Xiaomi’s Mi 10T Lite 5G brings a device that offers 5G connectivity,
and a whole lot more, with a budget-friendly price tag. The device offers a surprisingly
high-quality build and impressive specifications to go along with it,
with a price tag, at the time of this review, of just under £230.
Unlike other devices which may fall into the “budget” category, Xiaomi has not used a plastic
construction on the back or front of the device. The front and back of the device are both glass,
Gorilla Glass 5 to be specific, and feel great and result in a device that feels much more premium in
the hand. The sides of the Mi 10T Lite 5G are plastic, however, but for the price this phone
comes in at you can’t exactly expect a metal and glass build that is found on flagships that
cost over double if-not triple the price of this. The use of glass means that the device will not be
as prone to light scratches or scuffs that could appear on a plastic device after regular use,
but this does of course mean that the glass could shatter if you drop your phone and it lands in
an unfortunate position. Xiaomi does have you covered with the basics to help prevent this,
a screen protector is installed out of the factory and a silicone case is included in the box.
The Mi 10T Lite 5G is a big phone, with a 6.67” display on the front of the device.
I’m usually a fan of smaller devices, so this phone is definitely one to use two hands with
as it’s very difficult, at least for me, to even get near to reaching the top corner of the device.
The display features a hole-punch cut-out camera in the middle,
earpiece speaker, curved corners, and a little bit of a chin at the bottom. I didn’t notice
the selfie camera much within the display during my testing, which is good as it is
unobtrusive. This larger size does result in a device that packs quite a bit of weight,
weighing in at 214 grams — almost 100 grams more than my, albeit much smaller, iPhone 12 mini.
Looking around the sides of the device, the right-hand side is home to all the buttons.
There’s the sleep/wake button with an integrated fingerprint reader as well as the volume rockers.
The left-hand side has the SIM and microSD card slot. The bottom of the device has the speaker,
USB Type-C port as well as a headphone jack – which is certainly a welcome inclusion,
especially on a budget phone. The back of the device is very shiny and a bit of
a fingerprint magnet. I’m a big fan of the satin glass finishes on recent devices from OnePlus,
as this still has the advantages of glass but in a sleeker and less fingerprint-covered manor. The
back of the device also is home to the quad-camera system, housed in a circular camera bump.
The Mi 10T Lite 5G has a 6.67” display with a 2400x1080 resolution and a 120Hz refresh rate.
High refresh rate displays have been making their appearances in high-end flagships and
gaming phones and with the Mi 10T Lite 5G, it is clear to see that they’re also making
their way to more budget-focused devices as well. This high refresh rate setting does
need to be enabled in the settings as the device runs at 60Hz out of the box to conserve power.
This is my first experience with a high-refresh display, so, unfortunately, I don’t have any
other high refresh rate displays to compare it against – all of my displays and devices are 60Hz.
If you’re a big mobile gamer, I can see the high refresh rate being beneficial as it will provide
you with a smoother gaming experience but even if you don’t game, the high refresh rate makes
the overall experience of using the device and browsing feel much smoother and faster.
However, I did notice that some apps, such as Twitter did not run at a high refresh rate.
The display panel itself is an IPS LCD, so it doesn’t offer as much contrast as an OLED display,
but it does still offer playback of HDR10 content. Viewing content on the display is pleasant,
text is sharp and colour saturation, as well as contrast, is good for a device in this category.
The display also manages to hold up well when being looked at from an angle as it remains
clear without any prominent colour shift. The Mi 10T Lite 5G ships with Android 10
and their MIUI 12 interface running on top. Xiaomi has recently started rolling
out Android 11 with MIUI 12.5 recently, although I am yet to receive the update,
but it is good to see that the phone is seeing software updates for major Android versions.
The MIUI interface is a substantial design change from stock Android,
but it is still pleasant to use and navigate and offers a good amount of customisation such
as changing your home screen style, navigation method (between buttons and gestures) and the
option to hide the hole-punch camera cut out. I did find that the device did include quite a
few apps from third parties that were installed out of the box and there were also a few apps
that offered duplicate functionality such as Xiaomi’s web browser as well as Google Chrome.
Overall, the software experience is good and the MIUI interface is easy to navigate,
but I do wish that those pre-bundled apps were optional, rather than mandatory.
The Mi 10T Lite 5G is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 750G 5G processor, the processor
features 8 processing cores and works well for day-to-day phone usage, including browsing
social media, watching videos and a bit of gaming. I don’t game that much on mobile devices that much
anymore, but I had to take the 120Hz refresh rate for a display. The phone held up well to the task
and provided good quality graphics and performance on 3D titles such as Real Racing 3 and Asphalt 9.
Regarding benchmarks, the device scored a single-core score of 658,
a multi-core score of 1,979 and a compute score of 1,292 on Geekbench and score of 1,096 on 3DMark.
For wireless connectivity, the device supports Wi-Fi 5 (AC) connectivity, Bluetooth 5.1,
NFC which can be used for making contactless payments with Google Pau
as well as an infrared port, which you could use for controlling your TV.
The device supports two biometric unlocking methods through fingerprint and face recognition.
Out of these two, the fingerprint recognition is the most secure as face recognition only
uses the selfie camera unlike infrared face unlocking systems such as FaceID on the iPhone.
The fingerprint reader works well for unlocking the device and seamlessly unlocks the device
as it is woken up from sleep and the placement of the sensor is good as my finger or thumb
was able to naturally rest on the button to unlock the device when needed.
