Over the past few years, Xiaomi has been consistently making good quality smartphones with the latest hardware and paired them with quality cameras, good design, and batteries that last long. The Mi 10T is one of those paired with great hardware and has a reasonable price tag.

Xiaomi is growing fast and has been doing a lot of things well, seemingly launching a phone for every possible price point to satisfy all the people. And it helps when these products are usually undercutting the competition in price.

Mi 10T is undoubtedly a flagship-grade phone and it adds some interesting features that surpass every single mainstream non-gaming proper flagship in its display’s refresh rate, albeit at the cost of using an LCD and not an OLED.

The smartphone is built with a glass body design, to end snapdragon processor, sufficient storage, a good primary camera and selfie camera, a large battery with a fast 33-watt charging, and a screen refresh at 144 Hz. All these specs are beautifully blended with their unique user interface called MiUi.

One interesting thing is Xiaomi intelligently priced this device because these days more people want to try premium phones but they consider the price first. Here Xiaomi deliberately changes some parts which made them build this phone more like an affordable flagship.

Storage and Buying Options:

The Mi 10T comes in two colors Cosmic black and Lunar silver and is packed with 128GB storage which can be expanded using micro SD cards. In the RAM department, we have two options a 6GB and 8GB versions available.

Here you get a fast performance because the Mi 10T uses a fast LPDDR5 random access memory and UFS 3.1 storage for faster read and write speeds.

There are many buying options available, you can go directly to any E-commerce site to buy Mi 10T, and if you like you can buy from AMAZON or Flipkart. The base 6GB/128GB version launched at $ 380.00.

The Specifications:

Design and Display of Mi 10T:

The Mi 10T is a flagship-grade phone made of premium materials it’s covered in Gorilla Glass 5 on the front and the back and the rounded frame is made from aluminum. The back is slightly curved and it feels comfortable and secure in the hand.

The phone comes in black and silver color and here we have the cosmic black finish, which seems more like a shade of grey it’s super glossy almost mirror-like, and fingerprints and smudges are quite visible here.

On this glass body, we have a power button embedded with a fingerprint reader and volume controller on the right-hand side and we have nothing on the right. On the bottom, we have a sim card tray along with USB- type C and a speaker grill. We have an IR bluster and two microphones at the top.

The Mi 10T measures 165.1 x 76.4 x 9.3 mm (6.5 x 3.01 x 0.37 in) so it’s not the slimmest one and the weight is 216 grams feels heavy in hands but pretty solid.

On the front we have a tall 6.67-inch display with a 1080p resolution unlike the other Mi10 models this one is an LCD, not an OLED, and while last year’s me 9T Pro kept its selfie cam hidden with a pop-up mechanism this year’s model houses it within a visible punch hole.

Although the LCD panel is made of good quality still we notice some visible backlight blade around the punch hole when we set anything on the display super white so it’s a downside always for the LCDs.

Maybe most of us don’t notice these things so overall this display is pretty awesome it’s the first on a Xiaomi device with a super-fast 144hz refresh rate so swiping the interface or scrolling content looks smoother than ever before.

More interestingly the refresh rate is adaptive to the content on-screen and can go as low as 30 hertz to match it. It’s successful at syncing this up and is one of the best implementations we’ve seen this LCD is one of the best out there.

The panel has great contrast and though the blacks aren’t as deep as an OLED could produce they’re still quite dark max brightness is great too up to 500 nits with a slider and it can reach 630 nits maximum in auto mode when in bright conditions.

Colors aren’t too accurate to certain color spaces but can be made to be acceptable if you tweak them in settings. Though in very bright sunlight, outside. While its sunlight visibility is much better than that of most LCDs.

The device supports reading mode 3.0 and sunlight display 3.0 so you can manually adjust the display tone according to your needs and it has multiple options preset under the display app.

The display is also certified by TÜV Rheinland Low Blue Light Certification so a long time reading or watching is less harmful to your eyes. HDR 10+ support is there so watching Netflix in high definition is not a problem.

Finally, we have to mention the MEMC feature something also found on modern TVs it has additional motion smoothness to lower fps content by inserting extra frames.

We have Triple Corning® Gorilla® Glass 5 covering the front, back, and camera lenses so it makes the Mi 10T more sturdy for accidental drops.

Performance and Gaming in Mi 10T:

In one section where it shines, here Xiaomi used top graded Qalucomm processor that gives enough power to the device and can handle anything with ease.

At the heart of the Mi 10, T  is a flagship-grade Snapdragon 865 chipset. The performance is excellent and you get 5g connectivity too. While it might not be as chart-topping as the newer snapdragon 870, the 865 still holds its own and doesn’t disappoint you in the performance section.

