Meet Redmi 10C - Speedy phone on a budget!

The Redmi 10C is a new affordable smartphone that arrived in the Philippines last April. Read on to see what we think about it.

The Redmi 10C

Meet Redmi 10C!

To recap, the handset boasts a huge 6.71-inch Gorilla Glass protected HD+ IPS display, 6nm 2.4GHz Snapdragon 680 octa-core processor, Adreno 610 GPU, 4GB LPDDR4X RAM, 64GB/128GB UFS 2.2 storage, 5,000mAh battery with 18W fast charging and 50MP + 2MP dual cameras.

Let's unbox it first.

The box of Redmi 10C

Inside the box, you will see be greeted first by the unit, USB-C, and the 10W adaptor.

Inside the box

There are also accessories like the SIM injector tool, some papers such as the manual, and the warranty.

The back view

Looking around the body of the phone, it is using plastic material with a textured slant pattern in it. Although it is more of like an illusion since the feel is smooth on the rear surface. You will also notice a squared camera bump which houses dual cameras, an led flash, and even the fingerprint reader.

We can confirm that the rear plastic body is less prone to fingerprint smudges even if your hands are sweaty as they immediately disappear even when pressing harder.

The front view

Facing it upfront, there you will be greeted with a huge 6.71-inch display with 1650 x 720 resolution and uses a dewdrop notch at the top. We think that it is big enough to cater to your multimedia needs, viewing angles are great and the IPS panel also produces near-accurate colors.

The refresh rate here would be the standard 60Hz and something that you would normally see in the affordable category.

Side view (right)

On the sides it uses a plastic frame, the right part covers the volume rockers and power button while on the left side you will see the slot for the SIM card. At the top part, you will find the 3.5mm audio jack and at the bottom, you will see the speaker grill, USB-C, and microphone.

Side view (left)

The overall feel when holding it is solid, it has a bit of weight but is not too heavy and tiring even when holding with 1 hand only. This gives us an impression that it is durable and the materials used are of good quality.

First Camera Samples

Outdoor daylight shot

Outdoor closeup shot

Outdoor daylight shot 2

Indoor food shot

Selfie daylight

Selfie daylight portrait

Outdoor night shot

Using night mode

Selfie lowlight

Selfie lowlight portrait mode

As you can see, the Redmi 10C does a nice job when shooting in a well-lit environment. It gave us good picture quality and pleasant colors. The dynamic range may be a bit underwhelming but that's understandable.

However, it is evident that this smartphone struggles in darker scenarios. You will see a lot of noises and the details have deteriorated completely making them unpleasant to look at. 

In most cases using night mode will make it even worse. Yes, it looks a little bit brighter but produces more noise than the normal ones and doesn't look natural at all. So we recommend not to use that until Xiaomi improves it through software updates.

For selfies, the details and colors produced on our daylight samples were washed. It may not look that good but it still does its job.

Selfie night shots aren't great either. Again don't use the night mode for similar reasons we mentioned above.

Overall if you want to achieve desired results it's best to always look for areas with good lighting. After all, this is just a budget smartphone.

Performance

We ran some benchmarks like the Antutu where we got a score of 241,229. While on Geekbench we got 375 points on the single core and 1,596 on multi-core.

Benchmark results

In real-life usage, the phone is capable of handling multimedia tasks like streaming, Facebook, and Chrome. Since it only has 4GB running several tabs on Chrome will give some slowdowns so it's best not to put that much load on it.

Ultra settings on a budget phone

We were also able to try some of the popular games with it such as Mobile Legends. Surprisingly the phone is capable of running at ultra-high preset and 60fps. The entire experience was consistent and we didn't encounter frame drops with it.

Another game we tried was Call of Duty: Mobile. We were able to push the device to very high graphics and medium frame rate giving us a smooth experience. However, for some reason every time we set it to a high frame rate the graphics will be toned down to the lowest. This is just probably an app issue, as newer gen SoCs do not get support right away.

We also notice that the phone does not get warm when under heavy tasks. So that's a good thing for those who play for extended periods.

The battery doesn't drop quickly too when gaming. We noticed that it only reduces by 2-3 percent for every 10 minutes of COD or 15-minute gameplay of MLBB, respectively. This is due to the power-efficient 6nm lithography of the Snapdragon 680.

Some nitpick will be that its 4GB RAM could still be okay in today's apps but it may not be enough shortly. Yes, it can be expanded virtually by another 1GB but it is only limited to that.

On paper it has 18W fast charging support however inside the box will be a "10W adapter". It takes around 2 hours and 20 mins on the 18W while the 10W will take longer to more than 3 hours.

The speakers aren't great, it's not that loud, and the sound quality produces less detail. Although understandable given that it's a budget smartphone.

The fingerprint reader isn't also snappy and sometimes you'll have to press more to unlock the device.

For connectivity, both 4G, and WiFi work as intended, it even has a 5GHz frequency so gamers will surely love that. Meanwhile, the Bluetooth 5.0 is just fine as we were able to enjoy our Haylou TWS earbuds without latency issues.

The Redmi 10C comes with Android 11 with MIUI 13 skin which looks neat much like an iOS copycat. Although as usual the UI also comes with bloatware and ads that some may find annoying. Fortunately, they can still be removed but requires a bit of exploration. Just head to YouTube and look for tutorials on removing them.

UI of the Redmi 10C

Quick thoughts

With a price point of PHP 6,299, you can already get a speedy chipset yet battery-efficient handset. Back then, you really have to spend more to get a performance like that. With that being said, the Redmi 10C has shortcomings but it's really hard to complain about it.

Hopefully, we can give a full review soon. But for now, the device gets a thumbs up from us.