Today Xiaomi is announcing their late-year flagship devices with the unveiling of the new Mi 10T and Mi 10T Pro devices. The refreshes this …
Today Xiaomi is announcing their late-year flagship devices with the unveiling of the new Mi 10T and Mi 10T Pro devices. The refreshes this year are a bit more unconventional as they aren’t exactly direct successors to the Mi 10 and Mi 10 Pro – but rather lower-cost alternatives. Still, the new devices promise to bring a slew of new software camera features as well as being the first phones on the market to adopt new 144Hz display screens with AdaptiveSync variable refresh rate functionality. The new Mi 10T’s series biggest selling point is probably their reduced prices, starting at only 499€ for the base model Mi 10T – still delivering you a Snapdragon 865 SoC, a competitive camera as well as the aforementioned 144Hz OLED display, packing a massive 5000mAh battery. Starting off with the innards of the phones, Xiaomi has stuck to the Snapdragon 865 which has proven itself to be an outstanding SoC for 2020. The lack of the + variant here isn’t really a disadvantage as users won’t be missing out on much. The Mi 10T comes in either 6 or 8GB LPDDR5 configurations while the Mi 10T Pro has 8GB in both its options. On the storage side of things, we’re seeing 128 or 256GB options, however we’ve now seen an upgrade to newer UFS 3.1 modules. Whilst populating the specification table above, I’ve noted a rather large quirk on the part of the new Mi 10T phones: Although they’re both advertised as 5G phones, Xiaomi made a footnote notice in the cellular connectivity section that both devices only support NSA 5G networks. This is a rather weird and very unusual aspect to have given that the X55 modem supports both NSA and SA networks, and such a limitation seemingly wasn’t present on the Mi 10 series devices earlier in the year. If this is related to some cost-cutting measure on the part of the RF-backend of the phones it does put a larger question-mark in regards to the future longevity of the devices once network operators switch to SA-only networks. We’ve reached out to Xiaomi to comment on this aspect of the phones and are awaiting a response. The new phones are also from a design-standpoint very different to the Mi 10 series devices as they share very little in common between each other, with the new phones representing a more substantial redesign and departure from the sibling flagships from earlier in the year. The biggest notable change is that the new phones employ a flat display panel as opposed to the curved edge design of the Mi 10 and Mi 10 Pro.
