Xiaomi Mi 10T Pro long-term review

Display quality

Here's where it gets interesting. People love OLED screens, but people also seem to be increasingly into high refresh rate displays. For the Poco F2 Pro, Xiaomi chose the former over the latter, giving you a 60 Hz OLED panel. For the Mi 10T Pro, the company went the exact opposite way, so what we have here is a 144 Hz LCD.

That's a higher refresh rate than any mainstream non-gaming flagship, by the way, but a lot of you will be disappointed by the use of an LCD. Don't be. This is probably the best LCD ever put in an Android smartphone. It still can't match OLEDs in the sheer numbers, but in day to day use, especially if you don't have an OLED screened phone around to directly compare to, you'll only ever (possibly) remember it's an LCD in two specific scenarios.

First, in very bright sunlight, outside. While its sunlight visibility is much better than that of most LCDs, it's still no match to even run of the mill OLEDs in 2020/2021. This doesn't mean you can't see it at all if you're outside on a bright sunny day, you can. Just not as well as an OLED.

Second, when you have any sort of black content on the screen in an environment that isn't very bright. That's when you may notice that blacks, while impressively black-looking for an LCD, are still dark gray-ish compared to an OLED.

Display settings

That's it. Everything else about this screen is outstanding, and the above are probably, for most people, not situations you'll find yourselves in very often. If you do, and you care about dark gray vs. black and great sunlight legibility, then this is clearly not the phone for you. But for everyone else, it's a very good screen that it has, with a lot of calibration options, and one that can get incredibly accurate if you need it to.

We don't care about that all that much, so as usual we went with the Auto color preset, which adjusts the color temperature based on that of the light sources around you.

Color scheme settings

This is akin to Apple's TrueTone and works in a very subtle fashion to enhance the perceived quality of the display. If you have some accuracy critical work to do, however, then you should probably choose the advanced settings and then pick from P3 and sRGB depending on what your target is.

Display features

Auto-brightness was very iffy before the Android 11 update, but is now very good. The Mi 10T Pro has two ambient light sensors, just like the most expensive flagships out there. One of these is at the front, one is at the back, and so if the ambient light level suddenly changes where the phone's back is pointing, that will be taken into account too. This is a very small quality of life improvement, but one which we very much appreciate. The responsiveness to changes detected by the rear light sensor is the best we've ever seen, it's almost instant to respond to an increase in ambient lighting, while for a sudden decrease it's subtler, yet still quick.

The only issue we've had with auto brightness happens as the ambient light levels get very low, when it gets sort of unpredictable. Sometimes it will go very low, other times it will 'stick' to a higher setting with no apparent logic. This has meant that we've had to manually adjust the brightness here and there, usually one or two times a day. That's worse performance of the auto curve than we've seen for a lot of the other phones we've recently long-term reviewed, but compared to any device pre-2020, is actually quite good.

There's a blue light filter called Reading Mode, and this is one of the most customizable we've seen. You can pick between a Classic mode (which is what we're used to from every other phone) or something called Paper, which aside from warming up the colors by blocking blue light also gives you a paper-like texture for backgrounds, in order to further reduce eye strain. Maybe we're old school but while we appreciate the existence of the Paper mode, we found it too weird-looking to use, so we stuck with Classic.

Reading mode

Additionally, you can let the software automatically adjust color temperature to the ambient light to "maintain optimal comfort level". Like every other blue light filter out there, MIUI's Reading Mode is schedulable too - it either automatically comes on at sunset or you can pick a custom interval for it to be active in.

Performance, smoothness

The Snapdragon 865 SoC inside the Mi 10T Pro may not be Qualcomm's absolute top dog anymore, but you really can't tell in day to day use. For all intents and purposes, this phone won't perform any worse than any device with a Snapdragon 888, unless you're really pushing it with extreme gaming setups or benchmark runs.

It's so fast for general day to day things that we're not sure where any possible future improvements may come from, but we're excited to find out. Anyway, the point here is this - despite this device having 'last year's flagship' chipset, it's insanely fast no matter what you throw at it, and it hasn't gotten slower by one bit in the many weeks we've used it as our one and only smartphone. Performance truly is flagship-grade, dare we say it, even in 2021.

Smoothness is amazing too. The Mi 10T Pro easily matches the smoothest phones we've ever long-term reviewed, and shares the crown of the smoothest device ever with a bunch of others. It doesn't surpass any, but it's also not behind. That's an amazing feat, and it's thanks in no small part to the 144 Hz refresh rate of the display, as well as the tuning of animations in MIUI (though we feel like switching their duration to 0.5x in Developer Options does further add to the perceived smoothness).

So who said a flagship killer can't be on par with a flagship in terms of performance and smoothness? Not Xiaomi, definitely, as the company has just proven this is entirely possible, at a fraction of the price. That's something to celebrate.

Battery life

Battery life has been extremely good, we feel like we say this about every single Xiaomi phone we've long-term reviewed in the past few years. But it's true. We never ended a day having needed to charge midway through for a quick top-up. Even with our rather heavy use, it has always lasted us through one of our 12-16 hour days off the charger. That said, we couldn't quite squeeze two days of use from it either. Off the top of our heads, we'd call this a 1.25 day phone, or 1.4 at most.

Screen on times are incredibly good, you can see an assortment of our results in the screenshots below. We would call this one of the best phones for endurance out of all the flagships and flagship killers (some mid-rangers and budget options are better simply because they have larger batteries).

Battery life snapshots

Keep in mind that all of these numbers were achieved with the screen refresh rate set to 144 Hz. It's not a static setting, though, it intelligently adapts to what's going on and how you use your phone, and that's why it doesn't have as big a hit on battery life as it would have if it was 144 Hz all the time. In use you don't really notice when it goes below that at all, though, the adaptive system is very well thought through.

Charging is reasonably fast too with the included adapter (yeah, it's in the box - can you imagine?), taking just about an hour to go from zero to hero. There's no wireless charging on offer here, that's one of the first things that gets cut in the quest to make a flagship killer more affordable.