The myth of fingerprints: The Xiaomi 10T Pro is well-rounded, but it's definitively a sub-flagship handset

Released late last year with a price tag of £599 (about $812), Xiaomi’s Mi 10T Pro is an aspirational sub-flagship 5G phone that focuses on photography and performance. This device sits in a highly competitive sector of the market, with dozens of vendors duking it out for dominance. And while we have certain moans, overall the …

[Anonymous Coward]

"Mercifully, given the current pandemic situation, there’s also a fingerprint sensor mounted to the side of the device, which is handy for unlocking your phone while wearing a mask."

Really wish all phone manufacturers would take the hint on this one. Fingerprint sensors are far more convenient even without a pandemic, especially for Android/Apple Pay scenarios.

[DS999]

Given product cycles, by the time it is added to phones that don't have it masks will no longer be necessary.

Taking an extra couple seconds to type in my password when I'm buying something with Apple Pay has hardly been my biggest hassle of 2020.

[Annihilator]

Yes but as I said, fingerprint is far more convenient on Apple Pay etc even without a mask.

Apple Pay on a Touch ID iphone is practically a one-step process - hold the phone to the card reader with your thumb already on the touch ID button. The reader will wake the Apple Pay screen automatically, your fingerprint is read automatically, and it's done.

With Face ID - you do (I think) double tap the side button, hold the phone up to your face, wait for the unlock signal, then hold the phone to the card reader.

It's telling that Apple haven't ditched Touch ID entirely, and have already created a solution to the lack of home button - the new iPad Air has Touch ID in the power button on the side.

[Neil Barnes]

no option to expand this with a MicroSD card.

They missed a trick there: my year-old Xiaomi 8 has space on the sim carrier for two sims and a microSD, so they obviously know how to do it.

And with similar specs in terms of storage and RAM, it cost around about a hundred and fifty quid...

[Lord Elpuss]

Re: no option to expand this with a MicroSD card.

For many users it's an irrelevance; that's why they didn't include it.

[sabroni]

Re: For many users it's an irrelevance; that's why they didn't include it.

But for some users it's an essential; that's why they should have included it.

You don't have to put an SD card in if you don't want to.

[juice]

Re: no option to expand this with a MicroSD card.

> SD cards slow things down and people want their phone camera thingies to be fast.

Personally, I put all my personal media (e.g. music) on the external card, and use the internal memory for photography, apps, etc.

If nothing else, it makes it simpler and quicker to transfer things over whenever I pick up a new handset!

[Lord Elpuss]

Re: no option to expand this with a MicroSD card.

"Personally, I put all my personal media (e.g. music) on the external card, and use the internal memory for photography, apps, etc.

If nothing else, it makes it simpler and quicker to transfer things over whenever I pick up a new handset!"

Really - I do everything in the cloud now. Apple for me, but I'm sure Android has similar functionality?

[juice]

Re: no option to expand this with a MicroSD card.

> Really - I do everything in the cloud now. Apple for me, but I'm sure Android has similar functionality?

All my stuff is backed up to the cloud via backblaze, but when it comes to portable media, I definitely prefer having a local copy.

Mainly because (in less locked down times) I do a lot of travelling - both national and international, usually on public transport where I'll be actively using my media to while the time away. And the idea of both needing an active internet connection and draining the phone battery quicker doesn't appeal to me!

[Lord Elpuss]

Re: no option to expand this with a MicroSD card.

Oh no I get that completely - you need your media local to you. I was talking about the transition to another handset - which I do through iCloud and it's pretty seamless.

Locally you definitely do need enough storage to keep all your stuff close by - which these days usually means buying a handset with 'future potential' in terms of memory...

[juice]

Re: no option to expand this with a MicroSD card.

> Oh no I get that completely - you need your media local to you. I was talking about the transition to another handset - which I do through iCloud and it's pretty seamless.

Ah - understood :)

To be fair, the Samsung/LG equivalents have been pretty painless to date - turn on NFC, tap and then let them chunner to themselves.

But I have a lot of music[*], and I also keep an ebook library on the SD card (since I enjoy reading, and a few bytes on the phone takes up considerably less space than their dead-tree equivalents). And I've yet to see any transfer process which can handle transferring gigabytes of media in the time it takes me to pop a micro-SD card out of one handset and insert it into the other :)

[*] I also use iTunes to handle musical playlists, and I've got an app which will let you sync itunes playlists to non-Apple hardware. Sadly, it's a bit flakey when it comes to updates; it can be easiest to just pop the card out, reformat it and leave my PC to recopy the ~12,000 tunes back onto the card for an hour or two, while leaving me free to use my phone in the meantime...

