Xiaomi really went all in with the new Redmi. The base Redmi K100 got 10 000 mAh, the former flagship Snapdragon, and an insane price in China

Redmi today in China added a base model to the K100 series, and it surprisingly has the largest battery among the three. Redmi K100 comes with a 10 000 mAh battery, even though the pricier K100 Pro has 8 580 mAh and the flagship K100 Pro Max has 9 070 mAh. Xiaomi, on its official page, also lists a minimum capacity of 9 800 mAh, so it’s not some rounded marketing number.

But at a lower price, you give up something. The base model is powered by Snapdragon 8 Elite from year 2024 instead of the latest Gen 6; there’s no telephoto lens at the back; and the screen runs at 165 Hz instead of 185 Hz.

Battery 10 000 mAh and charger in the box

You’ll charge the battery with a 100 W cable, and the 100 W GaN charger is included in the box—just like with Chinese Xiaomi models. The phone can also charge another device via cable at 27 W, but there’s no wireless charging support in the specs. The K100 Pro, meanwhile, has it with 50 W, so for some people this could be exactly the reason to pay extra.

Such a big battery comes with weight. The phone measures 162.91 × 77.93 × 8.65 mm and weighs 234.5 g, which is just under 17 grams more than the K100 Pro. Before its launch, the model appeared in Geekbench 7 under the name M786BC with 16 GB RAM and Android 17. According to the Beebom website, it scored 2 705 points in the single-core test and 9 885 points in the multi-core test. The same designation M786BC is now also listed by Xiaomi in its certification.

An older flagship Snapdragon with the gaming assistant D2

Snapdragon 8 Elite is made by TSMC using its second-generation 3 nm process, and the fastest cores run at 4.32 GHz. The same chip was used last year in the base Redmi K90, which in China was sold starting from 2 599 yuan (about 350 €). Redmi adds its own gaming chip D2 built on a 12 nm process, which calculates extra frames in games and boosts image resolution to 1.5K.

The phone has 12 or 16 GB of LPDDR5X memory and 256 or 512 GB of UFS 4.1 storage. For gamers, there’s also 3D cooling with coolant circulation and a touch sampling rate of up to 3 500 Hz, which—according to Xiaomi—is enabled only in games. It runs on Xiaomi HyperOS 4.

A body with a metal frame offers IP66, IP68, IP69 and even IP69K resistance, so besides immersion it can also handle a jet of hot pressurized water. There’s also a 3D ultrasonic fingerprint reader, a linear vibration motor on the X axis, NFC, an infrared port, Wi‑Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4.

Display 6,83″ and 165 Hz

A flat AMOLED panel has a 6.83″ diagonal and a resolution of 2 772 × 1 280 px, so it’s larger than the 6.59″ panel in the K100 Pro. Refresh rate goes up to 165 Hz, peak brightness per Xiaomi reaches 3 500 nits, and the minimum brightness drops to 1 nit. The display dims via DC at every brightness level, has a 12-bit color depth, and supports Dolby Vision as well as HDR10+.

Compared to last year’s K90 model, the resolution has been reduced, because that one had a 6,59″ display with 2K resolution at 120 Hz. The new model has a larger surface area and a higher refresh rate. Audio is handled by two symmetric speakers 1115 tuned by Bose.

Camera without a telephoto lens

At the back, there are only two cameras. The main 50 Mpx Light Hunter 800 sensor has size 1/1,55″, an aperture of f/1,68 and optical stabilization, complemented by a 8 Mpx ultra-wide-angle lens. The selfie camera has 20 Mpx, and video from the rear camera—per Xiaomi’s table—goes up to 8K at 30 fps.

The telephoto lens was already from last year’s K90, namely 50 MP with 2,5x zoom. The more expensive K100 Pro has a main sensor of 200 MP as well as a 50 MP telephoto lens, so if you shoot often, the base model may not be enough.

Price of Redmi K100 and colors

The official Xiaomi store lists three memory versions. It asks 3 499 yuan (about 471 €) for 12 + 256 GB, 4 099 yuan (about 551 €) for 12 + 512 GB, and 4 499 yuan (about 605 €) for 16 + 512 GB. Sales on mi.com start on October 27 at 22:00 Beijing time, i.e., 15:00 our time. The more expensive K100 Pro there costs from 3 999 yuan (about 538 €) and the K100 Pro Max from 4 499 yuan (about 605 €).

In early sales, all versions are about 500 to 600 yuan cheaper, so the base model comes to 2 999 yuan (about 403 €) and the top version to 3 899 yuan (about 525 €). You can choose green, white Snow Rock White, and black. The conversion is just indicative; any potential EU price would be higher due to VAT, customs duty (clo), and distribution.

Along with the phone, Redmi also unveiled earbud headphones with an on-ear clip called Redmi Clip Neo, which the GSMArena site covered before the launch.

Will it come as a POCO F9?

Xiaomi’s global launch has not been announced yet, but Notebookcheck assumes the phone will appear outside China as a POCO F9. That would match the fact that the K100 Pro and K100 Pro Max came to us in September as the POCO F9 Pro and F9 Ultra. However, POCO has not yet confirmed the base F9, so this is just a guess.

If that happens, a 10 000 mAh battery may not survive the trip to Europe. The global POCO F9 Pro has 6 330 mAh instead of 8 580 mAh, and the F9 Ultra has 8 050 mAh instead of 9 070 mAh, as we described in our article about POCO F9 Ultra. The Chinese version will likely be offered by China-based sellers, but with a Chinese system without Google services and with the limitations that come with it.

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