The Redmi Note 8 turns 4 years old in August, so we felt like an old school “Is it still usable?” review was in order. This device is now considered end of life by Xiaomi, but still supported by custom ROM developers, and the price is still relatively cheap, so it’s time to answer the question: can you still use the Redmi Note 8 in 2023?
Redmi Note 8 in 2023
Hardware & performance
The Redmi Note 8 uses an older Snapdragon 665 chip and 4 to 6 gigabytes of RAM (we will be ignoring the 3 gigabyte version for this review). The specs were decent when the device was released, however nowadays with phones reaching up to 12 gigabytes of RAM and even more, the question on our minds is – is 4, or even 6 gigs enough? Well, depending on the tasks you do on your phone, it depends. If you’re a multitasker, you’re definitely going to expect some apps to shutdown in the background if you have enough of them open. As for gaming, while the Snapdragon 665 was never powerful, lighter mobile games should be fine. So, if you’re just going to use this phone for social media and light-to-medium usage, you shouldn’t be worried. For anything else, you should look elsewhere.
Camera
The Redmi Note 8 uses a Samsung S5KGM1 sensor, which can upscale to 48 megapixels. Alongside the main camera, the Redmi Note 8 features a wide angle lens, a macro camera, and a depth sensor. While the camera isn’t amazing, it gets the job done for a cheaper device.
Here are a few samples taken with the Redmi Note 8:
Software
While Xiaomi has obviously dropped support for the Redmi Note 8, the custom ROM community is still going strong, with an official LineageOS port for the device, alongside many other ROMs. If you’re not willing to flash a custom ROM on your device, we don’t recommend you pick up an older device, as the software and security aspect is a bit of a problem, considering Xiaomi hasn’t released a security update for the Redmi Note 8 in a long while, and forget about full MIUI updates. The Redmi Note 8, codenamed “ginkgo” internally and by the community is currently still on the supported devices list of LineageOS, though this state could change as maintainers drop support for deprecated devices.
Conclusion
The Redmi Note 8, for the price, is a decent device. The cameras are fine, and the performance, while not great, is good and the ROM community is still supporting this device. If you need a cheap device that is performant in daily tasks and you don’t mind testing out a few custom ROMs for stability, we recommend that you get the Redmi Note 8, though if you want a device that is supported by Xiaomi, you could also check out something like the POCO M5s.
