The Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G has an immense battery and… well, that’s about all, really.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Nice large display | Speakers are astonishingly weak |
| 7000mAh battery | Some truly terrible apps pre-installed |
| IP64 Water resistance | Mediocre app and camera performance |
Score: 2.5/5
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In this review
Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G Specifications
Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G Design
Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G Camera
Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G Performance
Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G Battery
Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G Verdict
Ethical disclaimer:
The Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G used in this review was loaned to me for a two week period by Xiaomi’s Australian arm; it’s going back to them once this review is live.
I mention this upfront before the review because there’s just so many terrible reviews out there that skip past due disclosure, or omit it entirely, or, quite frankly, take money from companies for positive “reviews” that aren’t worth your time.
ART does not work that way. It does need your support to do so, but I feel strongly that consumers are best served with honest, upfront reviews. Whether or not a product comes and goes or stays permanently makes absolutely zero difference to how I review it, and to be clear, Xiaomi have had no influence over this review in any way at all.
For more on ART’s Ethics position, see here.
Design
When you’re buying a budget phone, it’s often true that you’re not overwhelmed with design choices, because fancy designs cost real money. The $349/$399 Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G is a larger budget phone, built around a 6.9 inch 2340×1080 pixel 144Hz LCD display, which does help it to stand out.
As you might expect, a phone with a 6.9 inch screen is very large in the hand, but its more budget-centric nature is highlighted by the fact that it does have some pretty prominent bezels all the way around the phone screen if that kind of style bothers you.
In Australia, Xiaomi sells the Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G in three colour finishes; Ripple Green, Titan Gray or Midnight Black. Xiaomi sent me the Midnight Black variant, and… honestly, this is one of the most generic looking phones I’ve held in years.
The use of black of course doesn’t help here, and it does appear that Xiaomi does produce the Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G in other hues for some international markets. There’s little here that’s bad per se, but also not much that stands out.
Controls sit predominantly on the right hand side, with volume buttons above a combo power/assistant button that also does double duty as the phone’s fingerprint reader. It’s a slightly fussy reader too, hitting more false negatives from my enrolled fingers than I would really have liked to see. The left hand side houses a dual SIM card tray with support for microSD expansion if you’re happy to sacrifice one of those SIM card slots doing so.At the bottom you’ll find the USB-C port for data and charging along with what passes for a speaker.
I don’t often comment on the speakers in smartphones because typically at this price they’re fine without being great, because there’s really only so much true sound separation you can do with a device as small as a smartphone.
The Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G’s speakers don’t even manage fine, sadly; they’re amazingly weak, and while that does suit my tastes when it comes to people being jerks on public transport with speakers, it’s equally not good for those who might want to more responsibly use their phone speakers in their own homes where it’s none of my damned business.
Entertainingly, if you slide the volume indicator for the Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G all the way up it declares it’s at a very Spinal-Tap-esque “200%” volume… and it’s still well below mediocre in terms of both volume and clarity.
Most budget phones do not particularly bother with any kind of IP-rated water resistance, so it’s pleasing to note that the Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G does, though only to a very light level. It’s rated at IP64, which means it should be fully sealed against dust ingress and be capable of handling the impact of a light rain shower; taking it out in torrential rain or for a quick dip in the pool is not advisable, however.
Camera
The classic way that phone makers keep prices low on smartphones almost always falls to the camera capabilities of a phone, and the Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G is no exception in any way at all. At the rear there’s a sole 50MP sensor, while selfies are handled by an 8MP front facing camera.
While it’s not unusual to see simple cameras in budget phones, that’s a particularly low-level combination especially for the more pricey $399 variant of the phone; by way of comparison the CMF Phone 2 Pro sells for $50 more than the Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G, and that buys you wide, ultrawide and telephoto lenses!
Also read:
The Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G does fit into that classic space of a budget phone where it can deliver some decent enough photos, but you do need patience with its rather slow focusing, and sometimes with the way it handles exposure.
