Redmi K20 Pro is the most affordable smartphone with a Snapdragon 855SoC

Redmi K20 Pro

Xiaomi entered the Indian market with a huge splash in 2014, selling its Mi 3 with the then-flagship Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor at an extremely low price.
However, the company has concentrated more on its entry-level and mid-budget Redmi models for a while now. The new Redmi K20 Pro builds on the popular Redmi name but takes Xiaomi back into high-end territory. Priced starting at Rs. 27,999 with its top-end Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 processor, this phone undercuts even OnePlus, which has been the go-to brand for affordable flagship phones for quite some time now. The Redmi K20 Pro offers many of the features and capabilities of the OnePlus 7 and even the higher priced OnePlus 7 Pro.

Dubbed the ‘Flagship Killer 2.0', the new Redmi K20 Pro has generated huge amounts of interest in India thanks to multiple leaks and teasers before its official unveiling this week, not to mention its price. This is now the lowest-priced smartphone in India with a Snapdragon 855 processor, but it also has three rear cameras, an in-display fingerprint sensor, a big notchless screen with a pop-up selfie camera, and an intriguing design.

This allows the big 6.39-inch AMOLED display to dominate the front of the smartphone, giving the Redmi K20 Pro a screen-to-body ratio of 91.9 percent. This is also the first Redmi smartphone with an AMOLED display. The FHD+ HDR panel(1080x2340 pixels) on the Redmi K20 Pro is tuned to the DCI-P3 colour gamut, has good viewing angles, and gets bright enough to be legible outdoors.

Since it is an AMOLED panel, the Redmi K20 Pro also offers an Always-On display feature that shows the time and icons of apps with notifications when the device is in standby. You can tweak the contrast as well as the colour temperature of the panel. This phone also sports an in-display fingerprint scanner.

The Redmi K20 Pro has a glass-sandwich design with Corning Gorilla Glass 5 at the front and back and a metal frame in the middle that gives this phone a premium look and feel. The rear glass is curved, which makes the device comfortable to hold in the hand. Xiaomi has positioned the power and volume buttons on the right, and we found the volume buttons to be a tad too high, needing us to stretch our thumb to reach them. The power button is highlighted in red, which looks good on our Glacier Blue review unit.

The Redmi K20 Pro is being offered in three colours: Glacier Blue, Flame Red, and Carbon Black.

The pop-up selfie camera module also has LEDs that light up when it rises. It glows blue on the Glacier Blue units and red on the other colour variants. Some might like the light effect, while others might find it tacky, but thankfully it can be turned off. The pop-up module also has a tiny window on the top which allows the phone to use these LEDs to alert you about incoming notifications.

The Redmi K20 Pro has a 3.5mm audio jack at the top along with a secondary microphone. At the bottom, it has a USB Type-C port, the primary microphone, a loudspeaker grille, and the SIM tray. The left side of the phone is blank. The phone does not have any IP rating but Xiaomi says it has a P2i nano-coating and rubber-lined ports. This could help it survive minor water splashes.


Xiaomi has opted for a gradient finish on the back of the Redmi K20 Pro. The finish is darker in the centre and transitions into a catchy blue colour at the sides on our review unit. The pattern has multiple arcs which are visible when light hits them at the right angle. This is a new kind of design finish and it does manage to hide fingerprint smudges to quite an extent. However, if you don't like gradient finishes, the Kevlar-patterned Carbon Black colour variant might appeal to you more.

There are three cameras on the rear of the Redmi K20 Pro, lined up down the centre. The first sensor is positioned separately, while the other two are placed in a raised pill-shaped module with a metal rim around it, which should help keep the lenses safe from scratches. A dual-tone LED flash sits below the cameras.

Redmi K20 Pro specifications and software
It is now well known that the Redmi K20 pro is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 SoC, afterall it was referred to as the “855 flagship” while it was being developed. The Snapdragon 855 is quite popular, and is the first choice for many manufacturers when designing a flagship device.
This popular SoC has eight CPU cores and is based on a 7nm manufacturing process. Xiaomi mentions that it has used eight layers of graphite sheets to help dissipate heat. The Redmi K20 Pro is available in two variants, one with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage priced at Rs. 27,999, and the other with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage priced at Rs. 30,999.

