108 Appreciate: A month with the Xiaomi Mi Note 10 (and 10 Pro)

Note: This article was first published on 11 Feb 2020.

Believe the hype?

"A hundred and eight megapixels. One - hundred - and - freaking - EIGHT!"

At first slow, deliberate, and deliberately sarcastic, he suddenly spat out the last word.

"So tell me, which high fashion brands have signed you up so far, huh? Spring/summer collection, huh? Going Paris and Milan? This is hilarious, Luke!" he guffawed, taking a drag on his cigarette while he flipped the phone back and forth in his hands.

Not once did my professional-photographer friend even attempt to turn it on, let alone take a test shot.

As you will recall, dear reader, the moment we got our hands on an export set of the Xiaomi Mi Note 10 (and later on, the 10 Pro), we were among the first in Singapore to post images before the official launch a couple of days later. Since then, the usual "what's that phone you're testing now ah?" has garnered very extreme reactions across the entire spectrum, from surprise to disdain, the moment its 108-megapixel camera is discussed.

But a lot of the hullabaloo surrounding it has since died down. With Samsung rumoured to be using an improved version of this same sensor in its upcoming Galaxy S20, has the Mi Note 10 managed to whet our appetite for more jaw-dropping smartphone cameras to come - or only left a sour taste in our mouths?



With my own export-set Mi Note 10 in hand, I convinced a friend to get a 10 Pro and to loan it to me for the purpose of this review. Hey ho, let's go!

(Quick note: In this review, "Mi Note 10" refers both to the 10 and the 10 Pro unless otherwise stated.)

Design

Maybe it's true that there's no more room for innovation in phone design. Maybe it's also true that Chinese makers find it safer to build something people have already gotten used to from someone else. The Mi Note 10 is yet another one of these unashamed clones, this time of the Huawei P30 Pro, and who can say whether that's for the best?

Colour choices range from a flamboyant Glacier White to a more classy Aurora Green that is actually more turquoise-y blue, and, of course, a relatively uninteresting Black. The former colourway packs a beautiful gradient that glows pink and blue depending on your viewing angle, but after only a week, I noticed a long scratch on its bare-metal edge along the top (all phones were kept in their supplied TPU cases.) For the avoidance of doubt, all three colourways, including Black, are available on both the Pro and non-Pro variants.

Here's another tidbit: The Mi Note 10 may well be quite splash-resistant, for I've actually gotten used to reading news in the bathroom and (gasp) rinsing it daily with the shower head to clean it - I've been doing this for over a month with no discernible ill effects. Disclaimer: Xiaomi has not claimed any form of waterproofing for the Mi Note 10 series, so *do not* try this with your own phone.

The SIM and SD combo slot has a rubber seal, so I'm sure there's some waterproofing.

The one thing Xiaomi couldn't clone from the P30 Pro is the weight. The Mi Note 10 is a hefty 208 grams, 16g more than the P30 Pro, and two grams heavier than the already huge OnePlus 7 Pro, which has a larger display. The reason? The gargantuan 5,260mAh battery - of which more in a bit.

There are going to be quite a few who will grab a Mi Note 10 sight unseen - and then put it on Carousell after only a week or two because it’s causing their trousers and jeans to sag. Let me save you the trouble at the outset: if you’re used to light phones, this is certainly not the ‘droid you’re looking for.

Display

There's a sort of same difference between the 6.47-inch FHD+ curved AMOLED displays on the Huawei P30 Pro and the Mi Note 10: while they both look identical at first glance, the former's are built by LG Display and BOE, and the latter's by Visionox. And for some reason the Visionox panel seems more vibrant and appealing than what's in the Huawei phone.

Curved displays, mmm. They look so good, yet are so fragile… and by the way, unlike just about every other Chinese phone maker, there's no factory-applied screen protector on the Mi Note 10. Better get one before your phone arrives!

For shame, Xiaomi, protecting the gorgeous display on this thing would set you back less than a dollar per phone, maybe?

Software

Whether MIUI has aged well is the subject of much debate, but at least in its 11th iteration, and layered atop Android 10, it's quite acceptable aesthetically:

Two things, though. First, although it's been talked about before, the sheer number of ads in MIUI's system apps always comes as a rude shock: Browser, File Manager, Mi Music and Mi Video...

