The Xiaomi Mi 10T lite 5G is one of the newest Mi 10 series phones to come out. With 'lite' in the name, you know this one is a mid-ranger, and knowing Xiaomi, it's bound to have a bunch of bang for your buck. So, let’s see what the Mi 10T lite brings to the table in our full review.
The Mi 10T lite brings looks that are reminiscent of the Poxo X3 on the back thanks to its rectangular camera arrangement. However, here the back is made of Gorilla Glass with a glossy gradient finish. The frame is still made from plastic, though, and it's matte, not glossy, which offers a bit of extra grip. The phone's curved back adds a bit of comfort in the hand, too. But at 215 grams, the Mi 10 lite is actually not that light. On the front is the 6.67-inch IPS LCD with a 1080p resolution and a fast 120hz refresh rate. The fast refresh rate means moving elements on the screen, like when swiping or scrolling, look much smoother. We were pleasantly surprised by the cutout for the selfie cam. It's one of the smallest we've seen on an LCD. Unlike many competitors, we didn't notice any glow or backlight bleed around it. Overall, we like this display. It's HDR10-compliant and plenty bright. We measured almost 600 nits of maximum brightness in auto mode in bright light. Colors looks good and you can tune them to be reasonably accurate in settings. And the fast refresh rate is adaptive to your content, switching seamlessly to fit what's on screen.
Xiaomi also didn't cut corners in the audio department. The Mi 10T Lite features a set of stereo speakers, with one speaker at the bottom, and the other doubling as the earpiece. The sound quality isn't exceptional - it's unbalanced, with the bottom speaker much louder than the top one. But vocals sound clear and the overall loudness is good, too. In addition, there is a 3.5mm audio jack on the Mi 10T lite, for plugging in traditional headphones plus support for FM radio. Waking up and unlocking the phone is easy with the side-mounted fingerprint reader. We like its concave shape and it's super fast and responsive.
What you won't find here is expandable storage. Correction!!! You get a microSD slot besides the 64 or 128GB on board. At the time of this review, the Mi 10T Lite doesn't run the latest Android 11, but Android 10. However, the interface is Xiaomi's new MIUI 12. A notable feature of MIUI 12 is that the notification shade can be divided into two different drop-down menus. One for notifications and another one for your quick settings - the Control Center - very similar to Apple's iOS. You can not only keep your apps on the home screen but you can have them in an app drawer.The app drawer will automatically arrange your apps into categories, too. And a cool feature is that there is a space for quick shortcuts, always available when gaming. You access them by swiping on upper corners of the screen. These include plenty of functions and you can even launch apps. One of the more unique features of the Mi 10T lite is its new Snapdragon 750G 5G chipset. It’s built on an 8nm process and its performance is great for a mid-range chip, comparable to the Snapdragon 765G. This one offers better CPU performance but falls a bit behind GPU-wise. Games still run really smoothly of course, especially if you can find some that can take advantage of the display with a high frame rate. And, of course, you get support for 5G network connectivity, too.
Battery life is another area in which the Mi 10T lite does a great job. With its 4820mAh battery, it was able to score an excellent 116-hour endurance rating in our battery life tests. And charging speed is excellent too. With the 33W charger that ships in the box, we were able to charge the Mi 10T lite from 0 to 68% in half an hour. Now on to the cameras. There’s a quad-camera setup, with a 64MP Quad Bayer main cam, an 8MP ultra wide-angle cam, a 2MP macro camera, and a depth sensor. Photos from the main camera come out in 16MP and these are decent. They have nice colors, low noise, and a good level of detail. However, sharpness leaves a bit more to be desired. Since there's no dedicated telephoto camera, zooming is done through a digital crop from the main cam. These aren't tack sharp due to the upscale but they aren't too bad.
Portraits are taken with the main camera, too. You get well-exposed faces with quite a bit of detail. Edge detection is pretty accurate in simple scenes, but it had some trouble with more complex hairstyles. Shots from the ultra wide-angle camera are okay for this price range but they are nothing special. You do get the ultra-wide effect you'd want, with good distortion correction, but there's visible noise and softness, as well as clipped highlights here and there. Close-up shots taken with the macro camera are okay, with nice colors. These can be tricky to shoot due to the lack of autofocus. And don't expect a ton of detail from a 2MP sensor. In low-light, the main camera performs about how you'd expect for a phone in this price range. You get relatively well preserved detail, realistic colors, and good contrast, but there's plenty of noise, clipped highlights, and the photos are overall a bit soft. If you turn on Night mode, each photo takes a few seconds to capture and process. The effect is worth it though. You get a more clear overall picture, with more detail, less noise, added sharpness, and more balanced highlight and shadows. Low light photos taken with the ultra wide-angle camera look muddy and almost out-of-focus. There's a bunch of noise and clipped highlights, too. However, with Night mode on, you can capture some half-decent ultra wide-angle shots, with cleared up noise and more detail in the shadows. Light sources look better, too. Selfies are taken with a 16MP front-facing cam and these are detailed and sharp enough. Faces come out well-exposed and the colors are accurate in general. There is some visible noise though, especially if the lighting isn't ideal.
Videos can be recorded with the main camera at up to 4K at 30fps. These are good looking, with nice colors and contrast, and low noise. The ultrawide camera can take video at up to 1080p resolution and the results aren't impressive. These are a bit grainy and soft. While there is video stabilization available, it's only for 1080p resolution, and not 4K. Regardless, the EIS does a good job in smoothing out handheld video. So, that’s the Xiaomi Mi 10T lite 5G. You get a solid glass build, a great LCD screen with a high refresh rate, stereo speakers, excellent battery life with fast charging, a snappy interface, and solid chipset performance. Overall, it's a feature-packed smartphone and a great deal for the money.It is worth mentioning that if you went for the similarly named and similarly priced Mi 10 lite 5G, you would be getting an AMOLED display and a better main camera. But if that's not something you care about, the Mi 10T lite 5G is definitely worth recommending.
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