Xiaomi Mi Note 10 Hands-On: 108 Megapixels?! Wha?!

Written by Melissa Tan

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Although our side of the world may be a little late to the game, the release of the Xiaomi Mi Note 10 and Mi Note 10 Pro still raised some eyebrows. And here’s why.

It may not be the world’s first phone with a penta-camera system, so it aimed to deliver the largest amount of megapixels – a whopping 108MP. You get a 5-megapixel telephoto camera with 5x optical zoom, a 12-megapixel portrait camera with 2x optical zoom, a 20 megapixel ultra-wide, a 2-megapixel macro camera, with the main star in the centre – the 108-megapixel main camera.

Image quality is pretty great across the board, and you do get a pretty versatile set of cameras to work with. The lag time for shots on the 108MP lens, though, would need some planning on each shot instead of our usual trigger-happy approach as each snap takes roughly 5 seconds to process in between.

The front camera is also very selfie-friendly at 32MP. The design is aesthetically pleasing, though hardly revolutionary, ringing familiar bells amongst fans of Huawei. It comes in three different colours: Midnight Black, Glacier White and Aurora Green, featuring the now-ubiquitous curved glass edges with Corning Gorilla Glass 5 on the back and front.

Surprisingly, the phone is not as slippery as one would expect. Some of that can be attributed to its hefty weight of 208 grams, one of the heavier phones around, which does help with giving our hands a decent weight to hold on to.

But when you’re squeezing an impressive 5,260mAH battery into it plus all those cameras, that weight is to be expected. The battery should last you a full day, and Xiaomi is already including a 30W USB-C fast charger with the phone itself. Some might also appreciate that you still get a headphone jack on this phone.

You get a 6.47-inch AMOLED display with a resolution of 2,340 by 1,080, with a small waterdrop notch. Colours are vibrant, viewing angles are great, and it does get pretty bright, maxing out at 600nits, so it’s fully usable outdoors. You get the latest Mi UI 11, which now also has Dark Mode.

They both run on a Snapdragon 730G processor; noticeably underpowered especially when it comes to photo processing, but otherwise forgivable with a little patience.

Despite the naming convention, the Xiaomi Mi Note 10 and Mi Note 10 Pro are essentially the same phone, even in dimensions, just with higher RAM and storage.

The Mi Note 10 comes with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of internal memory at $699 and the Mi Note 10 Pro with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage goes for $799.

Overall there are better specs for this price elsewhere, but for a unique camera experience, this is a phone you might want to consider.