Every smartphone uses some kind of computational adjustment for portrait selfie modes, but the Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G’s version isn’t particularly realistic.
Oh, look, it’s me. Non-portrait selfie
Oh look, it’s me (again), portrait selfie mode.
While the Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G’s 50MP lens does give it some space for digital zoom, it only extends to 10x and frankly isn’t worth bothering with.
Standard fountain photo with the Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G’s 50MP sensor. All basically fine.
10x zoom with the same sensor. Oof.
Obligatory cat photo. Nyssa was sitting still for this photo shoot, but the Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G still struggled with focus and exposure.
This shot is decent, but it took some patience to get.
Bonus points if you can name this cartoon duo (without using search or AI or such, that would be cheating)
If your camera needs are truly modest, or you rarely use the camera on your phone at all, this may not matter, and I’ve certainly tested worse camera phones in my time. If you do want decent photos, at this price you can definitely do a little better.
Performance
The Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G’s price places it in the budget category, and it’s equipped with budget internals as a result. In Australia Xiaomi offers up two variants, both running off the Qualcomm Snapdragon 6s Gen 3 processor with either 128GB or 256GB of internal storage at $349 and $399 respectively. MicroSD card storage is supported via the SIM card slot, though you’l be sacrificing one of the two physical SIM card slots to do so, a very classic arrangement.
While that might make the $349 128GB variant seem like the best deal, I’m not so sure, because the sting in the tail here is that the 128GB variant ships with just 4GB of RAM, while the 256GB version has 8GB. In 2025, for a lot of the apps that people want to run, 4GB is downright mediocre, and this isn’t something that you can upgrade down the track. That observation does have to sit in the theoretical bucket, however, because the model that Xiaomi sent me for review was the higher-end 256GB/8GB variant.
The other challenge for the Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G in this regard is that at $399 for the tested model, you do start to see both a lot of straight up budget competition as well as slightly older models that originally sold for more being offered for that price. As such, I was keen to see where the Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G might land in a benchmark comparison.
Here’s how it compares using Geekbench 6’s CPU test:
Sitting in the middle of that pack isn’t bad, and it should be noted that the HMD Skyline is a phone that originally sold for a lot more, but at the time of producing this review, it was available at mass market retail for the same $399 price as the Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G.
Still, the expected speed in this space is not what I could reasonably call “fast”, and again I’d add a note of caution here if you were considering the 4GB RAM variant, because that would be even slower. Xiaomi does try to talk up the RAM situation because it can sacrifice storage for virtual RAM, but that’s not the same thing as physical RAM and can still lead to notably slower phone performance.
How about at the GPU level? Here’s how the Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G compares using 3DMark’s benchmark suite:
Using the Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G for most apps reveals few surprises. This is a budget phone, and they’re not fast and they are prone to intermittent lag for some apps. If you’re keen on Android gaming in particular you’ll probably find the Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G a bit of a challenge even given that 144Hz display, because load times are quite ordinary at best.
There aren’t all that many Android apps that support 144Hz in any case, but even for more mid-range app fare the Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G isn’t particularly impressive. Not bad, to be clear, but not exceptional either.
On the operating system side, the Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G runs on Android 15 with Xiaomi’s HyperOS 2 launcher on top. Not my preferred style of Android, but there are people who like a bright and cheery style to their Android launchers; if that’s you then the Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G might suit. It’s not entirely clear at the time of publication what Xiaomi’s update promises are for the Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G; I’ve put queries through to Xiaomi Australia and will update as, when and if they get back to me.
Update: Xiaomi informs me that the Xiaomi Redmi 15 will get 2 OS upgrades and 4 years of security updates. That’s not nothing, though some competitors at this price are doing more.
Like so many other Chinese market phone makers, Xiaomi has had to adapt the Android model to fit the Chinese government’s rules around Google services – basically, there aren’t any officially available on the Chinese mainland – and this means that it also includes its own suite of applications and an app store on the Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G. You do still get the full suite of Google services on the Australian model, including Google Play, and I’d suggest you stick to that route; some of the apps offered in the Xiaomi App Mall look downright dodgy.
