Two months after the launch of the Redmi K40, the K40 series has a new member — the Redmi K40 Gaming Edition. This is Redmi’s first gaming smartphone, and it’s also the cheapest entry in the gaming phone market. Instead of starting a new product line for this phone, Redmi has put it in the K40 series.
While the K40 Gaming Edition seems perfect, there is one aspect where buyers need to pay extra attention. Read this review till the end to know the points that you should keep in mind.
REDMI K40 Gaming Edition Review: Design
Redmi emphasizes that this K40 Gaming Edition focuses on solving the three major pain points of gaming phones: thick, heavy, and flashy. If you just look at the official data – The phone is 8.3mm thick and weighs 205g, So this phone is not really thin and lightweight as compared to regular smartphones. But when you compare it with other gaming phones, it is indeed lighter and thinner.
This time, the frame is made of metal and the back panel is made of glass, so it’s not using plastic to reduce weight, and the quality is better than K40 and realme GT Neo. The back looks less flashy than other gaming phones, the camera module is still placed in the upper left corner. The lens protrudes very little, and the design of the pattern is still very restrained. The main gaming design elements are around the lens, the words FREEZING, SPEEDIEST are on both sides of the lens, and there are two RGB lights around it. If there are unread notifications, or if the phone is charging or if you are playing a game, these lights will flash. But these lights while gaming may not be always bright.
The lightning flash and the new speaker cutout are very gaming centric. The top and bottom frame are straight and with the pop-up trigger on both sides, it really feels like you are playing on a handheld gaming console. In addition, the new antenna design and the third microphone added to the side all confirm its identity as a gaming phone. There is NFC and IR blaster, but the lack of a 3.5mm headphone jack is not very “Gaming-focused”.
REDMI K40 Gaming Edition Review: Display
The K40 Gaming Edition uses a 120Hz FHD+ flexible OLED straight screen. Because of our sub-par display experience with the Mi 11 Lite 5G, first, let’s take a look at the screen pixel arrangement. This time the screen supplier is from a Chinese company and uses diamond-like pixels.
The screen’s fineness is not much different from Samsung’s AMOLED. It supports HDR10+, and the protective glass is Corning Gorilla 5th generation glass. Also because the flexible screen uses the COP packaging process, the width of the lower bezel is made very narrow, and the plastic protection layer is also made very small and looks more beautiful than other non-gaming phones.
But also because of the non-Samsung flexible screen, the camera cut out at the front is a little larger than the K40. The peak brightness is lower than the K40 as well. Although the screen performance is not very good in terms of hardware, the narrow bezel still gives a good impression.
REDMI K40 Gaming Edition Review: Performance & Gaming
The K40 Gaming Edition is the second phone to use the MediaTek Dimensity 1200, which was also used in the realme GT Neo.
Let’s compare the Benchmark results: On Antutu, the phone scores 686604, in 3DMark 4147, in GFX Bench OpenGL 1741, and in Manhattan 3.1 it scores 4136.
Since it’s a Gaming Edition, the gaming experience is the main focus. For a good gaming experience, the K40 Gaming Edition uses a new type of thermal material that can control the antenna heating up without blocking the signal transmission and reception. It is also equipped with the same type of pop-up trigger as the Black Shark 4. The trigger pops up when you toggle the switch on.
The sound and feel of the switch can be really addictive. Because it is a physical trigger, it feels more comfortable than other triggers that are pressed through vibration feedback, the feedback is more direct while the latency is lower. However, the current system version does not allow the trigger to be customized for shortcuts. So right now the trigger can only be turned on to start the <Game space>. When you play PUBG, like realme GT Neo, it does not support the HDR Graphics Extreme frame rate option, but with Smooth Graphics you can turn on 90fps frame rate. K40 Gaming Edition can run at a near full frame rate in this setting. The same light load game COD mobile is also available in full frame.
This time Redmi and miHoYo have worked together to optimize Genshin Impact. But the actual results don’t look very different from the realme GT Neo. The average is 50.99 fps. The phone has slightly less lag than the realme GT Neo, but there is still a performance gap with the K40.