[Blackjack]

Gotta go fast

Android 11 is slower than Android 10, that's it. They didn't want to ruin the device test scores.

[Mike 137]

Resolution

"the phone converts pictures taken with the 108MP sensor into 27MP snapshots."

With an adequate lens 100MP can produce repro grade images - the early Hasselblad digital backs were 100MP. In this case, 108MP is a sales pitch only. They'd do much better using a native 24MP sensor. Many SLRs have this native resolution and produce excellent results.

The big problem for phones is always the lens though. Not for nothing is the size of a mid-length SLR lens in the order of 5x8cm and it's constructed with multiple elements in several groups. A phone lens can never compete on any of the key parameters that distinguish a good lens. Clever math on the raw data can conceal some of its failings, but then you're not getting a real image of what you photograph. Instead you're getting a simulacrum of the reality.

If you view the buildings on the left of the sample image at full size, it's clear just how poor the results really are. For example. the text of the "humped crossing" sign on the left (a good example of high contrast edges) is blurred and surrounded by a halo. My first digital camera (a 2006 Panasonic Lumix DMC-LZ1) did better than that with just 4MP.

Unfortunately, persuading folks to constantly "upgrade" their phones is a numbers game - more pixels, more memory, more speed, more frames per second. Whether this translates into a better phone is as usual secondary to the hype.

[Lazlo Woodbine]

Re: Resolution

It's not just the lens, it's the sensor size, phones use a sensor that's only a few millimetres across, the 100mp Hasselblad sensors are, if memory serves 33 x 45mm

[juice]

Re: Resolution

> The big problem for phones is always the lens though. Not for nothing is the size of a mid-length SLR lens in the order of 5x8cm and it's constructed with multiple elements in several groups. A phone lens can never compete on any of the key parameters that distinguish a good lens. Clever math on the raw data can conceal some of its failings, but then you're not getting a real image of what you photograph. Instead you're getting a simulacrum of the reality.

True, but if it's Good Enough...

I moved house just before Xmas, and decided it was time to make use of some of the many (many many many) photos of street art which I've taken. And a week or two later, a bunch of A3 prints popped through the door.

I'm in no way going to pretend I'm a professional photographer, and these photos came from a variety of cameras and phones - The earliest is from 2012, and initially were from was a mix of Sony and Panasonic compact cameras which were later phased out for LG and Samsung mobile phones.

Either way, I'm genuinely pleased with how they've come out as A3 prints.

To be fair, street art is a relatively easy subject to photograph; so long as you have some decent lighting and can stand far back enough, you face it straight on, frame it and snap. And I've no doubt that a professional photographer would point to issues with colour balance, bokeh, contrast levels and the like. And I have no doubt they'd have even more words about the framing and composition of these shots ;)

But, y'know. For me, they're Good Enough. And my work office looks much brighter as a result :)

(If anyone's interested in said photos - or critiquing the quality thereof - I did put an album of them up on my Street Art Snaps Facebook page. Just don't forget that Facebook has worked it's own downsampling/mangling magic on the photos, too!)

> If you view the buildings on the left of the sample image at full size, it's clear just how poor the results really are. For example. the text of the "humped crossing" sign on the left (a good example of high contrast edges) is blurred and surrounded by a halo. My first digital camera (a 2006 Panasonic Lumix DMC-LZ1) did better than that with just 4MP.

(Rambling nostalgia aside: I had an LZ1 (alongside many others!); it was a great little camera. Though saying that, the Casio Exilim S20 I bought on a whim a few years earlier still remains one of my favorites - it may have been just 2MP with a fixed-focus lens, but it was the size of a credit card, virtually indestructible, had great battery life and took great pictures within the above limitations, especially since at the time, we were still mostly on flip-phones which either didn't have a camera or offered something which was often little better - if not worse than contemporary laptop webcams...)

TBH, I suspect that's going to be an artefact of the post-processing and JPEG conversion. Be interesting to see if this camera offers any sort of RAW feature (albeit the files are going to be significantly larger, which has a knock-on effect on the time needed to save to disk).

