The Redmi 13 4G is the first smartphone in the Redmi entry-level series that Xiaomi has equipped with a 108MP main camera. On paper, it looks impressive, and there seem to be only a few obvious competitors in this price range that offer a similar main camera.
By the way, Redmi 13 4G (announcement) officially appeared on Russian shelves a couple of days ago – it was priced at 17,999 and 19,999 rubles for modifications with 6/128 GB and 8/256 GB memory kits, respectively, but the first buyers who made a purchase before July 7 will get the smartphone with a discount of 1,000 rubles.
Redmi 13 has certain shortcomings “here and there”. Firstly, this smartphone is equipped with one of the old chipsets of the Helio family – despite the fact that the MediaTek Helio G91 Ultra chip is quite fresh, it is a clone of older processors.
Not only that, but it comes with a downright outdated eMMC 5.1 flash memory, which is quite slow by today’s standards.
The Redmi 13 also comes with a single speaker instead of a stereo system, basic dust protection, and a rather mediocre IPS panel with a refresh rate of 90 Hz.
Table of contents
Redmi 13 4G Specifications
| Networks | 2G, 3G, 4G |
| Display | IPS, 6.79 inches, 2460 x 1080 pixels, 396 ppi, 36/48/60/90 Hz, 450 nits (type), 550 nits (HBM) |
| Platform | MediaTek Helio G91 Ultra, 6 nm, 8 cores, 4 x Arm Cortex-A75@2.0 GHz, 6 x Cortex-A55@1.8 GHz, Arm Mali-G52MC2 graphics |
| RAM | LPDDR4X |
| Flash memory | eMMC 5.1 |
| Main camera | Dual: main 108 MP, Samsung HM6, 1/1.67″, f/1.75, 1.92 µm in 9-in-1 binning, 3x lossless zoom, 6 lenses; macro 2 MP, f/2.4; AI, HDR, video recording 1080p@30fps, 720p@30fps |
| Front camera | Center hole, 13 MP, f/2.45, video recording 1080p@30fps, 720p@30fps |
| Wireless interfaces | MediaTek LTE modem; Wi-Fi 5; Bluetooth 5.3; GPS receiver; IR port |
| Additional | Side fingerprint scanner, face recognition, 3.5 mm audio jack |
| Battery | 5030 mAh, USB Type-C, 33 W |
| Dimensions | 168.6 x 76.28 x 8.3 mm |
| Weight | 205 grams |
Redmi 13 Unboxing
The Redmi 13 comes in a simple cardboard box that consists of two parts. Its top side is mostly painted red, which makes it stand out a lot. The packaging doesn’t seem to use any plastic, and the stand on which the device rests inside the box is made of cardboard.
As we mentioned, unfortunately, the Redmi 13 doesn’t come with a charger in all regions – you’ll only get it in some markets.
In the box, you get a basic USB Type-A to Type-C cable. It’s nothing special, but it’s designed to transfer data, which is nice. Our review unit also came with a nice clear protective case.
Redmi 13 Design
There’s nothing particularly special about the Redmi 13’s design. It’s an average smartphone in this regard, with round camera modules on the back, a hole for the front camera on the front, and a reasonable size, proportional and balanced body weight.
The Redmi 13 has a standard layout of the control set. The layout is also expected. On the right side, you get a volume rocker and a power button.
Moreover, the latter has a built-in capacitive fingerprint scanner, which is both fast and reliable. We have no complaints about it. The buttons are also conveniently located at a height and are pressed quite loudly, which is good.
The left side of the phone is mostly empty, except for the tray for the SIM card and microSD card. At the bottom is a microphone, a single speaker, and a USB Type-C port. At the top of the phone are a 3.5 mm audio jack and an IR port. The Redmi 13’s front panel has a typical budget design, including fairly large display bezels, wide enough to accommodate the ambient light sensor above the display. There is a hole for the selfie camera, which is also on the larger side.
Despite its budget price, the Redmi 13 still has glass in its design – front and back. The front one is impact-resistant Corning Gorilla Glass of some unknown type.
The Redmi 13’s frame is made of plastic, but it looks and feels good in the hand. This applies to the entire smartphone. There is no noticeable bend or void anywhere in the body. As mentioned, the Redmi 13 only comes with basic IP53 ingress protection.
The Redmi 13 feels solid and quite comfortable in the hand thanks to its beautifully rounded corners. Its surfaces do not collect dirt and do not get dirty too much, which is always appreciated by users.
