Redmi’s Note 17 Pro Max embarrasses other affordable phones with one of the biggest batteries I’ve seen

The Note series has long been Redmi’s affordable phone standout in Europe. Diluting parent company Xiaomi’s bigger hitters down to a more attainable price point was a mostly winning formula, even if successive generations did start to feel a little iterative. The Redmi Note 17 Pro Max takes a different approach, dialling back some hardware but going big in others – namely the absurdly big battery.

The whopping 9210mAh cell is almost a third more than what you got inside the outgoing Redmi Note 15 Pro Plus – and that’s if you buy the global variant. Asian markets get a version with 10,000mAh. That could mean as much as three full days of use before it’s time to plug in. A rugged build and large AMOLED screen sound rather tasty too. And if all that battery sounds like overkill? There’s also the step-down Note 17 Pro to consider.

Rising component costs might’ve blurred the line between budget and mid-range phones of late, but a £499 starting price (like most Chinese brands, remains forbidden fruit in the US) puts the Note 17 Pro Max squarely up against the Google Pixel 10a. Even with its modest Snapdragon CPU and cut-back cameras, I think it could cater to a certain sort of Android fan very well indeed.

What the Redmi Note 17 Pro Max gets right

Don’t worry, you’ve not missed an entire generation – there was no Note 16 series. Redmi’s penchant for fresh designs with each new model also means there’s little here to tie it back to the Note 15 series either. It’s a clean-looking handset that embraces flat glass – older models used 2.5D screens long after they’d stopped being cool. My Green review unit’s matte textured rear has resisted fingerprints and doesn’t feel overly plasticky, though naturally as an affordable phone the whole frame is polycarbonate.

It’s built to survive serious punishment, with 3m drop resistance and an IP68 resistance rating. The Victus 2 glass up front has stayed blemish-free throughout testing too, though the pre-fitted screen protector has obviously helped. There’s very little indication, given the 8.6mm thickness, that there’s a colossal battery inside.

The screen itself is sharp, colourful and with great contrast – exactly what I’d expect from a modern AMOLED panel, even an affordable one. At 6.83in there’s oodles of screen real estate, touch responsiveness is great and it gets properly bright, too. The full 3500 nits is reserved for a tiny portion when showing HDR content, but it shines enough that outdoor visibility wasn’t a problem.

NFC and eSIM support aren’t always a given on mid-tier phones from Chinese brands, so it’s great to see them both here. You also get a fairly speedy under-display fingerprint sensor and face unlock (albeit not the kind that works with your banking apps).

Then of course there’s the battery. The Redmi 17 Pro Max simply lasts for ages, with enough charge that I could comfortably get to the end of a second day of quite heavy use before it was begging for a trip to the plug socket. If you’re more sensible three days isn’t out of the question. For long weekends where you need to stay in contact but aren’t constantly playing games or streaming videos, it looks like a great choice. Reverse wired charging also means you can siphon off those immense reserves to keep your other gadgets ticking.

Wired charging is suitably rapid, meaning you’re not waiting ages once you have managed to run it down. With a compatible 100W power brick, it’ll get back up to full in just over an hour. A 20 minute dash is usually enough to get through the rest of the day. It’s leagues ahead of any of the brands more common in Western markets, like Samsung, Apple or Google.

What lets the Redmi Note 17 Pro Max down

With a step down in pixel count but a wider lens aperture, the 50MP main camera isn’t all that far behind the Redmi Note 15 Pro+ and its 200MP lead snapper. The pixel count isn’t an indicator of quality, though: it struggles to balance highlights with shadows, leaving some parts of scenes looking overexposed, while colours lean a little too vibrant for my liking. It does at least capture a decent amount of detail and the portrait mode brings pretty convincing depth blur. 2x snaps taken through sensor cropping aren’t half bad for the money either.

The 8MP ultrawide has returned for yet another Note generation, again producing noisy and slightly washed-out snaps that lack much in the way of fine detail. It falls apart rapidly as light levels dip, to the point I’d outright avoid using it at night. The lead camera doesn’t fare all that better, with a noticeable drop in detail and a fuzzier overall presentation.

Still, at least the Note 17 Pro Max’s reara camera design isn’t trying to suggest it has more cameras than it actually does anymore.

Performance is the other big stumble for me. A Snapdragon 6 Gen 5 might be new silicon but it’s a tier below the Snapdragon 7 seen on the Note 15 Pro+, and while Redmi will sell a step-up version with 12GB of RAM, my review unit made do with 8GB (plus 8GB of the 256GB storage assigned to virtual memory). Unsurprisingly benchmark scores were pretty mediocre, falling behind mid-tier competition like the Pixel 10a – which isn’t exactly a speed demon.

It doesn’t feel responsive enough in everyday use to justify the pricing, with Android sometimes stuttering when opening new apps and taking longer to load pages in the Play Store than I usually like to see. It’s not exactly a slouch, but anyone coming from a higher grade handset will instantly notice the lack of snap to the UI.

Gaming is passable, with Call of Duty Mobile defaulting to High details and gameplay feeling fairly smooth. More demanding titles like Genshin Impact needed details dropping and even then averaged closer to 30fps than 60.

Xiaomi’s take on Android continues to arrive full of pre-loaded bloat and sits atop Android 16 rather than the newer version 17. It’s easy enough to navigate and isn’t short on customisation, but there’s little else to write home about. Google Gemini, Circle to Search and a familiar helping of AI-infused apps (audio transcription, text summaries, generative image editing tools and the like) are all givens at this point, even among budget handsets.

Should you buy the Redmi Note 17 Pro Max in 2026?

If you want to go days between top-ups, the Redmi Note 17 Pro Max will be hard to beat – its battery is bigger than any phone I’ve tested from a mainstream maker. It doesn’t look or feel like it was built to a budget and the screen is really rather good. The lead camera also puts in a good showing among its peers.

It’s more of a sideways move than the step forward I was hoping for though. General performance has fallen compared to last year’s Note 15 Pro+ and Redmi needs to speed up its software game, rather than launch with an outdated version of Android.

While the price has risen compared to last year’s Note 15 Pro+, Redmi has stayed in line with what rivals are asking. Ultimately I think a Pixel 10a makes more sense if you care about photography, but for sheer longevity the Note 17 Pro Max absolutely has its place.

Redmi Note 17 Pro Max technical specifications