Xiaomi’s Mi Note 10 Pro is a combination of a lot of things with a reasonable price tag. While it’s not perfect, it does do some (and the more important) things right. You’ll have to consider what you really want from a smartphone, and if you’re willing to compromise in some performance for a good camera and battery. But with that being said, I’ll be expanding on all of the above, below. Let’s get straight into the review!
(Mostly) Minimalist Design
To start off, let’s talk about the aesthetics and what hardware is on the device. Right off the bat, you’ll notice the Note 10 Pro doesn’t really have anything that makes it stand out except for the back with 5 cameras. That got a lot of people saying”Wei, got quite a few cameras uh?”. And yes, got quite a few, but more on that later.
The back has a glossy almost mirror like finish which captures ambient light, which makes for some colour effects on its surface. On the front there’s a 6.47″ curved AMOLED FHD+ display, which was pretty great to me. Did its job, nothing more, nothing less. The phone also has a base 90Hz refresh rate which did makes things a bit smoother, but it wasn’t as noticable as a 120Hz refresh rate display. You’ll notice from the picture below it comes with a tiny teardrop notch in the centre of the screen, which I feel wasn’t very intrusive to my entertainment experience with the phone.
Other than that, it was quite an attractive package as a whole, but the one thing I did have a problem with was the side edges. Like I’ve said countless times in many reviews, I’m just not a fan of curved screens because it doesn’t add enough to warrant phantom touches on the side. And trust me, it happens a lot. But besides that, you can expect the phone to look like a majority of smartphones out there. While it’s not the most original, I’ll say it still has a good look to it.
Average Performance With A HUGE Battery
Here’s where the review gets tricky. The Xiaomi Note 10 Pro is running a Qualcomm Snapdragon 730G processor, but has 8GB of RAM. It manages to equal out the somewhat decent performance of the Mi Note 10 Pro. Things are snappy, you’ll be able to do what you have to, but expect some errors and bugs. I noticed that I would get a stuck screen quite often, where I couldn’t do anything except lock and unlock the phone. Not sure what caused the issue because it happened at random times, but it was an issue nonetheless.
There were also other bugs I noticed when I was using the phone, such as lagging in between apps, widgets malfunctioning, stuff like that. It wasn’t a big deal, until enough stuff went wrong to warrant me being annoyed at the phone ruining my productivity. But if you’re a low-medium user, you should be okay taking some pics, sending an email, and WhatsApp. Because that’s all we really use smartphones for nowadays anyway.
Gaming on the device was also a pretty okay experience, considering the Snapdragon 730G processor. Well, because the ‘G’ in 730G stands for ‘Gaming’? I like to assume anyway. But the 730G was built with gaming in mind, and with that, I managed to get some wins in Call of Duty Mobile, as well as Chess Rush, my two staple mobile games. It ran COD Mobile at high settings with no problems.
But here’s where some of the problems I had with the phone went away; the battery. The Mi Note 10 Pro comes with a pretty massive 5260mAh battery, which had no problem lasting me a day with heavy use. Like literally, I never had to worry about losing power with this phone. It comes with 30W charging capabilities which did the job. It was a fast enough charge.
Camera – Pentacamera Goodness
One huge factor to the what makes the Mi Note 10 Pro a good phone is the 5 camera setup they’ve got on the back, or a AI Rear ‘pentacamera’ as they like to call it. The Mi Note 10 Pro is equipped with a 108MP main shooter, 12MP portrait camera, 20MP 117° ultra wide-angle camera, 5MP ultra telephoto lens and a 2MP macro camera. Check out some of the pictures I took with the phone:
What I noticed was it took some really great portrait shots, and I liked what the Note 10 Pro did with the post processing to make the more true to life. It wasn’t ridiculously saturated to the point the image wasn’t recognizable anymore, so that’s a good thing, for me anyway. The in-built night mode was decent I’d say but I never really used much of it. Just point and shoot was good enough from when I was testing the device. But I will say that it wasn’t fantastic in low-light scenarios.
Another advantage of having a 108MP camera is, for one, taking some really detailed shots with the 108MP mode. It takes a while to process, but more often than not, you’re getting a great picture. The zoom on the phone was incredibly stable which I for one, enjoyed. I was never going 50x zoom a picture, but I could, if I wanted to, and still sort of see details in the image. It was fun to take pictures with the phone. That’s what I’m trying to say.
Final Thoughts
I personally feel like the Xiaomi Mi Note 10 Pro is a definite pickup for people who want a solid smartphone, to do what you need to do, and a bit more. The camera on this thing is certainly quite good and mixed in with the great battery and solid display, made for a great device. It’s shortcomings were more noticeably the lag in performance at certain times due to the Snapdragon 730G processor, but it was something I could live with. And I’m pretty sure noone uses a smartphone the way I do, so that probably contributed to that aspect of it.
At the end of the day, it’s up to what you’re looking for in a smartphone. Do you need the best? Are you willing to settle? If you’re willing to compromise on possibly some performance issues, then you should definitely get Xiaomi’s Mi Note 10 Pro. Did I mention it starts off at RM2499? Yeah, that’s a pretty solid price for what you’re getting here.
