Xiaomi 14T Pro REVIEW – Good but with flaws

The Xiaomi 14T Pro comes with 209 grams of weight and IP68 rating. It is actually a glass sandwich because it features a glass front, it also features glass back and the frame is made out of aluminum alloy and I can say that the overall build quality of the phone goes a little bit more towards the flagship grade rather than the mid-class range.

Design and build quality

One of the things that I really don’t like about the phone is actually that we don’t have any interesting colors. Here we have blue, we have green, we have gray and this is it. This is everything that you get with these colors. This glass back attracts many fingerprints, and you have to clean it often if you are not using the case that is provided in the package.

Classically in the bottom you have a USB type C port, the sim tray and one of the two stereo speakers. At the top of the phone you have an IR blaster to control your multimedia, your TV, your AC, whatever you’re using and at the side we have the volume rockers and the power button. The power button has a very nice texture on it and you can easily find it with your thumb and I can say that the positioning of the button is very nice, it is very convenient to be there and even with my medium-sized hand I have no issues of operating with the phone.

The one issue that I have though is with touching the diagonals of the phone it is absolutely impossible for me. The highest my thumb can go is the middle of the screen and this is mainly because of the fact that we have a 6.67 inch screen which in this case is AMOLED. The Xiaomi 14T Pro features 2712 x 1220 resolution, 144Hz refresh rate and an amazing color reproduction that makes working with editing apps easy. No matter the fact that the maximum brightness in manual mode is 1600 nits (4000 nits PEAK) you will be able to see the screen even in bright sunlight so don’t hustle and bustle about this thing. I think that the screen is greatly made.

From watching YouTube or TikTok, or on any other social media to using streaming platforms like Netflix or Amazon Prime, the image that you are going to see is going to be very nice mainly because of the dense pixel per inch and mainly because of the nice color reproduction. In my opinion Xiaomi did a great thing with implementing this exact screen into the 14T Pro and I can give it a thumbs up with no issues at all. This is one of the most gorgeous screens that you can see in the mid-class phones.

And it comes time to point out the first drawback – the speakers. The set of stereo speakers is loud enough, even a bit too harsh and distorted at the highest volume, but it lacks richness and bass response. I find them to be below-mid class and I hope to see better ones in the future.

Camera setup

The camera system here is co-engineered with Leica and it is the main highlight in the phone. We see a triple camera system at the back and a single selfie camera. The main camera is a 50 megapixel sensor with 1.6 aperture and OIS. Cool fact is that the main sensor also uses a Leica Summilux lens for overall better looking image, less aberration and distortion.

When it comes to the other cameras the 14T Pro features a 50 megapixel telephoto sensor and a 12 megapixel ultra-wide sensor. I have to say that I’m not very happy to see a 12 megapixel ultra-wide sensor in this phone, I expected it to be a little bit more, maybe like a 48 megapixel, but in this case we are going a little bit in the higher price range, we are going towards a flagman if we are expecting to have every single camera to be 48 or 50 megapixel.

The selfie camera though is 32 megapixels and I have to say that I’m pretty happy with the results that I got. As I already told you the main highlight is the main LightFusion 900 sensor that produces very nice images, no matter if you’re in the light, you’re in the dark. We tested this camera in the dark, we tested it with Xiaomi on a special trip to Tessaloniki and we were able to make some very nice photos when it comes to night photography.

I have to say that I’m very happy with the results and with the consistency that we get when shooting in the night time or when shooting in the daylight and every single image looks almost exactly same like the previous image that you took and the color reproduction is also good.
Here you also have to baked in color profiles into the camera system – Leica Vibrant and Leica Authentic.

If you’re going to choose like a Vibrant you’ll be having a little bit more saturated, more Vivid photos, if you’re choosing an authentic you’ll be having more pleasing more real to eye look of the photos and now I’m going to leave you some photo samples to take a look for yourself and to analyze them to see if you like them or if you don’t like them.

I can say that the main sensor is great but the other two sensors need a little bit more work to be done because even with the 50 megapixel telephoto sensor we see some lack of detail compared to the main sensor.