Qualcomm SM8250 Snapdragon 865 5G is an Octa-core processor where one Kryo 585 core clocked at 2.84 Ghz, three Kyro 585 cores at 2.42 Ghz, and four lower clocked Kyro 585 cores at 1.80 Ghz. On the graphics section, we have Adreno 650 GPU which can handle any graphics-intensive tasks with ease.

The processor is very fast and the performance is very fluid, whether you’re performing some everyday tasks or something intensive like gaming or video rendering everything goes pretty smooth.

And the processor is built upon a 7nm process so it’s very power efficient and we have multiple 5G band support with a dedicated X55 modem for lightning-fast 5G connectivity.

With the Snapdragon 865 octa-core SoC and the high-end Adreno 650 graphics core, the Mi 10T contains the equivalent of a very fast gaming PC.

The Xiaomi Mi 10T Pro can drive maximum graphics settings of Ultra HD on PUBG Mobile, which is fantastic. For this mode, however, the frame rate is limited to the Ultra setting ie. 40fps. In case you want to enjoy gaming at an Extreme frame rate ie. 60fps, you must switch the graphics settings to HDR.

At HDR graphics and Extreme frame rate settings, the Mi 10T shows a consistent performance, relentlessly outputting frame rates close to 60fps through the 26 minutes of gameplay. The only frame rate drops were seen during the loading screens.

Battlelands Royale is yet another battle royale game but instead of a first-person or third-person perspective, you play from an aerial view and that makes the game engaging.

The Xiaomi Mi 10T  once again performs magnificently, clocking a consistent frame rate of 144fps. The only occasional dips we see in the frame rate are at the loading screens since each match lasts only about 3-4 minutes.

Finally, the overall performance is very good and watching HD+ content online, browsing large websites, rendering and editing HD videos, and playing high refresh rate games for a long time is not gonna slow down or we don’t find any lag.

Triple Rear and Punch hole front camera:

The smartphone flourishes with a 64MP precision triple camera setup located at the backside of the device. It consists of a 64MP f/1.89 main sensor, with a 13MP f/2.4 wide-angle sensor and a 5MP f/2.4 macro camera. There is a 20MP f/2.2 selfie-shooting lens on the front.

Xiaomi has opted for the Sony IMX 64 MP high resolution with a 1/1.7″ sensor size. The sensor supports 0.8μm pixel size with 4-in-1 to 1.6μm Super Pixel and up to 10X digital zoom.

The Mi 10T 5G and the Mi 10T Pro 5G also offer a very similar triple-camera setup for photography, but they’re not the same. Both share what looks on paper to be the same ultra-wide camera module built around a 13 MP sensor and 13 mm-equivalent f/2.4-aperture lenses with a 123° field of view.

The main camera uses the 2×2 pixel binning technologies and the final output is different Mi10T 5G records a 16 MP final image. On the video section, the Mi 10T 5G shoots 8K video at 30 frames per second (fps), 4K at either 30/60 fps, and 1080p at up to 960 fps and features gyroscope-enabled electronic stabilization to control motion effects.

In good light, these are great with quite a lot of fine detail natural-looking colors, good sharpness, and a wide dynamic range you can take photos in the native 64-megapixel resolution but these aren’t impressive there’s noticeably more noise and not much improvement in detail.

Zooming is done digitally there is a loss of detail and sharpness here since the photos are cropped and then upscaled you miss the advanced telephoto cameras you’d find on the other Mi 10 models. Here are some samples…

Portraits are taken with the main cam but come out in 12 megapixels detail is good and the edge detection does an okay job however, from time to time you’ll notice some fine detail blurred out around the subject.

The ultrawide camera’s 13 megapixel photos are okay but we’re not too impressed colors are nice looking and the distortion correction works well but these are a bit soft and lacking in detail.

As far as the macro cam goes these results are a pleasant surprise the autofocus helps a lot and the amount of detail and sharpness is impressive for a five-megapixel sensor in low light shots from the main cam are nice sharpness is decent contrast is good and noise is minimal plus the dynamic range is quite wide.

The 20 MP front cam can take reasonable pictures in good ambient light. However, image sharpness and exposure are sometimes a bit off track. The selfie camera can record videos at up to 1080p and 30 frames per second, and slow-motion videos are possible at up to 720p and 120 fps.

With a DXOMARK Camera score of 98, the Xiaomi Mi 10T 5G ranks in the 2nd tier of their database, several places behind the Mi 10T Pro 5G, and its comparatively good score of 118. The Mi 10T 5G fares better in comparison to mid-range competitors such as the similar spec’s triple-camera Samsung Galaxy A71 5G at 88 points.

Software: (MiUi)

The Mi 10T Pro runs MIUI 12 from the day it launched, but the underlying Android version has recently changed on our review unit. Initially, it was Android 10, but then in early March, we got an update that bumped it up to Android 11.

