Last night's aurora was spectacular
Here's a long exposure, looking north.
It was a massively impressive sight to behold...
There's a part of me that wants to worry that if we're seeing something like that at the latitudes of northern France, we're liable to experience a Carrington Event. Those of us on fibre won't have a problem, those of us on twisted pair copper...will. As for the power grid, it is possible to keep that largely intact by taking the grid offline and opening all of the breakers so as few transformers and grid segments are connected. The only problem is that we'd get maybe five minutes of notification. That's accounting for three minutes for the sun watchers to realise what was happening, verify, double-check, and then issue the warning. I feel that our electrical distribution network will not fail so much due to solar wind dumping vast amounts of energy into it so much as it'll fail because some middle-ranking "manager" promoted to their level of incompetence will receive the message and do one of the following:
- Stick it on the to-do pile because coffee break is more important
- "Oh bollocks, this is clearly fake"
- Even though it is his job, he absolutely will not take the responsibility for pulling an entire country's grid offline without waking up his manager to discuss it in detail.
- ...and the fact that he starts getting blaring warnings for the EU grid shutting down is purely a demonstration of why Britain was right to leave the EU.
- "Carrington Event? Meh, that's someplace in Yorkshire, innit?"
We're doomed.
Thankfully, that image is a complete and utter fabrication.
This is the original image, the very first one I took with my new phone.
Just a dusk shot with purple hue.
Using "AI", it was possible to "expand" the image by looking at what was in the image and then inventing surroundings.
Choosing what to invent.
I then used an AI assist to replace the sky with something different - in this case an aurora.
Replacing the sky with something more impressive.
Finally I cropped it in order to remove that black thing on the right - if this was a real photo it wouldn't have been framed that badly.
Another example, a screenshot from an episode of Patience. There's a sort of mini-castle thing on a hill in York, so...
© Eagle Eye Drama Limited / Channel Four Television.
Let's expand this with some completely fake scenery. If you live near or know York, you can let me know how far off it was. ☺
It's not at bad so long as you don't look too hard at the roads.
Finally, let's swap the sky out for something nicer and fiddle the colours so it looks like better weather.
Now this is getting ridiculous... sun in Yorkshire?
This isn't meant to show off the power of AI, by the way. It is meant as an indication of how painfully easy it is, now, to come up with completely fake imagery that "looks real". So, alas, the old mantra of "pictures or it didn't happen" no longer holds true.
When hell freezes over? When pigs can fly? Doable.
I trust you don't need this to be called out as being AI generated...
Redmi Note 15 Pro Plus
Xiaomi is a middle-to-high end brand, while the sub-brand RedMi is solidly midrange. There's also Poco which is an independent sub-brand that is aggressively low end.
Part of the design philosophy of the RedMi devices is to concentrate on delivering the sorts of features that users actually use, while dropping off the sorts of things that are less necessary. That is why, for example, the Note 15 has a plastic back instead of glass. That it why none of the RedMi devices support wireless charging. That is why it's strictly USB 2.
It also extends to the camera. You're not going to get flagship-level performance out of these devices because, well, they aren't flagships. This phone is an MG Metro - souped up a little compared to other models in it's category, but, look, a Metro is still a Metro. And if you're confused by this, it was a popular(ish) car in the UK in the '80s. At least this phone isn't a Ford Cortina. ☺
The next few sections are nerdy. If you aren't interested in the nerdy, click here to skip it.
Processor, memory, etc
The processor is a Snapdragon 7s Gen 4, and upper-mid range system from Qualcomm made in August 2025. Featuring four Cortex-A520s at 1.8GHz one A720 at 2.7GHz, and three A720s at 2.4GHz; it supports UFS 2.2 and 3.1, a 200Mpix camera, 4K at 30fps (record and playback), a screen up to 2900×1300, 4G/5G, and all the usual stuff (WiFi 6, BT, GPS, etc).
Interestingly, GSMArena differs from Aida64 by saying the chipset is a Mediatek Dimensity 7400 Ultra (four A78s at 2.6GHz and four A55s at 2GHz) with a Mali-G615 GPU. I'm guessing this might be an American model? They need different chipsets as their mobile telephony is quite different.
Installed memory is 8GB LPDDR4X. This is a type of SDRAM that uses less power than conventional memory - important on battery devices.
