Xiaomi Mi Note 10 Unboxing and Review - 108MP Camera is NOT a Gimmick By Eric Okafor

Hey guys, it’s Eric here and this is the unboxing and review of Xiaomi Mi Note 10, a successor to the Mi Note 3 from 2017. I mean yeah Xiaomi just skipped 6 generations like that. When you open the box, you’re greeted with the smartphone, let’s take out the stickers. This is the midnight black color, it also comes in Aurora green and glacier white. You have an envelope that houses your sim ejector tool, Warranty card, User guide, You get full support for all the 4G/LTE networks available here. A Smokey TPU case.

This one is a little bit different, it does have some raisivity as flossy carter calls it, to protect those curved edges. Thoughtful yeah. The stress of removing that charger was worth it in the end. We have a 30watt charger and a USB type C cable. Let’s take a look at the design.

It’s a flagship style glass and aluminium sandwich complete with a curved display and back. Gorilla Glass 5 protection on the front and back. Very tall phone with Thin bezels on all sides. Feels every bit as premium as it looks and it is a heavy weight but it’s not as wide as most phones so one handed typing is a breeze. The Midnight black doesn’t look all that different from the kind of grey color on the Mi A3 series that i recently reviewed.

The Penta camera set up sort of differentiates it from a flagship bearing similar form factor, P30 Pro comes to mind. You get 5 cameras with Quad flash, a 108 megapixel main shooter, a 12 megapixel telephoto lens, another 5 mega pixel telephone lens, 20megapixel ultra wide lens and a 2 megapixel macro lens. Huge camera bump that is well guarded from scratched when you put the case on it. On the front, you have a 6.47 inch FHD+ AMOLED display with 19.5 by 9 aspect ratio. On top of the display you have that water drop notch that houses a 32 megapixel camera and ear piece You have an under display fingerprint sensor, not the fastest one we’ve seen from Xiaomi.

The actual sensor is also situated slightly higher than it is on the Mi A3 and Mi 9T alike, so now we have to take our finger a lil bit higher. Small learning curve. With face unlock, look at how fast the animation is. It is crazy fast y’all like security wise, face unlock doesn’t match fingerprint unlock but with this speed, it’s hard to not use it. On the left you have nothing On the right you have a power button, volume rocker and a true Dual SIM tray with no option of an SD Card.

On the top you have your IR blaster and a Microphone On the bottom you have a single speaker, a second microphone, a USB type C port and a 3.5mm headphone jack The display on this guy is super crispy and has great sunlight legibility. On the software side, Mi Note 10 shipped with Android 9 Pie with MIUI 11 slapped on top of it. No word on when the Android 10 update is coming but I’d keep you posted. You get an option to hide the notch and then another really weird option to waste your screen real estate. Are people really still Notchophobic in 2020?.

I love the integration of dark mode for notifications but it does ship with a lot of extra bloatware that we haven’t seen before. Thankfully you can delete them. I got the 128gig storage variant with 6gigs of RAM and you get about 112gigs of available storage. As for the performance, this uses the Snapdragon 730G CPU clocked at 2.2ghz. Same one on the Mi 9T.

This pretty much runs like a flagship chipset for your everyday social media, messaging and utility apps as there are no lags or slow downs while multi-tasking. Tested the speaker. Here’s how the single speaker compares with Mi A3’s speakerWhen it comes to gaming, as usual I played PUBG on default settings which is HD graphics and high frame rates. Now if you saw my Redmi Note 8 Pro review, you’d know it plays PUBG in HDR graphics hence, it is actually better suited for gaming. The gaming experience is still top notch on this guy and I have no complaints coz I don’t see skipped frames or lags anywhere.

What I did notice is the battery drain after gaming for 2-3 hours in one sitting and the back feeling fairly warm to the touch. Nothing alarming, just something worth noting if you want to conserve battery while on the move. Speaking of battery, this guy ships with a rather hefty 5260mAh battery and yeah it should last you through 2 days of medium use provided you don’t play graphics intensive games for too long. So on the average, it will take about 6+ hours of gaming to deplete the entire battery but for the purpose of testing this guy I put it through mixed medium to heavy use of social media stuff, taking photos and 3 hours of gaming all on wifi. This gave me over 8 hours of screen on time at the end of my day with 10% left to spare.

It took me 38 minutes to charge from zero to 70% and1 hour and 6 minutes for a full charge. It supports fast charging and thankfully, a fast charger came in the box. If you didn’t already know, the Mi Note 10’s camera is by far it’s biggest selling point. Now when I first heard about the 108MP, I must admit I was a bit skeptical about the whole megapixel count thing at first but now I’m certainly convinced that not only was Xiaomi trying to grab everyone’s attention with numbers but with results as well. The selfie camera is pretty good but isn’t the star of the show.

Using portrait mode, it didn’t quite map my face accurately. By default the Primary camera shoots in 27megapixel and you can see the difference when you crop into the image. Now in this 27 megapixel shot, the saturation and details were so good that I compared it with iPhone 11 Pro camera, you be the judge of this one. I also compared it with the Mi+A3 paired with GCAM and of course, it was an easy win for the Mi Note 10. The primary lens has a really good sense of depth for your portrait shots.

Indoors, the primary camera still exceeded any kind of expectation I had. Selfie camera is brighter but isn’t nearly as detailed. Comparing the portrait mode with the iPhone 11 Pro, after several takes, Mi Note 10 always has its focus on both subjects while the iPhone 11 Pro isn’t capable of that when the lighting is less than ideal. I have to give night mode to Apple. At night the iPhone sees better, ever so slightly.

Now, asides the 2 and 5 times optical zoom, this thing can go up to 50X hybrid zoom. The resulting image is way brighter and more detailed than actually cropping a 108megapixel picture. I know you’ve been waiting for the GCAM output but I couldn’t find a stable one that works without crashing or one that is compatible with the primary lens. It shows a clear improvement from the Selfie camera but the results from GCAM’s primary camera is under-saturated. It shoots videos in 4K with image stabilisation turned on in this footage.

Prior now, we’ve been led to believe that flagship killers can only be about flagship processor on a budget, as seen in the Mi 9T Pro which i reviewed. The Mi Note 10 kind of changes that narrative to being all about flagship camera on a budget, not just any flagship camera, the best flagship camera for point and shoot photography, a Xiaomi camera that does it all so well without the help of GCAM. There’s a reason Xiaomi took this route, if I could take a wild guess, I’d say its probably to give Mi fans a taste of what to expect from their actual flagship this year. All of that probably will come at a price much higher than the Mi Note 10. Xiaomi will release the usual flagship killer type smartphones this year for those who don’t care about photography.

Mi Note 10 is strictly for people who do a fair amount of capturing moments on a trip or event. I am switching from the iPhone 11 Pro to the Mi Note 10 as my daily driver so you can guess what group I fall under. The Mi Note 10 is priced at 179,000 naira which converts to 500 US dollars for the 128gig variant and you get an even better deal with the 256gig storage variant with 8gigs of RAM, it retails for 199,000 naira which converts to $550 US dollars. I’d be leaving a link in the description for anyone who wishes to shop online. If you have any questions or suggestions, please leave them in the comments.

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Source : Eric Okafor