In this article, I will review the new flagship Xiaomi Mi 10 Ultra with a 120 Hz screen, 120x zoom and 120 watt charging, which was released in honor of the company's 10th anniversary and is sold for 100 thousand rubles.
The flagship is top-end, powerful, modern, but first things first. While Mi 10 Ultra is on sale in China, we are waiting for the entry to the international market and the appearance of support for the Russian language (while MIUI 12 Chinese version is available).
Design
This is how the novelty looks in comparison with the Mi 10 Pro , the previous flagship.
We did a great job on the design. There is also a transparent version.
The phone is sold in three colors: black, silver and transparent (sticker).
In terms of dimensions, the Mi 10 Pro is very thick – almost 10 mm. The vibration is strong. Stereo sound, but worse than in Mi 10 Pro, because the top notch of the speaker has been greatly reduced.
On the back there is Gorilla Glass 6 protection, in front – Gorilla Glass 5. The sixth version is much inferior in strength to Gorilla Glass Victus 7, as on the Samsung Note20 Ultra.
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Camera
The well-known site DXOMark has placed the phone in the first place in the ranking. It turns out that the Mi 10 Ultra is the best camera phone in the world.
In fact, the Mi 10 Ultra has a very raw firmware, the phone is flawed, and the pictures (especially with zoom) are far from ideal and lose to the Galaxy S20 Ultra's husband.
- The main matrix of Omni Vision is 48 megapixels, aperture of 1.85, focal length of 25 mm, there is optical stabilization. Let me remind you that in Mi 10 and Mi 10 Pro the main 108 megapixel sensor from Samsung. And Xiaomi abandoned it in the new flagship.
- In a separate frame at the top of the periscope module for a Sony AMX586 lens, 120mm focal length, 48MP sensor, optical stabilization, 4.1 aperture, 5x optical zoom.
- Portrait camera Samsung S5K2L7 12 MP, 2x optical zoom, aperture 2.0, focal length 50 mm.
- Sensor Sony AMX350 ultra wide-angle lens 20 MP, aperture 2.2, viewing angle 128 degrees, focal length 12 mm.
In addition to the cameras, there is laser autofocus, a flicker sensor and 120x zoom. In fact, photos with this magnification are very blurry with a lot of noise. Here are some examples to understand how the zoom works on the Mi 10 Ultra:
For video shooting, there is a convenient resolution switching right in the application. Can record 4K 60fps, 8K 24fps. There is a macro mode for shooting video (4K 30 frames per second).
The 20 megapixel front camera takes good pictures. FullHD (1080) video recording at 30 fps. But there is a small nuance. When shooting video, the Rollingshutter effect occurs, when your face “slides” across the screen and deforms.
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Display
The Mi 10 Ultra has a 120Hz screen (the Mi 10 Pro has 90Hz). There are no complaints about the screen, it works very smoothly. The size is 6.67 inches, the resolution is 2340 × 1080 pixels, the contrast ratio is 5,000,000: 1, the average brightness is 800 nits (peak 1120 nits), 10-bit color depth (the Mi 10 Pro had 8 bits) and a bunch of modern technologies and standards.
Installed matrix Amoled with a hole for the front camera in the upper left corner. Protective Gorilla Glass 5.
The display covers 96.6% of the P3 color gamut as well as 96.5% of the sRGB color gamut. There is also a fast fingerprint scanner under the glass.
Today it is one of the best dies in the world, which is produced by a subsidiary of the Chinese TCL.
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Charging and battery
The phone comes with a 120-watt charger. Compare it to the 96-watt MacBook charger.
This is one of the first smartphones to receive Quick Charge 5.0 fast charging. The Chinese assure us that the smartphone charges 41% in 5 minutes, and 100% in 23 minutes.
In fact, I got the following charging figures:
- 1 minute – 8%,
- 5 minutes – 29%,
- 10 minutes – 42%,
- 15 minutes – 65%,
- 20 minutes – 75%,
- 32 minutes – 100%.
The built-in 4500 mAh battery is divided into 2 parts – 2250 mAh each.
Mi 10 Ultra supports 50w fast wireless charging. How did Xiaomi reach such a high value? Changed the layout of DC / DC converters. They were not installed in series, but in parallel.
In this case, the inductor is a stranded copper wire, which is placed in 5 layers. The efficiency of the internal circuit is increased by new connector materials, which are now based on graphene. As a result, the efficiency increases from 94% to 98.6%.
As for reversible charging, it's 10 watts here, so you can quickly recharge your Galaxy Note 20 Ultra, iPhone 11 Pro, and AirPods.
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Performance
- Snapdragon 865 processor.
- RAM 8, 12 or 16 GB LDDR5.
- Built-in memory 128, 256 or 512 GB.
The test in AnTuTu 8 scored 638474, Geekbench 5 test – 3307.
All games run on top-end settings, but the smartphone gets very hot. The firmware is still very raw, some games may have bugs and artifacts.
From communications: Bluetooth 5.1, NFC, Wi-Fi 6, support for 2 SIM cards, 5G. Google Pay works with linking cards of Russian banks.
The phone is based on MIUI 12 (Chinese version). There is no global version yet, which means there is no Russian language either. The firmware itself is very raw and unstable. The phone sometimes does not start video, games crash, the camera hangs, and other bugs.
Xiaomi Mi 10 Ultra is the first phone to support customization of the Adreno accelerator with GameTurbo 4.0. We are launching Mi Game Tuner: here you can adjust anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, frame rate, update the driver and much more.
No other gaming smartphone has this. And this despite the fact that Mi 10 Ultra is not officially gaming.
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Kit and prices
In addition to charging, the box contains a Type-C type-A cable, there is even a type-C to 3.5 mm jack adapter and a transparent case of very mediocre quality.
Price in China from 57.000r. basic version with 8 GB of RAM and 128 GB of internal memory. The top version of the smartphone with 16GB of RAM and 512GB storage will cost 75,000r (over $ 1000). You can order through Chinese online stores.
And if such a phone is released in Europe or Russia, then prices will start from 70k to 100k.
Over 2000 people have already signed a petition on Change.org for the release of the global version of the Mi 10 Ultra.
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conclusions
If you want an expensive flagship smartphone, go for something else. In principle, no one expected the release of such a smartphone. Just like that Xiaomi decided to celebrate their tenth anniversary.
Looking at the specs, OnePlus and Samsung have a 120Hz screen and a dozen other companies.
The 120X zoom is unlikely to be used by anyone. The 120 watt charging does not perform as well as the manufacturer claims, although the performance is very good.
System MIUI 12 is unstable, there is no global version (no support for the Russian language). There are no complaints about the design, although the black version gets dirty, so take the silver or “transparent” version.