Now the mi 10t runs the latest Xiaomi interface MiUi 12.5 over android 11. it’s a bit different from previous MiUi versions. Because of how heavy a skin MIUI is and has always been, don’t expect to see any big changes between the Android generation.

You can opt to split the notification shade into two parts swiping from the upper left corner will show you all of your arrived notifications while swiping on the opposite side will open the control center with your options and toggles.

You can choose to keep all of your apps on the home screen or within an app drawer, the drawer itself will automatically organize your apps into categories.

Besides several Google and Xiaomi tools, only a handful of third-party apps are preinstalled: Users who don’t need Facebook, WPS Office, LinkedIn, eBay, or Netflix can uninstall them all. Of the 128 GB of storage space on our test device, about 108 GB was still available out of the box.

Xiaomi’s gesture navigation system is among the best out there. It employs the usual actions – swipe up for Home, swipe up and hold for Recents, swipe from the sides to go back – but with a simple twist that Google has yet to learn.

The Back action is only triggered in the bottom two-thirds of the sides, while the top third will allow you to trigger an app’s slide-out hamburger menu if it still has that. Additionally, you can disable the annoying ‘pill’ bar at the bottom of the screen, which only takes up space for no good reason.

Xiaomi couldn’t help drawing some ‘inspiration’ from iOS and in this version of MIUI, you can pick between seeing Quick Settings icons at the top of the notification pane (like in Android) or using a new Control center that is entirely separate. If you enable the new feature (it’s off by default), you will swipe down on the left side for the notifications and on the right side for the Control center.

Battery and Fast charging:

The Mi 10T has a sizable 5000 milliampere battery and along with that, it seems the adaptive refresh rate does a nice job to help save energy. The custom MIUI software added some tweaks and that helps the battery to last longer the 7nm processor is very energy efficient so all in all, you expect good battery life.

Ok on the charging section we have good news, the phone supports a 33 Watt fast-changing and Xiaomi included a 33-watt charger in the Box. Although the charging speed isn’t incredible but still pretty fast and we were able to charge the phone from zero to 61 percent in half an hour.

Other Useful Features:

• As far as audio goes you get a pair of stereo speakers one sits at the bottom and the earpiece acts as the second speaker it’s well balanced the top speaker is just as loud as the bottom ones. The sound is clear and all low, mid, and high tones are clear but the bass is not there.

• There is no 3.5-millimeter jack on the Mi10T but there is an adapter included in the box with which you can plug traditional headphones into the USB-C port.

• For unlocking the phone there is a side-mounted fingerprint reader rather than an under-display one it doubles as the power button and is extremely fast and responsive. If you’re tired of accidental touches causing misreads and locking the fingerprint scanner you can make it so.

• Another thing that deserves some praise here is the Mi 10T’s haptic feedback system it’s very precise and strong if it needs to be and you have full control over it.

• There is a new feature called clear speaker which plays the sound at the maximum level for 30 seconds you can use this if you find the speaker jammed with dust or water.

• There’s a tiny white LED notification light at the top of the screen to the left, and we appreciate the effort of including it.

• In local networks, the Mi 10T communicates over Wi-Fi 6 (WLAN 802.11ax) including 2×2 MIMO, Bluetooth 5.1, A2DP, LE, aptX HD, aptX Adaptive, and multifunctional NFC with Google Pay support.

• The Mi 10T delivers good call quality. Participants can understand each other well, and background noise is filtered out quite reliably even when the hands-free function is enabled.

• The Mi 10T supports different satellite navigation systems like GPS, Galileo, GLONASS, and BeiDou Inside buildings/ outdoors, the Xiaomi smartphone determines our position with an accuracy of three meters.

In the end, should you buy Mi 10T?

When choosing a smartphone Great Features, good quality, and modern looks everything seem too important but the most important part is pricing here Xiaomi phones are shining because they always price their phone competitively.

The Mi 10T is now available at $380 or lower in some retailers so considering the price points it’s a great deal even in 2021.

You get a premium glass design, a great LCD screen with a super-fast 144Hz refresh rate, a flagship Snapdragon 865 chipset, stereo speakers, excellent battery life with 33watt fast charging, and an awesome main camera it has all the ingredients of a great phone or even a flagship killer.

Some people would prefer an OLED display and you miss out on having a telephoto camera and you don’t have the 3.5mm headphone jack, under-display fingerprint reader, or notch-less screen of last year’s model but in pretty much every other way the Mi 10T is a clear upgrade by offering top-shelf hardware for a mid-range price.

Ok, that’s pretty all for now and I loves to hear from you about the Mi 10T device, whether you used it or planning to buy one share your thoughts and inputs here.