Flash is 256GB, of which some will - obviously - be taken by the OS. It amounts to 10.91GB for the system and 17.48GB for system files (4GB swapfile, 627MB of logs, and 12.85GB of "other junk"). So you're looking at around 30GB being used by the OS alone - that's... stunningly wasteful, isn't it?
There are options with 12GB RAM and/or 512GB flash. Since the device uses the older UFS 2.2 it isn't overly nippy.
Display
The display is a 1280×2772 AMOLED, 6.83 inches diagonal 19.5:9 ratio, 447dpi, refreshing at 120Hz and driven by an Adreno 810 GPU. The screen is slightly larger than my other phones and looks pretty decent. It claims 68B colours. I can't talk about sunlight behaviour as there hasn't been sunlight in an eternity or two.
Battery
The battery is a large 6500mAh at 4.409V. That's twice the capacity of the battery in my S9, and more than my Android laptop (that claims 5000mAh but is "reported by Android", and Android says the exact same thing about my Note 12 so may be just a default amount?). Normal charging is around 45W (wired), though it will use the 67W of a Xiaomi quick charger. If you really want to bang the power into your phone, you can buy a 100W charger.
Apparently the phone, in OTG mode, can also be used as a power bank and will supply up to 22.5W.
OS/UI
It is running HyperOS 2 on top of Android 15. This is basically MIUI with a bunch of tweaks. But apart from some seriously fugly UI icons, it doesn't seem that different to the MIUI in my earlier phones.
All the AI crap
There may or may not be AI features - I think Gemini is in here somewhere. These may or may not work. I did get some prompts during setup but I noped out of all of that.
I don't mind specifically targeted AI like to help with taking better photos and to simplify editing things that I don't like or don't want in the photo...
...but I'm not down with having a bot keeping an ear open for me saying "Hey, Google, make me dinner" because it can't. Well, okay, it could maybe try to order linguine and get it delivered, but good luck with that. I don't think anybody is quite dumb enough to want to come all the way out here to deliver anything. I just checked Dominoes. They don't specify what their delivery range is, but here isn't it. Whatever, I'm getting sidetracked.
Cameras
There are three cameras. On the back, the main 12Mpix f/1.7 23mm camera with optical stabilisation - that was a bit of a surprise. It is augmented by gyro-controlled electronic stabilisation. The main camera is a 1/1.4" sensor with 0.56µm pixels and a raw resolution of 200Mpix.
There is an 8Mpix wide angle camera, f/2.2, 15mm, 120°, 1/4.0" and 1.12µm pixels.
They can both manage 4K at 30fps, 1080p at 30 or 60fps, and 720p at 30fps. In a slow motion mode, they can also do 1080p at 120fps and 720p at 120 or 240fps.
There is a time lapse option, but there is no long exposure options any more. In Pro mode you can do up to 30s exposure, with ISO up to 6400, but since this is set by the user it's not as good as the "starry skies" long exposure that would handle setting the exposure time (and possibly stacking exposures?) by itself.
On the back, the 20Mpix f/2.2 25mm selfie camera with a 1/4.0" sensor and 0.7µm pixels. This can record video at 720p 30fps, or 1080p at either 30 or 60 fps.
There's a fourth "thing" on the massive camera island (a big rounded square) on the back. I'm not sure exactly what this is.
Other connectivity
There are stereo speakers but no 3.5mm jack. There is the usual selection of WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, NFC, and of course the Xiaomi infra-red that's so useful for turning the heater on and off without getting out of bed. ☺
(and in the summer months, controlling my internet radio without getting out of my chair)
The phone supports two nano SIMs, of which one can be an eSIM. There's no support for SD cards.
Biometrics
There is an optical fingerprint sensor hidden under the display. It seems to be fairly reliable in use, though I wonder how secure it is if it is just reading a visual pattern.
There is also optical support for face recognition, but since this just uses the selfie camera without depth sensing, or iris scanning, it could surely be fooled fairly easily.
In use
A Redmi Note 15 Pro Plus (EU model).
I have not used this as an actual phone, in fact of my three Xiaomi/RedMi phones, only the first (the Mi 10T) had a tiny bit of use with the Bouygues network until they did away with the pay-as-you-go option.
I am saddened to see the long exposure camera modes are no longer supported. I'll talk more about the camera in a bit.
For me, HyperOS behaves a lot like MIUI. It looks like it is finally possible to have it open PDFs in Adobe Reader rather than insisting on opening them in Mi Reader (which, for some reason, sets grey backgrounds which makes it awkward to read).