The speakers are okay, they’re clear but do not offer much low-end. As the speakers work together,
the speaker on the bottom handles the low-end and the earpiece speaker handles the high-end,
there is a good amount of stereo sound. You’d probably still want to use earbuds
or a Bluetooth speaker for listening to music, but for spoken word content such as radio or podcasts,
these speakers should do the job. The Mi 10T Lite 5G features a quad-camera
system as well as a selfie camera for capturing photos and video on the device. The cameras work
well at capturing well-exposed photos with good dynamic range. On the back, there is a 64 MP wide,
8 MP ultrawide, 2 MP macro and 2 MP depth camera. The cameras generally take good photographs,
working well at capturing landscapes and portraits. Particularly with landscapes, the
camera has worked well at ensuring that both the sky and land are well exposed and are not clipped
thanks to auto HDR, this is quite an issue at the moment as the weather is so dreary and overcast
so the cameras being able to capture detail within the cloudy landscapes is a big benefit.
When you’re in a tight spot, the ultrawide camera works well at fitting more into the frame
such as large trees to get a more artistic angle. The saturation of images is good,
but I do think that some images could do with a little more punch but overall,
they look good. I did find that some subjects such as hedges did throw the colour balance a
little and look far cooler and desaturated than they were in real life, of course,
this can be fixed in the edit, but it would be even better if the camera were able to capture
the warmth and colour of these more accurately. I’m not too sure about the 2 MP macro camera,
during my testing I didn’t find myself in a single situation where I thought about using
it or needed it. I think it would’ve been far more useful to have a telephoto camera.
Interestingly, the camera app does have a 2X zoom option alongside the ultrawide
camera selection, but it just takes the image from the main camera and zooms in digitally.
When I got up close to a subject, I found myself using the main wide camera,
which works well and has a good amount of depth of field thanks to its f/1.9 aperture.
Of course, if you do want more depth of field separation, you can turn on the portrait mode.
The portrait mode generally does a good job at separating the subject from the background
and adds a good quality background blur behind the subject. The cut-out is generally sharp and
manages to cut out around hair to a good quality, but it can sometimes be thrown off by glasses
and result in a visible blur around where the glasses should’ve been excluded from the blur.
The depth sensor camera looks to help a little bit, but between the selfie camera and rear
camera, I could not tell a substantial difference in cut-out quality. As far as depth sensors go,
I think the Samsung Galaxy A90 5G makes the best use of its sensor, but that device does
cost much more than the Mi 10T Lite 5G. The front-facing selfie camera works
well for taking selfies, but it does not handle dynamic range as well as the rear-facing cameras,
this could be seen in some of my testing shots where the sky was completely blown out as the
camera worked to ensure that I was correctly exposed. The camera still does a good job,
however, when the price-point of the device is taken into consideration.
When it comes to shooting video, the Mi 10T Lite 5G can shoot 4K 30fps or 1080p in 30/60/120/240fps
and even 720p at 960fps, offering plenty of flexibility if you want to shoot some slow motion
or high-resolution video. I mainly chose to film at 1080p 30fps as this allowed me to shoot video
with electronic image stabilisation, which is not possible at 60fps or in 4K resolution. The
stabilisation works well at removing large shakes from filming and can effectively smoothen a video
that has been recorded when walking. The camera app provides a range of different
modes and settings for shooting, including a full manual mode if you wish to have full control of
the camera settings. There are a couple of things that I noticed when taking photos on the device,
the first was the implementation of skin smoothing, which is on by default. I would’ve
preferred to have this off by default and an option to turn on as I do not want skin
smoothening on in my photos, additionally a watermark was being applied to photos I took,
and this had to be turned off in the settings of the camera app to make it disappear.
I also noticed that the shutter of the camera could occasionally lag,
this isn’t a huge issue as it only occurred a few times, but it was quite annoying as I was unsure
whether I had captured the moment I wanted to. Overall, the camera app is okay and works well,
but it could do with a little bit of tweaking to ensure that it is able to do the main
thing it needs to do effectively – take photos. The Mi 10T Lite 5G has a huge 4820 mAh battery,
which supports 33W fast charging with a 33W fast charger included in the box. I’ve mainly
been using social media apps and occasional video streaming during my testing of the device
and it has held up incredibly well, giving me over a day of usage out of the device.
I also conducted a PCMark battery benchmark which emulates a range of device usage scenarios
such as video editing, photo editing and web browsing, to name a few, and the device held up
very well during this test. The test was performed with the display locked to full brightness
at 120Hz mode and the device connected to Wi-Fi and the Vodafone 4G cellular network.
The phone lasted 8 hours and 20 minutes of being turned on performing this benchmark
before hitting 20% charge, this shows that the device can offer an incredibly long
screen on time thanks to its large battery. The Xiaomi Mi 10T Lite 5G is an incredibly
appealing device that offers a lot for the money and is a fantastic budget offering.
The device performs well for general usage as well as impressive battery life to match.
The camera system is also good for capturing moments, although the app could do with a bit
more work to ensure it doesn’t occasionally lag and the build and feel of the device is
fantastic – for the £230 asking price, this is a very appealing option worth considering.
That’s been it for this video, if you liked it, please consider subscribing. Thank you to Vodafone
for sending out the device for review, I’ll leave a link to the Mi 10T Lite 5G in the description
if you’d like to pick one up for yourself. Thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one.