Redmi’s newest lineup in their Note series is designed to be a step up from their previous generation, that is not news. The ultimate goal in their series, however, is to make it last. They’ve given their new phone, the Redmi Note 17 Pro Max 5G, a battery to last you days and a level of durability to last you years.
In the box, you get the Redmi Note 17 Pro Max 5G, a generic phone case and a 100W charging block with detachable USB-C cable. It is still a relief every time the new generations of these phones come out that they are still providing the accessories that the companies with the most prominence in North America have been omitting for years.
The Redmi Note 17 Pro Max 5G comes built with a Corning Gorilla Glass Victus 2 screen and a pre-installed screen protector for a little added peace of mind. The phone is rated to endure up to a 3-metre drop and is rated IP66, IP68, IP69 and IP69K for water and dust resistance. The phone weighs 229.5g and comes in cloud blush, green, purple and black colours.
The display is a 6.83” CrystalRes AMOLED screen with 2772×1280 resolution, a refresh rate up to 120Hz and 3500 nits of peak brightness. It supports HDR10+ and Dolby Vision. The dual speakers on the Redmi Note 17 Pro Max 5G support Dolby Atmos and can provide an audio boost up to 400%. The screen is beautifully bright and displays apps, video, and games gorgeously while providing the eye comfort that lets you use it all day.
Inside the Redmi Note 17 Pro Max 5G, you will find a Snapdragon 6 Gen 5 Mobile Platform Chipset with an Octa-core processor and Adreno 812 GPU. The model we tested has 256GB of storage and 8GB of RAM with a 4GB memory extension, totalling 12GB. The phone is running on Xiaomi’s HyperOS 3 and features Xiaomi HyperAI, giving you access to AI writing, an AI interpreter, dynamic wallpapers, speech recognition and more. You also have access to Google Gemini and Circle to Search with Google.
“The Redmi Note 17 Pro Max 5G’s battery life delivers on all promises.”
Looking at the camera on the Redmi Note 17 Pro Max 5G, your main camera is a 50MP f/1.5 lens, you get an 8MP f/2.2 ultra-wide lens and a 32MP f/2.2 front camera lens. No matter which side of the camera you are shooting on, you can capture up to 4K/30fps or 1080p/60 fps.
The quality of the Redmi Note 17 Pro Max 5G’s camera is fairly consistent with the previous generation of Redmi Notes. It takes nice, detailed photos from the main camera and the selfie camera, but using their portrait mode has a pretty pronounced bleed of that manufactured bokeh on the subject. It seems to have a hard time finding the edges of a subject and, if you have something like a headset on, it doesn’t recognize that it is a part of you as the subject, so the phone blurs the headset, killing the illusion of depth of field.
Video capture is also good, but I wouldn’t put it in the upper echelon in terms of its overall quality. The sensors on many of the flagship competitors of the world are just delivering a pro-level quality that this camera can’t quite live up to. It is perfectly good for someone who just wants to capture their life around them and post it on social media. You could probably get away with it at certain levels of content creation, but creators who depend on their phone for all or some of their content may be disappointed in the long term.
“The quality of the Redmi Note 17 Pro Max 5G’s camera is fairly consistent with the previous generation of Redmi Notes.”
The Redmi Note 17 Pro Max 5G’s battery life delivers on all promises. With the exception of the days where I was very heavily testing features and downloading software, my everyday battery life could last me a few days with the phone’s 10,000mAh battery. Long sessions of taking video or gaming will impact it as anyone would suspect, but the phone is going to last if you are the average type of user. Even if you do push the limits on the phone, or if you happen to forget to charge your phone after a couple of days, the 100W charger will have you back to 100% in an hour.
My experience with gaming on the Redmi Note 17 Pro Max 5G was quite good. I tried out Wuthering Waves, a game known to really push the phone’s GPU. The gaming experience was generally smooth during short spurts of gaming. The phone did tend to get a little toasty after some lengthy game play, but nothing that I would consider overly concerning for the casual gamer and only slightly impacted the performance of high-end games on the phone.
Benchmarks for the Redmi Note 17 Pro Max 5G were done using Geekbench 7 and AnTuTu. The Geekbench 7 Single-Core score was 872, lining it up with the original Nothing Phone, the Multi-Core score was 2959, just ahead of the Nothing Phone and the POCO F3. The GPU score was 3308, putting it a hair below the Samsung Galaxy Flip 4. AnTuTu scored the phone at 964502, placing it near the POCO F4 and above the Redmi Note 15 Pro.
Overall, the numbers are a bit of a disappointment given a newer chip that was introduced this year, but we take these scores with a grain of salt, because testing environments vary and, ultimately, it’s how the phone feels like it is performing that is the final metric for any user. In my hands, the phone was responsive and performed well day to day.
As ever, when considering whether to get a new phone, the price can be a huge factor, and the Redmi Note 17 Pro Max 5G’s $499 USD price tag makes it very attractive when compared to the more popular phones in the market, but can leave you on the fence when you look at other international phones. I would say that the Pro Max is worth the buy given the fact that it is long-lasting, well-optimized and feature rich in a way that should satisfy the bulk of users.