[juice]

Re: Resolution

> If you view the buildings on the left of the sample image at full size, it's clear just how poor the results really are. For example. the text of the "humped crossing" sign on the left (a good example of high contrast edges) is blurred and surrounded by a halo. My first digital camera (a 2006 Panasonic Lumix DMC-LZ1) did better than that with just 4MP.

Also... I suspect those images aren't straight from the phone.

E.g. the first "cycle-path/streetlamp" is a 3.1mb webm file, which is 5760*2592, which in turn works out at about 15MP and a mildly odd 35:16 aspect ratio!

To be fair, this could be because the phone has been set to take photos in some "widescreen" mode, since the width isn't too far off what would be needed for a 4:3 aspect ratio 27MP photo (6000x4496, apparently). Though I've never seen the point in having the phone auto-crop images - I'd rather get the full frame and crop it myself!

Any which way though, the fact that it's webp rather than JPG makes me suspect that it's been through at least one lossy conversion...

[Colonel Mad]

Picture #2

Was that an old army post?

[TheProf]

Re: Picture #2

Princes Park Methodist Church & Centre.

Known for Arthur Dooley's Black Christ statue on the front of the church building.

shorturl.at/cGJKZ

[juice]

Re: Picture #2

I thought it looked familiar :) I snapped that a while ago - nice to see that the art's changed!

[Colonel Mad]

Re: Picture #2

Yes then, Army of God!

[Colonel Mad]

Re: Picture #2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auO9FBkR9_s

[Pascal Monett]

"the absence of wireless charging"

Is a Good Thing (TM).

It is once again time to educate people on this abysmally inefficient technology.

It's Global Warming, people. We don't need to waste yet more energy than we already abuse.

[juice]

Re: "the absence of wireless charging"

> It's Global Warming, people. We don't need to waste yet more energy than we already abuse.

I'm curious. How does the ecological cost of wireless charging compare to the ecological cost of repairing the power port on your phone when it becomes damaged? Or even - as is sadly more likely - the ecological cost of replacing your phone because the economic cost of repairing the power port is too high?

Equally, wireless charging makes it easier to keep your battery trickle-charged, which in turn can potentially extend the life of the battery. How do the ecological benefits of this stack up?

I'm concious I'm biased in this one - I use wireless charging, both for the points above and because it means I can sit the phone on a "portrait" easel, which makes it easier to see notifications and/or use it as an alarm clock.

(and again: thanks to this, it means I don't need to have an alarm clock plugged in in my bedroom! Which is probably a net energy saving...)

But I still suspect that if you stack up the costs of this "lesser evil", they'll be less than the greater evils which you can get without it.

[Graham 32]

Re: "the absence of wireless charging"

> it means I can sit the phone on a "portrait" easel

If they'd just let the picture rotate 180 degrees so you could charge with the cable at the top. It's also much nicer to use hand-held when charging. There are apps to do this but Android thinks there are only 3 permitted orientations.

[juice]

Re: "the absence of wireless charging"

> If they'd just let the picture rotate 180 degrees so you could charge with the cable at the top

True - or have the power socket on the "long" side of the phone!

The sad fact though, is that with smart phones having effectively replaced PCs for a lot of things[*], they need to be recharged a lot more often than older, less "smart" phones[**].

And if you're using a cable to charge, that means there's a lot more potential wear and tear on the power socket.

I know USB C is meant to be a lot more robust than USB Micro B, which in turn was meant to be more robust than USB Mini B[***]. But failures do still happen, and at a glance, it'd cost around £80 to get it repaired by a third party - and even then, I'd have to wait for up to a week to get it back, unless I can find someone local who has the tools to fix modern phones.

And frankly, at that point, I'd be inclined to stick it on Ebay as "spares or repairs" and buy a new handset. Though TBF, I'd probably go for something cheap from CEX, since they give a 12 month guarantee and I've long since lost the urge to keep up with the Joneses!

OTOH, and at least partly thanks to the use of wireless charging, my phone is now two years old and is still pretty much in pristine condition, despite having been dragged around the world for various music and photography-related activities.

So hopefully, it'll last for a good while longer...

[*] Which itself is generally an energy saving!

[**] I can remember being disgusted and amused by the fact that the original O2 XDA handhelds - essentially the first iteration of the modern touchscreen "smartphone" - needed daily recharging. Twenty years later, I look back and laugh hollowly...

