Xiaomi 14T Pro review: A T-rrific flagship alternative

While most flagship phones now stretch to four figures and beyond, brands usually have at least one high-end handset that manages to stay at a more reasonable price. For Xiaomi, that smartphone is the Xiaomi 14T Pro. This mid-cycle addition to the 14-series takes everything that I liked about the Xiaomi 14 and builds upon it even further, surpassing its compact sibling in several areas while also undercutting it on price.

There are a couple of sacrifices to be made in order to reach this lower price, including a less impressive telephoto camera and slightly inferior battery life, but taken as a whole package, the Xiaomi 14T Pro is a remarkable follow-up to what was already a temptingly affordable flagship. For a quality alternative to the industry’s most expensive phones, the Xiaomi 14T Pro makes an extremely convincing argument.

Xiaomi 14T Pro review: What you need to know

In terms of its hardware, the Xiaomi 14T Pro is a relatively straightforward upgrade over the 13T Pro with some new components and a few returning ones. The new MediaTek Dimensity 9300 Plus chipset is paired with the same 12GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. The battery is once again a 5,000mAh unit that supports lightning-fast 120W wired charging but now it can also juice up via 50W wireless charging, too.

The display is another 6.67in AMOLED panel with the same 1,220 x 2,712 resolution and speedy peak refresh rate of 144Hz – the actual utility of the latter is debatable, as so few apps support it and it’s essentially indistinguishable from 120Hz for most people, but it doesn’t hurt either. This still isn’t an LTPO panel, so dynamic refresh rate isn’t on the table, leaving you to manually switch between the options in the settings, depending on your preferences.

There’s a higher-resolution 32-megapixel (f/2) selfie camera in a hole-punch notch at the top of the display and the Leica-branded rear cameras have received some minor tweaks, too. The main lens is still 50 megapixels but the aperture is now a wider f/1.6 and the 50-megapixel (f/2) telephoto camera can now achieve a 2.6x optical zoom, as opposed to the 13T Pro’s 2x magnification. Only the ultrawide camera is unchanged, once again pairing a 12-megapixel sensor with an f/2.2 aperture.

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Xiaomi 14T Pro review: Price and competition

The Xiaomi 14T Pro retails for the same £699 as its predecessor. For that, you’re getting the model with 12GB of RAM and 512GB of onboard storage (there are also 256GB and 1TB variants on the Xiaomi UK store but these have been listed as out of stock the whole time I’ve been writing this review).

Most of the competition is a little pricier. The Xiaomi 14 originally launched for £899 but you can currently pick one up for £689 – that’s if you if you can find one.

The big three – Apple, Google and Samsung – are all represented around this price, too, with the Apple iPhone 16, the Google Pixel 9 and the Samsung Galaxy S24 all starting at £799 for their 128GB models. If you want the same 512GB of storage as the Xiaomi 14T Pro, the iPhone 16 costs £1,099. Neither the Galaxy S24 nor the Pixel 9 have 512GB variants, but you can get your mitts on them with 256GB of storage for £849 and £899, respectively.

Xiaomi 14T Pro review: Design and key features

The Xiaomi 14T Pro is a little shorter than its predecessor but is otherwise roughly the same dimensions, measuring 75 x 8.4 x 160mm and weighing 209g. It comes with an IP68 dust and water resistance rating and the phone is once again sandwiched between layers of Gorilla Glass 5 for scratch protection.

You only get two colour choices: the black is fairly standard but the steely blue shade of my review model is quite attractive. The rear camera module is once again a slightly rounded square in the top-left corner but the lens distribution has changed, now tucking each inside its own circular housing, with a fourth containing the LED flash for the sake of symmetry.

The frame is now a matte aluminium, which feels more premium in the hand than the plastic of the 13T Pro, but it slightly overlaps the rear plate, creating a “bumper” that I think cheapens it somewhat. It would have looked more sophisticated and perhaps even felt a little slimmer if the edges were flush with the rear.

When it comes to software, the phone runs Xiaomi’s latest UI –  HyperOS – and I’m afraid I have issues with it. It’s supposed to be an upgrade over MIUI but it feels more like a downgrade to me, with the new control centre being of particular concern. As standard, none of the icons are labelled and to make matters worse, general settings are bafflingly mixed in with all the other shortcut cards, so trying to access your settings becomes a laborious game of Where’s Wally. Add in the excess of bloatware that comes pre-installed and it’s clear that Xiaomi doesn’t appreciate the principle of “less is more”.

As for support, four years of OS updates and five of security patches is decent, but the Samsung Galaxy S24 and the Google Pixel 9 are both set for a superior seven years. The much cheaper Google Pixel 8a also gets the support, significantly undercutting the Xiaomi 14T Pro for value.

Xiaomi 14T Pro review: Display

The 6.67in AMOLED display is essentially unchanged from the 13T Pro, once again pairing a 1,220 x 2,712 resolution with a maximum refresh rate of 144Hz. Manual brightness is a little better, topping out at 508cd/m2, while switching to autobrightness and shining a torch on the light sensor pushed it to a solid 899cd/m2. It was best when displaying HDR content, however, where I recorded a fantastic 1,544cd/m2.