You can turn them off (look for "Recommendations" within the relevant apps...

It's not about the ads themselves, but the fact that Xiaomi is collecting gobs of user data from them. And on that note…

MIUI’s battery management is just as annoying. We received notifications from several apps that task killers were interfering with their proper operation...

So is there any good in MIUI versus, say, stock Android? Yes: themes and customisations like scrolling screenshots, various creature-comfort apps like a good screen recorder and QR code scanner. Also, Xiaomi seems to be pretty fast with the updates; our Mi Note 10 was already on the January 2020 security update as of a few days back.

Performance and battery life

Is a high-end midrange processor good enough for a groundbreaking phone? Are benchmarks all there are to performance?

Hold those thoughts as we explore how the Mi Note 10 and 10 Pro do in our usual tests. The 6GB of RAM on the former is bumped to 8GB on the Pro, but both phones have the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 730G chip under the hood, which offers close to flagship performance thanks to its two Kryo 470 Gold cores, the same kind found in 8-series chips.

In JetStream 2, which measures JavaScript performance across a diverse number of browsing situations, the Mi Note 10 Pro expectedly outperformed the non-Pro, with the extra 2GB of RAM coming in handy.

But in system benchmarks Geekbench and Antutu, however, the results were too close to call. In fact, Geekbench results were marginally better on the non-Pro than on the Pro. We'll put this down to differences in software optimisation, since the non-Pro received a software update just before the tests which included a January security update.

Likewise, 3D performance in 3DMark Sling Shot Unlimited was neck-and-neck on both phones.

We only tested the Mi Note 10 in our battery test, but any discrepancy between it and its Pro sibling is likely insignificant given its amazing battery life of over 1100 minutes!

Should you shell out for the Pro, then? After a month of use, I’ll say the Mi Note 10 appears to lag slightly more than the Pro, especially during web browsing with numerous tabs open. There were also noticeably longer delays in switching between apps on the non-Pro version.

But otherwise, both phones behaved almost indistinguishably from flagships, and this compliment testifies to the power of the Snapdragon 730G and its two high-end Kryo 470 Gold cores. Coming from a OnePlus 7 Pro, I've grown accustomed to its lightning-fast moves, and with both Mi Notes 10 I didn't feel as much of a step down as I thought I would.

Camera

Xiaomi collaborated with Samsung to be the launch customer for its ISOCELL Bright HMX 108-megapixel sensor, which measures a relatively large 1/1.33 inches - that's almost 2 cm - across! This is situated behind a 7-plastic lens group with an aperture of f/1.69, while the Pro version has 1 extra lens element. There’s also optical image stabilisation (OIS).

Since 108MP shots on a regular basis would take ages to process (and I'm coming to this), the main shooter downscales the 108MP output by default, combining 4 pixels to give regular 27MP shots. This results in abundant detail:

Processing, however, doesn’t always seem to make the most of this. Both Mi Notes 10 are inconsistent with their processing sometimes, tend to underexpose images slightly, and colours are generally more muted than some of the competition - say, Samsung and Huawei.

The dynamic range is decent, but not as good as today’s 48-megapixel phones.

A true 108MP Ultra HD mode exists. Don’t go thinking that cobbling together all 108 million pixels is a sure bet for more detail, though. Each pixel is only 0.8um in diameter, so you're also adding noise into the mix.

Here’s where we come to one of the Mi Note 10 series’ biggest flaws: The camera simply isn’t fast. When starting up, there’s noticeable viewfinder lag, probably as the buffer deals with the inrush of 108 megapixels of image data. This also means the shot-to-shot time is pretty slow, taking some 2 seconds (yes, 2 seconds!) in normal photo mode, and a positively glacial 5 seconds in 108MP Ultra HD mode, so it's not going to work for action.