Are these really “must-have” apps, Xiaomi? I have my doubts.
You don’t entirely get to avoid them either, because the Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G does install a whole range of preinstalled apps, including (sigh) the Booking.com app, Facebook, OneDrive and a handful of poor Android games.
When I say poor, the first time I launched one of them, instead of launching the game, it launched an unskippable ad for a different, terrible looking Android game. I tried to persevere, got into the game itself for about 15 seconds… and then it launched a Temu ad.
To say that I’m not impressed would be an understatement. In the interests of public civility I will not repeat the words I used at that time, but rest assured most of them were comprised of precisely four letters each. You can uninstall them, and I’d advise you to do so.
Battery
The Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G’s real party piece is its battery. For so many Android phones, even in the more affordable budget space, 5,000mAh is so damned typical I probably should have written a macro to automate placement of that number in my reviews… but that’s not what the Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G offers. Instead, it’s packing a 7,000mAh battery on board, well above the average.
Every phone manufacturer likes to talk up their battery numbers, because on the face of it, 7,000mAh is a big battery number. As always, there’s the numerical reality, and then the reality of using a phone on a day to day basis and seeing how well it actually manages that battery capacity.
First stop for me is my comparative battery test, pitting the same crew of similarly-priced handsets against the Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G. Here’s how it compared:
97% for the first hour is a very solid figure, and it does highlight how well the Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G’s battery can last in most use cases, but it is pipped at the post by the Oppo A5 Pro 5G, and that’s a phone that runs from a 5,800mAh battery. Or in other words, the Xiaomi is using a bit more of that 7,000mAh battery to achieve the same effect.
For real world ongoing usage, given that it’s got 7,000mAh to play with, a little comparative inefficiency isn’t likely to be a huge problem for most. You certainly can run the Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G flat within a day if you’re determined to do so, but equally if your usage is light it’s quite feasible to see it last through one or maybe two days of regular usage, and a whole lot more if your phone usage is really on the light side.
When it comes to charging up the Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G, it supports USB-C charging at up to 33W, though the presence of its charger may be something of a Schrödinger’s charger situation. My review model did come with a 33W charger, but not with an Australian plug; I can totally accept that because often review samples are early models or overseas variants offered up ahead of retail launch.
But what if you buy a Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G in Australia? Do you get a charger then? I’m going to say… probably not, but Xiaomi’s official site does not make this clear in any way at all.
So, there’s a charger in the box, but it’s also not included. So glad we cleared that up… wait a minute!
Xiaomi is rather more explicit with what it says is in the box, so I’m still leaning towards the idea that you’ll have to buy your own charger:
Which still isn’t clear. Just in case anyone thinks I’m being needlessly pedantic here just for the sake of it, Australian consumer law is really quite clear on how you shouldn’t mislead or confuse customers, and there’s a very easy interpretation here for anyone skim reading the specifications that would suggest that you might get an inbox charger, only to discover that you don’t. Big brands — and Xiaomi is a massive brand — can and should do better.
Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G: Alex’s Verdict
Xiaomi has launched into Australia with a dizzying array of phones (and other devices) at a wide variety of price points, intending clearly to take on the market at just about every price point. At first glance, some of its pricing and products do look quite compelling, but then that’s marketing for you.
The reality of using the Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G is that outside of its 7000mAh battery, this is a deeply average smartphone, and even the battery isn’t quite as amazing as that headline number might have you believe if you compare it to the real-world performance of phones with smaller batteries. At its $399 asking price, the Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G is a tough one to recommend.
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Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G: Pricing and availability
The Xiaomi Redmi 15 5G retails in Australia for $349 with 4GB of RAM and 128GB of storage or for $399 with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. The model tested for this review was the $399 8GB/256GB variant.
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