[***] Or at least: AIUI, the later variations are designed so that the cable is more likely to fail than the socket, on the grounds that cables are cheaper to replace. Any which way, I'm just glad I no longer have to try and figure out which way round the plug needs to be! [*4]

[*4] Today is obviously a footnote day...

[Cynic_999]

Re: "the absence of wireless charging"

When the amount of energy wasted by a week of wireless charging (about 7Wh more per full charge than wired charging) amounts to far less than the amount of energy wasted if you boil just a little more water in the kettle than you need (about 63Wh per 100ml), it really becomes too insignificant to worry about. If you were really that concerned, then the biggest changes you could make is in how you cook. Everything should be microwaved, and you should never use a conventional oven or cook any food by boiling. Better yet only consume foods that can be eaten cold and raw. And of course always fill your kettle with the exact amount of water you intend to use, not one ml more.

Most people will put at least 250ml more water in the kettle than they need, which means that it wastes the same amount of energy *every time the kettle is boiled* as that wasted in 250 flat-to-full charging cycles (or 7 months at 1 charge per day) of a wireless charger compared with wired charger.

[sabroni]

Re: "the absence of wireless charging"

Well you've rightly pointed out that boiling a kettle is an inefficient process. You found something more inefficient than wireless charging. That's a straw man when discussing the efficiency of phone chargers.

The relevant numbers are the figures for wireless charging vs wired charging. By all means sort out kettles too, but the argument that "kettles are more wasteful so phone charger waste doesn't matter" seems pretty weak to me. Why not just make them all as efficient as possible? Because of some minor inconvenience with a plug?

[juice]

Re: "the absence of wireless charging"

> Why not just make them all as efficient as possible? Because of some minor inconvenience with a plug?

I suspect you're missing the point somewhat. There's much bigger and easier targets out there.

According to this first hit on Google, charging a mobile phone generally costs around £1.09 per year.

https://www.mymemory.co.uk/blog/how-much-does-it-cost-to-charge-your-smartphone/#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20Charger%20Tariff,1.09%20for%20the%20full%20year.

And from what I've seen, wireless charging is generally deemed to be around 50% less efficient than wired charging.

So if you use a wireless charger all year long, you'll spend £1.65 rather than £1.09.

Or to put it another way: it's an extra 55p. For the entire year.

Conversely, if you leave a console like the Xbox One or PS4 on "active" standby, it'll cost you over £20 per year. In fact, the average UK household cost of leaving items on standby is somewhere around £50 per year.

https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-7629985/How-leaving-games-consoles-standby-cost-UK-231m-year.html

Or if you have a 12w energy-saving bulb turned on for 8 hours a day, that racks up a bill of around £17 per year.

https://www.energylightbulbs.co.uk/energy-calculator.html

So, yeah. I'd be inclined to take take aim at all those "convenience" targets before coming around to wireless charging. Especially since as I outlined above, the reduction in wear&tear on the handset and battery can extend the life of the phone and thereby make for a significant reduction in the economic and ecological cost.

(Plus, I use mine on a wireless cradle as an alarm clock. Which looks to result in a net saving of £4.50 a year in energy costs, as compared to keeping an alarm clock plugged in...)

[juice]

Re: "the absence of wireless charging"

And yeah, I know I'm quoting financial costs rather than ecological costs, but in this context, there's a pretty straight-line mapping between the economic and ecological costs of generating electricity.

Beyond this, and at a glance: it's surprisingly difficult to find stats on total UK handset sales, and unsurprisingly difficult to get a breakdown on overall failure rates.

But some clicking around gives us a few figures to play with:

1) Around 25m handsets sold per year in the UK

2) Overall, there's around a 2% failure rate

3) Around 20% of failures are related to battery or charging issues

https://www.which.co.uk/reviews/mobile-phones/article/most-reliable-smartphone-brands-a7DEY5H9tCOA

Which overall suggests that around 500,000 handsets per year need to be replace/repaired due to charging or battery issues.

And this is where we get even more speculative. But if even 10% of those failures could be averted by using wireless charging, I suspect that would more than offset the ecological cost of said wireless charging.

(Of course, the phone's going to get replaced/recycled at some point, regardless. But anything which increases the overall average lifespan for handsets brings with it a reduction in the amount of materials and energy needed!)

So, yeah. Flick those switches when you leave a room. And do your best to keep your smartphone in good condition :)