Xiaomi Mi Note 10 review

Display

The Xiaomi Mi Note 10 has a curved 6.47" AMOLED screen with rounder corners and a waterdrop-shaped notch for the selfie camera. It has one of the most common resolutions on the market right now - extended 1080p or 2,340 x 1,080 pixels to be specific (399ppi).

The screen is protected by a similarly curved Gorilla Glass 5 piece.

The Mi Note 10 display supports HDR 10, there is also an always-on option, and the night mode got TUV-certification for its low blue light emissions.

The screen has an excellent brightness for an OLED panel of 430 nits - that's in line with what Xiaomi promises. And it can go as high as 600 nits in bright light if you leave it on Auto, also matching Xiaomi's official promise.

Xiaomi offers three different Color scheme settings, each one representing a specific color space. The Auto option fully covers the DCI-P3 color space, and we measured an average deltaE of 3.7. Only in this mode, you can choose the color saturation (default, warm, cool), and the Delta E of 3.7, which we measured was taken at the default preset. Choosing warm will offer an even more accurate presentation with an average deltaE of 1.9 and it also fixes the otherwise bluish white point.

The Standard setting corresponds to sRGB, and we also recorded an average deltaE of 1.3 for the color accuracy, meaning it's an excellent one.

Finally, the Saturated makes the colors pop and they are no longer as accurate.

Battery life

The Xiaomi Mi Note 10 is powered by a massive 5,260 mAh battery - 30% larger than the Mi 9 Pro's 4,000 mAh cell and 60% larger than the Mi 9's 3,300 battery. The Note 10 supports 30W fast charging based on USB Power Delivery and the 30W adapter ships with the phone by default.

The 30W charger refills about 57% of a dead battery in 30 mins, while it takes about 65mins for a full charge - exactly what Xiaomi is promising.

The Mi Note 10 scored a very good endurance rating of 95 hours and had great times when it comes to making calls and watching videos. The web browsing drains more battery than we expected, while the standby consumption is higher than average. We suspect the new MIUI 11 might be responsible for the lower than expected standby and web browsing times and we hope Xiaomi improves the performance with a software update.

Our battery tests were automated thanks to SmartViser, using its viSerDevice app. The endurance rating above denotes how long a single battery charge will last you if you use the Xiaomi Mi Note 10 for an hour each of telephony, web browsing, and video playback daily. We've established this usage pattern so that our battery results are comparable across devices in the most common day-to-day tasks. The battery testing procedure is described in detail in case you're interested in the nitty-gritty. You can check out our complete battery test table, where you can see how all of the smartphones we've tested will compare under your own typical use.

Speaker test (old, new one below)

There's a single bottom-firing loudspeaker on the Mi Note 10 - it's loud enough and scored a Good mark on our test though we've heard louder from the maker. The output is very good - there is rich sound, with enough bass and clear mid and high tones.

Speaker test (new)

Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal "0db" flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.

Audio quality

The Xiaomi Mi 10 Note did splendidly with an active external amplifier, reproducing our test track perfectly and at high volume to boot.

The phone managed to maintain its loudness with headphones too along with stereo separation better than most in this case, but we did record a fair amount of intermodulation distortion and some harmonic distortion too. A solid showing still, but not quite perfect.

Xiaomi Mi Note 10 frequency response

You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.