Redmi 13 Display
The Redmi 13 has a fairly large 6.79-inch display with a Full HD+ resolution (2460 x 1080 pixels), which provides a fairly clear pixel density of about 396 pixels per inch. Although the screen itself looks good in a dark room, any light source reflecting off its surface spoils this impression.
The Redmi 13 simply lacks the brightness to properly combat glare. Officially, the smartphone should have a brightness of 550 nits in high-brightness mode, but in our testing, we measured only 342 nits at the maximum slider position and 448 nits in high-brightness mode.
Unfortunately, this is not enough to feel comfortable outdoors on a bright sunny day.
However, the Redmi 13 display supports DC dimming, which, however, does not make much difference on IPS displays, where the brightness is not regulated using PWM, as on OLED matrices.
The Redmi 13 has a 90Hz refresh rate. Of course, it’s not as good as some competitors, like the Poco M6 Pro with its 120Hz OLED panel. Still, 90Hz is better than 60Hz.
The Redmi 13 has automatic refresh rate switching logic, which is enabled by default. The display can operate at 36Hz, 48Hz, 60Hz, and 90Hz. You won’t see such low and atypical refresh rate modes every day.
The Redmi 13 display does not support HDR. It does have some HDR decoding capabilities for HDR10 and HLG. However, there is no HDR10+ or Dolby Vision. On the plus side, it does support the highest possible Widevine L1 DRM certification, allowing apps like Netflix to offer FullHD streams to saturate the screen resolution.
Redmi 13 Performance
There is no point in beating around the bush here – performance is the Redmi 13’s problem. So much so that even the user interface is laggy and downright slow when performing simple everyday tasks.
Let us remind you that the Redmi 13 uses the MediaTek Helio G91 processor in the Ultra version – this is the same Helio G88, which was previously known as the Helio G85, which, in turn, was an overclocked version of the Helio G80 from 2020.
In addition, this is aggravated by the use of outdated and very slow eMMC 5.1 flash memory in the smartphone.In Geekbench 6 tests, the new Redmi 13 shows results of 406 and 1342 points in single-threaded and multi-threaded modes respectively, and in AnTuTu 9 and AnTuTu 10 it scores a sad 258090 and 262438 “parrots”, which is frankly weak.
To be honest, the performance of the Redmi 13 is just terrible and definitely not enough for a 2024 phone, even a budget one. To put things into perspective, the 2020 Redmi Note 9 has essentially the same CPU and GPU configuration.
On the other hand, the MediaTek Helio G91 Ultra processor that powers the Redmi 13 may not be particularly powerful, but at least it doesn’t get too hot even under intense usage scenarios. Instead, it runs smoothly with reasonable and gradual thermal throttling.
Redmi 13 Camera
The main camera is the highlight of the Redmi 13. It’s the first 108-megapixel camera in the numbered Redmi series. It uses the Samsung S5KHM6 sensor, commonly referred to as the HM6.
It’s a 1/1.67-inch sensor with a 0.64-micron pixel size. The sensor is located behind the f/1.8 lens and has PDAF.
The Redmi 13’s budget price apparently didn’t leave enough money for anything other than a very basic 2MP macro camera on the back. There’s no ultra-wide-angle lens, and definitely no dedicated telephoto.
The final camera is a 13MP selfie shooter. It’s fairly basic, based on the OmniVisionOV13B10 image sensor with a fixed focus and an f/2.5 lens.
Redmi 13 Cameras:
- Main: 108 MP Samsung ISOCELL HM6 (S5KHM6) f/1.8, 1/1.67″, 0.64 µm, PDAF; 1080p@30 fps
- Macro: 2 MP GalaxyCore GC02M1, f/2.4, 1/5 inch, 1.75 µm.
- Front Camera: 13 MP OmniVision OV13B (OV13B10), f/2.5, 1/3″, 1.12 µm; 1080p@30 fps
The Redmi 13’s main camera generally takes relatively good photos with plenty of detail and beautiful, mostly natural colors. However, the dynamic range is limited.
However, once you start pixel-peeping, it quickly becomes apparent that these photos are quite crudely processed and the sharpening is very strong. There is also some noise remaining, and there is some color fringing in the finer patterns. Still, overall, these are pretty decent photos for a budget device.
The Redmi 13’s main camera also does a decent job with human subjects. Skin tones and textures are rendered and look quite realistic. The main camera can also take portraits. While they’re not perfect and the algorithm occasionally lags, they’re pretty damn good.
