from there I’ve genuinely enjoyed using the Note 17 Pro Max. If you’re chasing power with the aim to have your phone be the one device to rule them all, I do think there are better options out there. If however you’re looking at your phone and lamenting it not even lasting a day anymore, the Note 17 Pro Max should give you a glimpse of what’s to come. If you don’t need the latest and greatest specs and just need a phone that’ll do phone things well, I can recommend it.