Perhaps the main differences are that changes to Android meant I have had to leg of two apps that I have used for a long long time. The first is ES File Explorer (before it went bad). I'm currently using File Manager Plus.
I have also had to say goodbye to my good friend CustomRadioPlayer that was a very simple, straight to the point, streaming radio player. After a lot of messing around, including one app that popped up a display saying that it was "Try free for 7 days, then €22,99/year" (what, for something built around ffmpeg?), I stumbled across Radi-oh! which looks like it'll do what I want.
There was some issue connecting to my car's radio unit via Bluetooth. I'm not sure why, but resetting factory defaults (in the car radio) fixed that, though connection takes a pretty long time all the same.
The display is bright and clear, and a high enough resolution that even a short-sighted person isn't going to look at the individual pixels. The user interface looks and feels a lot like the progression from my Note 12. I can't compare this against stock Android as I don't have that.
What I noticed is that the tool icons are a horrible squared "representation" like somebody is trying to be trendy in a way that implies having watched too many 80s sci-fi films. I prefer rounded icons that show a clear purpose. So this, maybe irrationally, really rubs me the wrong way.
This is where you discover that the MIUI theme manager is made of fail. For starters, you get two font choices for the UI. Android regular and Xioami's "improvement". If you want other fonts, you can buy them, they're €1 or 2 each. Built into the phone are 226 fonts, which are actually just Droid Sans, Mi Sans, Noto Sans, Roboto, and Source Sans... most of the files being Noto.
Now you can get theme packs (free and paid) that bring various extra features, such as replacement app icons as well as maybe changed UI gadget icons. Unfortunately there is no filtering. So stuff for MIUI is mixed with stuff for HyperOS 1, 2, and 3. I did try a theme that looked like it had an interesting icon set, and this was the message that popped up.
If your theme store with your hardware shows a message like this...
...you're bloody incompetent. It shouldn't be up to the user to guess.
The next question was how to get my music library onto this device? I installed BlackPlayer, like on my other phones.
Well, Xiaomi has a ShareMe app so I started this up on both phones. One set to send, the other to receive. When connected it was pretty fast, running at around 15MiB/sec. Unfortunately it suffered from two and a half fatal flaws. The first was that when the connection dropped, it refused to reconnect. I had to force close both and restart. The massive game-ending flaw was that it ignored subfolders and such and dumped everything into /MIUI/ShareMe which...is not going to be useful when there are something like 850 tracks, some of them organised by artist/album.
The half flaw is that it needed location in order to search for nearby devices. I think this is more Google's rapacious data-grabbery because Bluetooth alone will provide proximity often to an accuracy equal or better than GPS ever could (especially indoors). That being said, I don't imagine Xiaomi won't have happily shared that info with themselves and/or their billion partners "because it's there".
So the next attempt. It turns out that there's an FTP server built into the default Xiaomi File Manager. Cool. So I started that and ran ES File Explorer on the other side. ES failed to connect, so I switched to AndFTP. It sent a bunch of files and then choked on one that had a Unicode character in the filename. This was with the FTP server being set to UTF-8 instead of the default GBK (Simplified Chinese). I then downloaded an app called WiFi FTP Server and this worked (with AndFTP) but all of the non-ASCII characters had turned into mojibake. Given that I have some Japanese tracks, it was all gibberish.
In the end I just shoved a USB lead into my computer and pulled all of the files to the SD card. It preserved all of the file creation dates, so I was hopeful... but this was shattered by the fact that copying the files to the new phone set them all to the date and time the file was created, and it was copying alphabetically. Maybe I ought to delete the six hundred odd stuck in "Music" and see if switching view to "by date, reversed" does better? Or maybe just spend some time to recreate my playlists or something?
This sort of pain in the arse is why I really don't like setting up a new phone.
In use, the phone seems fairly fluid except for the odd stutter now and then. I don't think the processor is overwhelmed, there are eight cores that can crunch at over 2GHz, so I wonder if the power saving is really quite aggressive and that's what is causing the hiccups?
Watching a recording of Patience, or Das Signal (Netflix), the screen was good and... MX Player is now an Amazon app? Well, it looks and feels and works like it always has, just without the adverts.
The final thing is that the USB to 3.5mm jack adaptor supplied with my Mi 10T gave a weird message.
Device isn't supported
This product's USB Type-C port only
supports digital audio devices.
After a moment of panic, it seems as if the OTG is quite happy with USB storage and a serial interface (CH340, I think?).
