Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro
A pricey premium Xiaomi phone.
Xiaomi has gained a reputation for releasing impressive phones with affordable price tags; however, it seems to have dropped one of those adjectives for its Mi 10 series in 2020, as the phones – and especially the Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro – aren’t what most of us would consider ‘affordable’.
The Pro’s high price tag does come with plenty of features phone fans will love. Its camera array consists of a 108MP main snapper, and there are also two telephoto zoom lenses (one for long-distance shots, another for the portrait mode), and an ultra-wide snapper. On paper, and indeed in real life, the camera is pretty great.
It’s hard to talk about all this, though, without mentioning the Xiaomi Mi Note 10 from 2019, which came with many of these specs and design flourishes but at half the cost. So does that call into question the Mi 10 Pro’s high price? It sure does.
The Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro screen is 6.67 inches diagonally, so it’s a fairly standard size for top-end phones in 2020, but as a Super AMOLED panel with a 1080 x 2340 resolution it doesn’t quite stack up against the OnePlus 8 Pro or Oppo Find X2 Pro, both of which have 6.7-inch screens with a 1440 x 3168 resolution.
The Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro has a 108MP main camera, which is one of the biggest draws of the device for people who want high-spec snappers.
In good lighting conditions, like a bright room or outdoors on a sunny day, this camera can take great pictures, with plenty of detail, bright colors and rich textures, whether you use the default shooting mode, which uses pixel binning to effectively combine four pixels into one for improved light gathering, resulting in 27MP pictures, or the 108MP shooting mode.
You can use the Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro for easily a day without needing to charge it, whether you’re just checking your messages, or streaming music and movies, or playing games. In fact, we generally found the phone lasted well into a second day of typical use before dying on us.
The operating system is Android 10, with Xiaomi’s MIUI interface laid over the top. This is generally a cosmetic change, though it brings certain apps which complement the default Android selection. However we did experience a few issues with it – gesture navigation is unavailable, so you can’t remove the three virtual navigation buttons and rely on swipes instead, and there are quite a few preinstalled apps that you’re unlikely to ever use, which can be a bit irritating.
The Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro is an accomplished phone, and its screen, cameras and battery capacity are all what you’d expect from a premium device – in particular, the speakers and charging speeds are some of the best you’ll find in a smartphone these days. However, there are a few too many annoying software quirks. Tom Bedford