Hardware and specs

The great thing is that all of the cameras can shoot up to 4k 30 fps and this is something that was taboo for Xiaomi for quite a long time because in the selfie camera area we saw that not many of the phones were able to go above 1080p and now I’m going to leave you some video samples to check out the camera quality.

The hardware is one of the most spectacular things in the Xiaomi 14T Pro. We have the MediaTek Dimensity 9300+, 12GB of LPDDR5X memory and 512GB of UFS 4.0 storage. Here you have an incredibly fast processor, incredibly fast RAM and incredibly fast storage. So, every single thing is present for you to be gaming on this phone with no issues at all. The MediaTek Dimensity manages to keep the temperatures at the right level without your hands burning when you’re using the phone without its cover when you’re gaming, or some heavy tasking and the performance is spectacular for such a processor. No matter if you’re playing Call of Duty or Genshin Impact, you’re going to have a cap of the frames if you have set everything to maximum. This is something that you won’t be having to worry about.

The SoC is capable enough to cap the frames in all games and keep them at a constant pace, without drops, lags and such.

For day-to-day usage, the MediaTek Dimensity is a killer processor. If you are going to game a lot, this chip is the right one for you as the GPU unit is powerful enough for max settings

Software

Software wise the phone comes with Android 15 and HyperOS 2. I have to say that the shell looks very nice, clean and intuitive. It gives you a lot of room for personalization, from the wallpapers, to the lock screen, icon packs, fonts and so on.
Every single option and setting is is on a finger-long distance and you can’t go wrong with the HyperOS 2.
Not coming as a surprise was the bloatware – few apps and games come “recommended” and I feel a bit annoyed when I have to uninstall them one by one, but price corners has to be cut somehow.

Unfortunately here comes the second portion of drawbacks – the software bugs.
The one that I encountered was related to pop-up login windows in certain apps, in this case – Diablo Immortal. I had to restart the phone few times and close everything in order to log-in into the game. The pop-up window was just not corresponding with the game and that was the major glitch.  
Another interesting bug is that the phone poped a notification that the battery level is below 20 percent, I unlocked the phone and the battery level was 25 percent. So this is something that is not expected in this price range and not expected in the phone at all because it is a pretty straightforward task for it to execute, pretty straight notification to give to me and function wise there are some bugs that are going to affect your work in some way.

Batter and charging

 The battery here is 5000 mAh, it can give you somewhere around one day, one day and few hours and this will mainly depend on the usage of the phone because if you’re only using it for gaming with maximum brightness and with maximum refresh rate the battery will be drained a little bit faster and if you’re going for a day-to-day task I think that you’re going to last a little bit more maybe like a day and a half and when it comes to charging you can rely on 120 watts of wire charging or 50 watts wireless charging. The bad thing here though is that for the European region we don’t receive a charger in the box. I know that this is in the directive of the European Union because of the electronic waste that we all make but, in this case, if you are bragging with the charging speeds that you have it’s better to put the charger in the box not only the cable.

Overall, my conclusion about the Xiaomi 14T Pro is that it’s a great piece of tech. It’s one of the best phones that you can go for in the middle class and everything here looks very nice and very high quality made from the screen to the camera system to the build quality itself to the materials that are used. It feels like a very premium phone, it almost feels like a flagship phone for day-to-day task and daily usage.

The only issues that I have were with some logins in a few of the applications, for example with Diablo and Mortal and from some notifications that were not that accurate everything else was working perfectly and everything else was working perfectly mainly because of the powerful processor that we have here.

Final Verdict

The processor also features a new NPU unit for some of the AI tasks that you can prompt the phone because now it has some AI features like editing some photos into their own gallery, the Xiaomi gallery. You can remove some objects from the photos, you can also prompt the AI to make a video from certain images that you have given it and there you should write a little bit more if you want to explain to the AI what you want it to make.

You can use Google Gemini, you can also use Circle to search which is very useful in my opinion in my case and one of the greatest thing is that you have live translation. This is something that will become very handy for people that are traveling a lot.

Feature-wise the phone is on a great level and to be absolutely honest with you I like it and I can recommend it even with the bugs that it has in the software. I highly hope that Xiaomi are going to fix these things in future updates.