The Xiaomi Mi 10T Pro is an improved version of the Mi 10T, but it pales in comparison to the Mi 10 Pro.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking the Xiaomi Mi 10T Pro, and the rest of the 10T line, are new-and-improved versions of the Mi 10 phones from earlier in 2020 – this isn’t a case of the mid-year phones being specced-up versions of their predecessors as in the OnePlus T line. Perhaps the best comparison is Oppo’s Reno phones, as the new phones seem to slot into the line-up of the old ones. That is to say, while the Xiaomi Mi 10T Pro is clearly an improved version of the Mi 10T, launched alongside it in September 2020, it doesn’t hold a candle to the Mi 10 or Mi 10 Pro from February. So presumably this is a phone for people who liked the look of the Mi 10 phones but don’t want to pay a premium price – and can’t wait until the Mi Note 11 launch towards the end of the year. Some of the same specs can be found here, but there are also improvements in some areas and downgrades in others. Perhaps the key selling point here is the 144Hz display – outside of gaming phones we haven’t seen this snappy refresh rate on a smartphone, and it provides a demonstrable difference when you’re using the phone. Yet there are also some things from the Mi 10 phones that are missing here like curved-edge displays, in-screen fingerprint sensors and, at least compared to the Mi 10 Pro, a telephoto lens for zoomed photography. That makes the Xiaomi Mi 10T Pro sound like a mixed bag, so what’s it actually like to use? We tested the phone briefly to find out. Bear in mind we’re just looking at the Mi 10T Pro here – if you want information on the Mi 10T and Mi 10T Lite, head over to our article on the Xiaomi Mi 10T series to see all of their specs. The Xiaomi Mi 10T Pro costs £599 (around $700 / AU$990), which makes it cheaper than the £799 / AU$1,699 (roughly $990) Xiaomi Mi 10, and that makes sense since Xiaomi is positioning it in its Mi 10 line-up between the Mi 10T and Mi 10. At this price it’s a great mid-ranged phone – it brings a few top-end features to a lower price tag, albeit with a few corners cut. You can buy the Xiaomi Mi 10T Pro from the Xiaomi website in the UK and possibly in Australia if it gets a release there (as some Xiaomi phones do), but the company doesn’t launch its non-gaming phones in the US, so don’t expect it there. In the hand, the Xiaomi Mi 10T Pro doesn’t feel as premium as the Mi 10 range, and there’s an obvious reason for that – its screen isn’t curved at the edges, and in fact there’s a thin but noticeable bezel around the display. Curved-edge displays are a pretty divisive phone feature, but we’re a big fan, and missed the comfortable hand-feel of such a display. There’s another intriguing design feature here in the form of a side-mounted fingerprint sensor housed in the power button, below the volume rocker on the right edge of the phone. The Mi 10 phones had in-display scanners, which tend to be a more premium feature, but again some people prefer side scanners, so we can’t mark it down for this. The scanner worked impressively quickly too, more so than the Mi 10 Pro’s in-display version. As with the Xiaomi Mi 10 phones, the Mi 10T Pro doesn’t have a 3.5mm headphone jack, so its only port is a USB-C one. A design quirk of Xiaomi phones is that they tend to have pretty thick camera bumps – the Mi 10T Pro doesn’t take this up to 11, but rather takes it all the way up to 111, as the island on the phone’s back that houses the lenses and flash is incredibly thick.