The Redmi K20 Pro uses UFS 2.1 storage which isn't as fast as the UFS 3.0 storage on the OnePlus 7 twins. It lacks a microSD card slot, but this shouldn't be a big issue considering that even the base variant has 128GB of storage.

The Redmi K20 Pro boasts of DC dimming just like the OnePlus 7 and the OnePlus 7 Pro. This feature uses DC voltage to lower the brightness of the screen instead of the commonly used Pulse Width Modulation. This decreases flickering and can be easier on the eyes.

In terms of connectivity, the Redmi K20 pro phone has dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11ac, Bluetooth 5, dual GPS, A-GPS, GLONASS, Beidou, and dual 4G VoLTE.
Like every other Redmi smartphone, the K20 Pro runs MIUI 10 on top of Android 9 Pie. The Redmi K20 Pro supports themes which let you customise the look of the UI. It also gets a system-wide dark mode that takes advantage of the AMOLED display to save power and is easier on the eyes when using the phone at night.

This implementation of MIUI has an app drawer thanks to the use of Poco Launcher, The Redmi K20 Pro also has a few preinstalled apps including games like Ludo Master and Block Puzzle Guardian, as well as Facebook, Dailyhunt, Amazon, Google Duo, Paytm, and WPS Office. There are also several Xiaomi apps such as Mi Community, Mi Music, Mi Video, Mi Pay, Mi Store, and a Security app. These apps tend to push notifications, but we've observed that the frequency of these spammy notifications is slightly less compared to other Xiaomi phones.

The Redmi K20 Pro also features Game Boost 2.0, which claims to improve gaming performance by managing your Internet connection, reducing latency, and improving the touch response of the panel. This Game Boost mode is activated through the Security app, which is the last place anyone would look for it. Xiaomi should have implemented it in the Settings app or offered it as a separate standalone app. This mode lets users adjust the touch response and sensitivity of the panel to repeated taps for each game individually. It also claims to enhance visuals by making darker areas brighter in games.

Gesture navigation is available as well, and you can ditch the traditional three-button Android navigation scheme in favour of swipe gestures. Xiaomi also gives you six sound effects to choose from for when the camera module is being raised. Digital Wellbeing, a popular feature of Android that helps you keep tabs on your smartphone usage, was missing from the Redmi K20 Pro at the time of this review.

Redmi K20 Pro performance and battery life
The Redmi K20 Pro is a fast smartphone and at no point did we notice any lag or stuttering when using it. It is quick to load apps, and with 8GB of RAM, our review unit could multitask with quite a few apps running in the background.

The Redmi K20 Pro has an in-display fingerprint scanner as well as the pop-up selfie camera for face recognition. We found the in-display fingerprint scanner to be quick to unlock the smartphone,The Redmi K20 Pro packs in a 4,000mAh battery and supports up to 27W fast charging. However, it only ships with an 18W charger in the box. Xiaomi also announced a 27W SonicCharge adapter at the Redmi K20 series launch event, and it is priced at Rs. 999. This should be on your list if you want to speed up the charging process and don't already have a high-powered charger.

We played PUBG Mobile on the Redmi K20 Pro and found that the game defaulted to the High preset with graphics set to HD and the frame rate set to High. We bumped these the quality up to HDR and the frame rate to Ultra. Even with these higher settings, the game ran smoothly. We played a full match at these settings, and after around 30 minutes, the battery level had dropped by 13 percent. The phone was only slightly warm to the touch.

In our HD video loop test, the smartphone managed to clock 19 hours and 26 minutes of continuous runtime. With our day-to-day usage, which consisted of using an active WhatsApp account, using Google Maps for navigation, running benchmarks, and taking camera samples for a full day, the phone still had 50 percent left in the battery. If you are frugal with your usage, you should be able to stretch beyond a day and a half or even two days.

When the battery did run out, we were able to charge it up to 45 percent in 30 minutes and to 80 percent in an hour using the bundled 18W charger.