Living with the consequences of trade-offs made by smartphone brands. Each time I pick up an Android phone, this one statement keeps bothering me. If it’s an inexpensive phone, some trade-offs are understandable but once the price ladder has been climbed, there is a chance of losing brand loyalty over small things. We have had Xiaomi Mi 10T Pro for a few weeks but instead of sharing a quick experience piece, the idea is to give you a fair idea of what the company has come up with and do the compromises hamper your experience.

Be it a Samsung or a Xiaomi or BBK electronics products (OPPO, Vivo, OnePlus and Realme), smartphone manufacturers are rolling out devices before you can say Jack Robinson. It’s about having a phone ready at almost every price point. Spending close to 40K on Mi 10T Pro is no joke but it obviously makes its competition clear — OnePlus 8T and Samsung Galaxy S20 FE.

Polished to a T

Let’s begin with the design, which almost forcefully turns all eyes to the camera panel on the back. It’s bit of a blob sticking out, unable to lie flat on a table. Of course, one may argue that there is a 108MP camera, which we will come to later.

The rear panel has a mirror finish that can capture every detail of one’s face, besides all the smudges you can throw at it. The days of such high-gloss finish hopefully will end soon. Plus, at 218g, there is a lot of heft, something that one would feel right of the box. In case you decide to watch a few YouTube videos lying down, get set for some muscle flexing because of the weight. This is visibly in contrast of Xiaomi’s early days in India when the devices reflected a minimalistic design philosophy. It would have been nice of Xiaomi to have presented a few options.

On a more pleasant note, the hole-punch display looks good, especially because it’s right at the top left corner. Though some reviewers have complained about the bezels, I am okay with it because the screen doesn’t look bad at all.

Are you a gamer or streaming-head?

Coming to the screen, there are two ways to look at it. Xiaomi has opted for a 6.67-inch LCD DotDisplay compared to the OLED panels that are available at this price point. With OLED, blacks get really dark while whites are very bright, offering a fantastic spectrum of colours. Apple, in fact, has moved to OLED panel this year while Samsung remains the king of AMOLED displays. Working in favour the IPS LCD display is the high display refresh rate available on the phone — 144Hz, which is really fantastic if you are a gamer.

What if you are not into gaming at all? What if you like to stream films all the time? The LCD display is fairly good at capturing all the colours but when you compare with some rival products while plonking down 40K on the table, you have to decide what you want to do with the device. Also, had Xiaomi gone with OLED and restricted screen refresh rate to 120Hz, it would have made little difference to gamers.

Many wins, a couple of losses

So the big feature is the 108MP main camera. It’s not the first 108MP lens we have seen on phones but honestly, Xiaomi has done a good job with it. Keeping the main sensor company is a 13MP camera and a 5MP macro lens. The main camera does an excellent job under good lighting as well as at night. Photos come out more or less natural with a lot of sharpness and a wide dynamic range. You can also natively shoot at 108MP, which works well as long as you know what you want to do with such shots. Just keep the AI part off when taking pictures.

When the user moves into the ultra-wide angle mode, there is a change in colour tone, which is a bit saturated. In the same breathe, the brand has done a fantastic job with the distortion that we often see around the edges in photos taken in this mode.

Staying on with positive vibes, you can shoot at 8K@24/30fps and if you playback on the screen, it looks fantastic. But you need to have a monitor which supports this kind of recording. Here’s the catch. Many have devices to playback 4K recordings. On the phone, 8K recordings are great but when you move to 4K there is a small degree of colour saturation. At the same time, the video stablisation you enjoy while recording at 4K is lost when you move to 8K. It’s a give-and-take situation.

What I found missing is a telephoto lens, which makes a difference to those who would use a new phone for blogging needs. The digital zoom is fine till 10X but beyond it (it can go up to 30X) things get noisy.

Is it for you?

Where the real strength of the phone can be felt is in the video gaming department. There is a Snapdragon 865 processor (with 5G) plus 8GB RAM (LPDDR5 RAM + UFS 3.1 flash storage). Every game out there can be played at maximum display setting without a hitch. But is that the target audience for the phone? Did Xiaomi build a device for gamers? In case somebody is purchasing the 128GB variant, chances of filling it up within a year is high. Remember, there is no microSD support.

Also excellent is the battery (5,000mAh) life, which easily lasts close to two days and the 33W charger can juice up quite fast. Two other features we liked about the phone is the clone mode in the camera department as well as how you can access notifications by dragging down from the left top corner while the quick settings panel can be accessed while dragging down from the right top corner, somewhat like on iPhones. Also, don’t go by what some bloggers are saying about advertisements popping up. We didn’t find anything irritating on that front.

So you have a phone that looks a bit like some Samsung devices. You have a phone that wants to compete with OnePlus. You have a phone that competes with its own Mi 10, which is a few thousand bucks costlier. Perhaps Xiaomi should consider working on its design philosophy once again and go back to its roots to make each device standout. Looks and feel matter in the age of black slabs.

Design aside, Xiaomi Mi 10T Pro (Rs 39,999, 8GB+128GB) is a powerful device that’s focused on gamers.

Mi 10T Pro flies because…

⦿ It comes with an adaptive 144Hz screen refresh rate

⦿ Of the main 108MP lens

⦿ It has enough battery to last almost two days

⦿ It charges up quickly

⦿ There are some great MIUI 12 tricks

⦿ Good stereo speakers

Mi 10T Pro could have flown higher had it…

⦿ Been lighter

⦿ Offered a telephoto lens

⦿ Not had a mirror-finish on the back

⦿ Gone with a slimmer camera panel

⦿ Given wireless charging

⦿ Come with expandable memory