Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro long-term review

Performance, smoothness

The Mi 10 Pro performs like a champ. We know we say this about almost every flagship smartphone we long-term review, but trust us - that's a good thing. You're paying top dollar for these devices, so this is what you want to hear. And yes, you've read all of this before: the Mi 10 Pro is insanely fast no matter what you throw at it. It doesn't get uncomfortably warm either, not unless you're fast charging it (more on that in the Battery section).

As far as smoothness goes, this is the smoothest phone we've ever had for a long-term review, with one very specific caveat. And that has to do with the Super Wallpapers and the stutters you see from time to time when switching states, if you're using one of those. None of the stutters appear otherwise, though, if you have any other wallpaper/always-on-display combo.

Undoubtedly, that feeling of smoothness is aided by the screen with its 90 Hz refresh rate, which is great to see, as Xiaomi has been one of the slowest to adopt this new trendy spec. And while 120 Hz would have improved things even more, we always feel that the perceived smoothness delta between 60 Hz and 90 Hz is much more pronounced than what you get when going from 90 Hz to 120 Hz. You may disagree, but please do that on grounds of your actual experience - not just going off of a spec sheet. People are different, and the entire point of a long-term review is to give you some subjective 'feels' to go with our objective, lab test filled normal review.

Battery life

Battery life on the Mi 10 Pro has been nothing short of amazing, especially considering that we're connected to a 5G network 99% of the time. It easily beat the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra while having a smaller battery, which probably says something about chipset efficiencies more than anything else (since we had the Exynos Samsung). Then again, it might also be down to not jumping to 120 Hz with the screen, we don't know.

Whatever it is, we easily made it through any of our days without having to top-up before bedtime. Sometimes, with less use, we got more than a day out of the Mi 10 Pro's 4,500 mAh cell, and that's impressive. As a reminder, our use case involves around 12-17 hours off the charger, connected primarily to Wi-Fi, with an hour or two of mobile data on 5G, an hour or two of phone calls (usually on Bluetooth), half an hour to an hour of GPS navigation through Waze or Google Maps, and an hour or two of listening to music through Bluetooth. Throw in half an hour of watching YouTube videos, too - we couldn't help ourselves, given how good the phone's speakers are.

In this scenario, we were always able to theoretically reach at least 7 hours of screen on time, which is a very good result in our book. Some days, though, we feel like we could have gone much further, had our need for sleep not interrupted our use - see the screenshots below. We could even reach 7 hours of screen on time over about a day and a half, with no nighttime charging in between.

Screen on times (over two days in the last screenshot)

Charging is fast with the included brick, with around 45-50 minutes needed to go from zero to 100%. That said, the phone gets incredibly hot while it's charging, to the point where it feels like it might want to burn you when you touch it. That's not okay, and other companies have somehow managed to charge their batteries up even faster without the handsets getting this uncomfortably warm to the touch when taken off the charger. We're wondering how much worse the Mi 10 Ultra might be, given its insane 120W charger - for reference, the Mi 10 Pro charges at up to 50W.

The same hotness is achieved when using Xiaomi's 30W wireless charger, to take full advantage of the Mi 10 Pro's 30W wireless charging capabilities. Again, it gets incredibly hot, although not quite as much as when wired charging. If you're going to only charge during the night, like we ended up doing (because of the amazing battery life), then we recommend using a different charger with less wattage, since it doesn't really matter how fast your phone charges up when you're sleeping. And that may also aid with the longevity of its battery, so it's a win-win. Of course, the fast charging is great if you need a quick top-up during the day, and we're glad it's an option, we just wish it wasn't so literally hot.