Xiaomi has announced the Mi 10T Pro, its latest flagship phone. The device follows the strategy seen last year, where the sleek Mi 9 was followed by a largely unrelated Mi 9T Pro with a heavier emphasis on specs. The Mi 9T Pro was one of the best phone bargains of 2019 in markets where it was available, so expectations should be high for the 10T Pro.
The two standout specs on the Mi 10T Pro are its screen and its battery. It uses a 6.67-inch 1080p 20:9 LCD with a refresh rate of 144Hz. That refresh rate is what you’d expect from a high-end gaming monitor, and until now it’s mostly only been found on gaming-focused smartphones, making this the most mainstream phone yet to achieve it. Because the screen uses an LCD panel, though, the fingerprint sensor is integrated into the power button rather than the display.
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As for the battery, Xiaomi has managed to fit a 5,000mAh pack into the Mi 10T Pro, which is well ahead of most competing flagship devices. The phone is definitely a little thicker than the Mi 10 Pro, at 9.33mm vs 9mm, and it couldn’t be described as a sleek device by today’s standards, but at 218g it’s not outlandishly bulky. Xiaomi also includes a 33W USB-C fast charger in the box.
The rest of the spec sheet is fairly standard for a phone aiming to provide high performance at what is presumably a relatively low cost. There’s a Snapdragon 865 processor, the requisite 5G modem, 8GB of RAM, 128GB or 256GB of storage, a solid haptic feedback system, stereo speakers, and a 20-megapixel hole-punch selfie camera.
The Mi 10T Pro has a pretty huge camera bump, though I’m not altogether sure why. There’s a 108-megapixel primary sensor, as on the Mi 10 Pro, but here the lens is housed in a large unit that stretches across the double-wide bump. The four smaller modules below are a 13-megapixel ultrawide, a 5-megapixel macro camera, an LED flash, and — as far as I can tell — a non-functional component to keep things looking symmetrical.
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There’s also a non-Pro Mi 10T variant — the only differences appear to be a 64-megapixel primary camera sensor and 6GB of RAM. Another phone, the Mi 10T Lite, is a different device altogether with a Snapdragon 750G, a 4,820mAh battery, and a 120Hz LCD screen.
Compared to the Mi 10 Pro, the Mi 10T Pro misses out on a sleeker design, thinner bezels, a curved OLED panel, an in-display fingerprint sensor, and a versatile quad camera system with two telephoto lenses plus the ultrawide. On the other hand, the 10T Pro beats the 10 Pro on screen refresh rate and battery capacity.
It’s hard to compare the two without having global pricing information on hand, though, and Xiaomi wasn’t willing to provide that at the time of publishing. For now, we can say that the 10T Pro is a powerful addition to the lineup and could be worth considering at the right price — but it doesn’t necessarily seem like the mainstream slam dunk the Mi 9T Pro proved to be.