Redmi does not have a frame rate limit for Brightridge, averaging at 41.56 fps. Although it is able to play smoothly, the temperature breaks 50 degrees Celsius at the front and 49 degrees Celsius at the back. And because it is a metal frame, it will feel much hotter than a phone with a plastic frame, so the gaming experience is not very good.
REDMI K40 Gaming Edition Review: Camera
There’s a 64MP primary camera. Although the parameters are very similar, it’s not the same CMOS sensor as the main camera of the K40. There is an 8MP sensor for the ultra-wide lens and a 2MP macro lens instead of a telephoto macro.
Although it is usually said that the photo quality of the game phone is not good, the K40 Gaming Edition uses optical glass in the phone lens for the first time. This means it features a “1 glass + 5 plastic” lens set. It can improve the quality of the picture. But the actual effect seems less obvious.
Main Camera
The colors in the main camera are vibrant and brighter. The white balance is also much closer to what the eye sees than the K40. The dynamic range is also higher, and the daytime performance is excellent. At night when there are more lights, the auto mode performs basically the same as during the day. However, lens flare issue is more serious, occupying a very large part of the picture. And the lens flare effect wherein you’ll see a small circle inside a large one in the samples could be caused by the glass piece in the lens set.
The performance of the night mode is not so good, and the dynamic range and exposure have been reduced as well. But if you feel the images are a bit dark, or if you want to improve the photo’s exposure and dynamic range, you will have to decide whether to use the night mode according to the situation.
Ultra-Wide Camera
As for the Ultra-wide camera during daytime, unlike the K40 which had a greenish tint in its wide angle samples, the gaming edition’s ultra-wide shooter is much more normal. But the automatic HDR activation probability is low, so you often need to manually enable HDR. The control of highlights at night is very poor, often overexposed at the lights, but it returns to normal after turning on the night mode. The other parts are the same as the main camera.
Macro Lens
The macro lens is just an ordinary macro lens, so don’t expect much from it.
The video performance is impressive, and the stabilization on this phone is very good compared to the last Dimensity 1200 phone. The main camera supports 4K 30 fps with very high usability. The ultra-wide-angle supports up to 1080P 30 fps, which should be no problem for extended shooting time.
REDMI K40 Gaming Edition Review: Battery Life & Performance
This time the box design is mecha style, and it contains the charger and charging cable. The charger and charging cable are now yellow and black instead of the usual white. And it’s a little smaller than the Mi 11 Ultra‘s charger.
The charging cable also uses the L-shaped charging head for the first time, making it more convenient for users to charge while playing games. The 67w charger is the same power as the Mi 11 Ultra, but the charging speed is slower than the Mi 11 Ultra, taking 43 minutes to fully charge. But given that in the first 15 minutes the phone charges to 51%, the charging speed is still almost as fast. Although the body is only 8.3mm thick, it still packs a 5065mAh battery.
Half-hour Tiktok consumed 4%, another half-hour 1080P video consumed 5%. A gaming session of PUBG drained 9%, half-hour of Genshin Impact drained 20%, and Brightridge for 20 minutes drained 13%. Such an excellent level of battery life can be credited to its large battery.
REDMI K40 Gaming Edition Review: Issues & Verdict
Redmi CEO Mr. Lu said this in an interview after the K40 Gaming Edition launch: “The gaming phone industry has entered a dead-end cycle, the product has deviated from user needs, and now all we have to do is return to user needs”.
The low-profile design allows most people to also accept the use of gaming phones as their daily driver, and then as more phones are sold, the selling price of the phone can be pulled further down, forming a virtuous circle. The K40 Gaming Edition is different from traditional gaming phones in the sense that it doesn’t have six or eight triggers, nor does it have the Snapdragon 888, but what it has is a cheaper price, more restrained appearance, and better-feeling physical triggers have made it possible for the K40 Gaming Edition to offer a good gaming experience without the traditional gaming phone features.
It should have sold well internationally too, but it was prevented from doing so for one reason – it can’t install GMS, which means it doesn’t support all Google-related apps, so users who don’t live in China must be aware of this problem. I hope Xiaomi will update the system to support GMS or launch a global version of K40 Gaming Edition.
We are eager to hear your thoughts about this. Feel free to share it with us in the comments section below. I’m Kieran from Gizmochina, and we’ll see you next time.
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