A quick-and-dirty test showed that in Burst shooting mode, the Mi Note 10 Pro got in about 30 shots before it started slowing down, while the plain-vanilla Note 10 stuttered after only the 10th shot. The time before the burst shot group appeared in the gallery was, however, almost identical at about 7 seconds for both phones. Since the Mi Note 10 Pro uses UFS 3.0 flash storage and the Note 10 makes do with slower UFS 2.1, I’d assume the extra RAM again comes in handy as a buffer while the processor writes to the storage. Many reviewers have opined that a switch to Snapdragon 855 power would benefit shooting speed, but I also believe this is a situation where 10GB of RAM would actually come in handy.

And so it’s time to flip the coin on the Mi Note 10’s camera: This is a tool for landscapes, for architecture, for situations where you can take your own sweet time to compose one superbly detailed shot. It’s not for sports, or action, or even for catching photos of the kids (you likely won’t be getting a lot of keepers for the latter scenario.)

What about the other lenses?

The wide angle lens is among the best we've seen. First of all, it autofocuses - yay for shooting close ups with large groups at birthday parties! Second, it has very nice dynamic range and colours.

And now for the telephoto. First, let’s answer the question of why there are 5 cameras:

Let's talk about another jaw-dropping feature: 50x hybrid zoom, likely powered by a combination of processing from the 108MP and 5x 8MP modules. No doubt due to its world-beating megapixel count, the Mi Note 10 almost certainly has the most detailed output among all the 50x (or better) zoom phones that exist right now. The image usability is not stellar, but it still counts for something, no?

In the dark, the Mi Note 10 puts up an acceptable performance, but disappointingly it's no better than the best on the market.

The macro camera is by far the most underwhelming of the five shooters. Like many of the macro units on other recent Chinese phones, it uses a 2MP sensor, although Xiaomi does a little better by adding autofocus. And sadly, like all of these other cameras, images lack detail and are smeared, with a lot of artificial sharpening to attempt to hide this.

But, you ask, why can't I shoot, say, food on the main camera? Heeeeeeere's why:

And what of the extra lens element on the Pro? Well, it doesn't improve every single shot, or people would be questioning why they're even paying for a non-Pro version. What it does do is improve corner sharpness in landscape and architecture shots, and these are likely to be this phone's bread-and-butter.

In the Mi Notes 10, I've found a selfie camera I can love. It's 32-megapixel, and does colours nicely:

Conclusion

So, which will it be, the S$699 Mi Note 10 or the S$799 10 Pro? Is it worth paying S$100 more for an extra 2GB of RAM, faster flash storage, and an extra lens element?

Well, the extra RAM doesn't seem to impact performance in key apps, but is always welcome when multitasking. The impact of the extra lens element, however, is undeniable, with improved corner sharpness.

Others would have a very different question: is it worth even buying a Mi Note 10 at all? This Samsung 108-megapixel sensor is almost certain to launch in an upgraded form this week in its creator's latest Galaxy S-series phones, and with a faster processor and other flagship specs to deal with all that megapixel madness. Leaks suggest that these will have 100x hybrid zoom as well, putting it exactly 50x up on the Mi Notes 10.

And so the Mi Note 10 is high-end only in that one (hundred-and-eight MP) specification. It isn't a fast camera. (It isn’t even a very fast phone.) It isn’t great at macro and food shots, but takes some jaw-dropping landscapes. Instead of a sleek, waterproofed high-end form factor, you get some decidedly hoi polloi ones, which may or may not be useful, to remind you of its place in the phone pecking order: a long-lasting but rather tubby battery, a headphone jack, a lackluster macro camera, and no 4K 60fps video recording.

Here, then, is the long-form answer: If you can accept that these are mid-rangers blessed with a single groundbreaking feature, if you’re not a person in a hurry, if you shoot mostly alone, and/or if you like the idea of flaunting the “108MP” and “5X Optical” inscriptions on the back - you'll love the Mi Notes 10. At around S$730-S$740 on the street now, the 10 Pro is about a hundred bucks less than, say, a Huawei P30 Pro, and it comes with slightly less snappy performance, but zoom you can really show off. However, if you demand consistent performance in all areas from your phone, or you believe that headliner features should come with headliner specs all round, this duo is not for you. Give them a miss and see what the upcoming Mi 10 series, with its rumoured Snapdragon 865 processor, has to offer.