I got a pair of adaptors dirt cheap from Amazon (you can see one in the above picture) and, well, those ones seem to work fine but the USB plug feels a little loose, so I wonder how reliable it'll be? That being said, they were like &uro;2,99 each or something.
The camera
I take loads of photos that nobody ever sees.
The camera app.
I'm doing here a quick comparison with the Note 12, my previous phone. Only quick because the weather has been naff and rainy since... uh... last year (more or less).
Here is a long exposure (30s, ISO6400) taken the other night.
Looking one way - with an odd sky colour.
And this is looking the other way as my car is on charge.
Looking the other way - yes, I used a tripod.
I'm not sure why the sky is those colours. It seems rather heavily tinted towards green doesn't it? Still, I do like the brutal contrast between the light and the blacks.
Earlier today I took a photo looking towards the village. Upper is the new phone, lower is the older one.
The colour differences could just be down to where it picked to meter from.
Here is the same thing with the wide camera, standing in the same position.
But the Note 15 does seem slightly darker and redder...
The Note 15 Pro, due to having 200Mpix, has the ability to push to 30× digital zoom, which is every bit as bad as it sounds. Video is clipped at 6× zoom.
30× digital zoom.
It is worth noting that some of these images cannot be uploaded by Chrome that reports that the file has moved or some nonsense like that. Firefox works fine. Is this a weird permission issue (despite both browsers having access to photos and videos) or is this Chrome being broken in weird ways...again?
Here's looking up the front.
Two more to compare.
Here's the metal chicken that welcomes me home.
Voici mon poulet de bienvenue.
Here is a photo looking down the stream.
Yet another photo of the stream.
The strange thing is that the normal resolution images are a little fuzzy, like maybe overprocessed or the focus has ADHD and forgot what it was supposed to be looking at? Let's zoom in on where that nettle is sticking out.
Zooming in on the 12Mpix image.
Switch to the 200Mpix mode and... it's a lot sharper. I mean, with so many more pixels it will appear a bit better, but... maybe it was just the autofocus messing up?
Zooming in on the 200Mpix image.
Of course, the 12Mpix files is 5.95MB while the 200Mpix one is expectedly ridiculously larger at a teeny-tiny 79.44MB!
Either way, it'll be interesting to play with this in better light, and to perform some video tests.
Something I did notice is that this device is aimed so firmly at the TikTok crowd that it even includes a built-in autoprompter for the selfie camera... but alas supporting TikTok means that it is the wrong way up. Additionally, it is possible to turn off the front camera mirroring so things appear the right way around, but the on-screen preview always appears mirrored. Are today's influencers so thick that they can't cope with seeing their arm move to the right on-screen when they move it to the left in reality?
Oh, so close...
All of this being said, I don't imagine I'll be using it as a phone. Like my previous devices, it'll probably be for photos, videos, and watching stuff. And for that, a €29,99 bit of kit does perfectly good enough.
Oh, and that weird Chrome bug? It's Chrome. It cannot handle a file called "Screenshot_202-02-07-20-08-15-940_de.android_co.radi_oh.jpg", reporting the bogus message:
Your file couldn't be accessed
It may have been moved, edited, or deleted.
ERR_UPLOAD_FILE_CHANGED
However, if I rename it to something a little shorter ("Screenshot_de.android_co.radi_oh.jpg") it works fine. Here, see? So this is just some crappy coding within Chrome that is making assumptions about filenames. Now, I get that it isn't useful to allocate a kilobyte just to store a filename...but if it is failing on screenshots being made by the screenshot facility within their own operating system...
Oh! Radi-oh!
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| David Pilling, 8th February 2026, 19:22 |
Kids and their phones eh? Nice technical description. Worryingly, only just within my grasp. Do phones have to have a GPU - tiny screen.
Presumably the idea that AI generated images might not appear on the web departed the station long ago.
That thing in York is Clifford's Tower. Once upon a time it did not have a roof or insides, just a high narrow wall, with steep drops on both sides, which I walked a lap of the top of. There were modest railings.
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| Rick, 9th February 2026, 07:42 |
The screens are physically tiny, but these days potentially equal or higher resolution than a desktop PC.
Plus, it gives the processor somewhere to offload video encoding/decoding so these devices can handle 2160p (aka 4K) in real-time. |
| jgh, 9th February 2026, 18:44 |
Zoom out... pan right.... uncrop.
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