The Redmi 13 doesn’t have a dedicated telephoto lens, but its main camera still has enough resolution for decent digital zooms. There’s a 3x toggle in the camera UI. 3x shots look very good, almost identical to 1x. Lots of detail, nice colors, great contrast, and good dynamic range.
The Redmi 13’s main camera takes decent low-light photos, but that’s about it. The results are hardly impressive. There’s enough detail in the frame, and dark areas are reasonably well exposed. However, there’s a lot of blurriness in the corners, and light sources are handled very poorly, almost always blown out.
Despite its rather modest specs, the Redmi 13’s selfie camera takes surprisingly clean shots. They have plenty of detail and nice colors, especially skin tones. Contrast and dynamic range are also good.
The MediaTek Helio G91 Ultra has an improved ISP (Internal Signal Processor) compared to the Helio G85 and Helio G88, but it’s still limited to 1080p video capture.
This is a bit of a shame, as the main camera has more than enough resolution to shoot 4K, but it’s also not entirely unexpected for a budget device. The main camera and selfies can do 1080p@30fps.
FullHD videos from the main camera look pretty decent, detail is fine given the resolution, and there’s an aggressive sharpening that creates the illusion of a sharper, more detailed image. Colors are nice, but not what we’d call realistic. Saturation is quite overblown, and dynamic range and contrast are decent.
As with photos, there’s a 3x zoom switch for videos. They don’t look as good as 1x, and understandably are a bit softer, but they’re still pretty aggressively sharpened.
The Redmi 13 doesn’t have any video stabilization. Any movement results in very shaky videos, almost unusable. This applies to both the main and selfie cameras.
HyperOS on Redmi 13
Redmi 13 out of the box runs on Xiaomi’s proprietary HyperOS firmware, built on the Android 14 operating system, all the most interesting things about which can be read on our website in this section.
We can’t find any reliable information about how many years of software support Redmi 13 can promise, but nevertheless, Xiaomi advertises “36 months of work with new software” for this smartphone.
By the way, Redmi 13 doesn’t seem to have many AI features like those found in more advanced Xiaomi, Redmi, and Poco devices, which is to be expected.
Redmi 13 Sound
Redmi 13 has one bottom speaker. There is no stereo system, not even a hybrid one. Don’t expect too much from this speaker. In our testing, we only got an average volume, and the quality wasn’t very good either. The sound isn’t too shrill, but it gets distorted at high volumes. The mids are a bit muddy, but overall, everything is fine.
Redmi 13 Battery
The Redmi 13 has a fairly large 5,030mAh battery. However, based on historical data from the Helio G85 and Helio G88 (which is essentially the same chipset as the Helio G91 Ultra), we came into our battery testing with rather modest expectations – with heavy usage, the Redmi 13 lasted 10:28 hours, which is far from impressive overall.
The Redmi 13 advertises 33W fast charging, but in many markets the charger is not included in the package, and we did not find any detailed information about which charging standard the Redmi 13 supports.
Since Xiaomi makes and sells a 33W charger, we can only assume that it will work best.
Unfortunately, we did not have a 33W Xiaomi charger when testing the Redmi 13, so we decided to test it with a 67W Xiaomi HyperCharge adapter. In the end, it turned out that the Redmi 13 does not charge very quickly. In fact, we’d say it’s a bit sluggish.
Conclusions
The Redmi 13 looks pretty great on paper, especially in terms of the camera with a 108MP main shooter. While it can actually take pretty decent photos, even this device has some shortcomings worth mentioning, primarily in the area of video capture. It’s limited to 1080p at 30 fps, lacks EIS, and only has mono audio.
The display looks good and we appreciate the extra attention to refresh rate modes and switching. However, it lacks the maximum brightness to be usable outdoors.
The Redmi 13’s battery life isn’t particularly impressive, and its charging speeds are lacking. It also lacks stereo speakers, though we appreciate the 3.5mm jack and FM radio.
But the Redmi 13’s biggest downside is its performance. The MediaTek Helio G91 Ultra chipset barely gets the phone running, but it struggles to handle even basic day-to-day tasks.
Pros
- Reliable build quality thanks to Gorilla Glass on the front and a glass back.
- Good refresh rate handling in low refresh rate states.
- Reliable all-round photography.
Cons
- In some markets, the charger is not included.
- The display is not bright enough for comfortable outdoor viewing and does not support HDR video.
- One speaker and not very good.
- Virtual gyroscope and proximity sensor.
- The MediaTek Helio G91 Ultra processor and eMMC flash memory cannot provide sufficient performance, frequent lags and slowdowns.
- Video capture is limited to 1080p with mono audio, no EIS.