As this is an AMOLED panel, the black and contrast levels are as close to perfect as you can get. For the colours, you’ve got three profiles to choose from: Vivid punches up the colours based on what’s being displayed, Saturated boosts vibrancy at all times and the Original Pro setting aims to recreate colours authentically.

On this setting, the screen reproduced 96.8% of the sRGB gamut and I recorded an average Delta E colour variance score of 1.08. That’s not quite as good as either the Xiaomi 14 or the Xiaomi 13T Pro but it’s still close enough to the target value of 1 or under to be considered a great result.

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Xiaomi 14T Pro review: Performance and battery life

The MediaTek Dimensity 9300 Plus chipset is a direct generational upgrade over the Xiaomi 13T’s 9200 Plus but even still, the leap in performance scores here are very impressive. The 14T Pro’s benchmark results were 66% better than the 13T Pro’s in the single-core benchmarks and a whopping 95% better in multi-core.

It even inched out a lead over the Samsung Galaxy S24 and Xiaomi 14 in the multi-core results, with only Apple’s iPhone 16 (represented here by the iPhone 16 Plus, which has identical hardware) surpassing it.

Apple loses that lead in the GFXBench GPU tests, with the 60Hz display (ludicrous on a modern flagship) keeping it from matching the rest of the competition in the on-screen results. The Xiaomi 14T Pro is essentially on par with the rest of the competition – barring the Google Pixel 9, which again trails behind the rest – and is an excellent choice for mobile gaming.

Helping this is the return of speedy touch sampling up to 480Hz, allowing the phone to respond to your inputs that much quicker. I tried out my standard test games, Asphalt Legends Unite and Genshin Impact and both delivered smooth, responsive gameplay. In short, the Xiaomi 14T Pro really punches above its weight in the gaming stakes.

As you can see below, battery life is massively improved over the Xiaomi 13T Pro, too, lasting a far better 23hrs 55mins in our looping video test. The rest of the options here perform better by a couple of hours but, considering the price difference, this isn’t a bad result at all for the Xiaomi 14T Pro.

Where Xiaomi really has the edge over the rest is charging speed. The nippy 120W wired charging got the battery to 61% in just 15 minutes, and on to full in just over 30 minutes, whereas the Apple, Google and Samsung options all take closer to an hour. The only competition in this regard is the excellent OnePlus 12, which recharged in just 31 minutes in our testing.

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Xiaomi 14T Pro review: Cameras

The cameras aren’t massively changed from the Xiaomi 13T Pro but those lenses were already fairly spectacular, so I don’t consider it to be a problem. The 50-megapixel main lens now has a slightly wider f/1.6 aperture and captures excellent detail in good lighting.

You can once again choose to shoot in either Leica Authentic or Leica Vibrant profiles, with the former being better suited to moody shots with its deep contrast and more muted colours and the latter dialling up the saturation for vibrant, impactful shots.

Night photography is also excellent, plucking out plenty of detail and keeping visual noise to a minimum. Colours look a little overprocessed in places but, overall, this is a great effort.

The 50-megapixel (f/2.0) telephoto camera is a bit of a weird one, as the camera app only switches to it in portrait mode or by selecting the 2.6x zoom on video – in standard photo mode, you’re just doing a 2.6x digital zoom via the main camera, with the telephoto lens only kicking in for hybrid zooms between 20x and 30x.

Once you’ve finally got the telephoto camera engaged, however, it’s a great shooter. You’ve once again got two styles to choose from – Leica Portrait and Master Portrait – and both do an excellent job of separating the subject from the background and reproducing natural skin tones. The differences are subtle but the most notable changes are that Master is warmer and Leica has more pronounced contrast.

Beyond that, however, the zooms are fairly unimpressive. The 5x digital zoom is decent enough but going beyond that sees the detail and contrast levels drop substantially, leaving images looking blurry and washed out.

Detail drops off with the 12-megapixel (f/2.2) ultrawide camera, too, particularly towards the edges, but otherwise, this is a solid enough camera. The colour profile, especially, does a good job at staying true to the colouring produced by the main sensor.

Video adds a 30fps option to the 8K recording, alongside the 24fps setting, but is otherwise exactly the same as on the 13T Pro. Detail on 8K and 4K are decent, and the latter goes up to 60fps, but neither works with the electronic stabilisation so if you want the steadiest footage, you’ll have to stick to 1080p.

Xiaomi 14T Pro review: Verdict

If it wasn’t for the software, the Xiaomi 14T Pro would be a runaway success. The sheer level of value offered for money here is astounding, with performance that can keep up with phones past the £1,000 mark, a fantastic suite of versatile cameras and a sharp, colour-accurate display topping it all off. Battery life isn’t quite as good as the Xiaomi 14 but it’s still a big improvement over the Xiaomi 13T Pro.

The frustrations in the HyperOS software are all the more irksome when the rest of the package is so easy to like. If Xiaomi cleaned up its UI and turned it into something a lot simpler, it would be a force to be reckoned with in the flagship space. As it is, the Xiaomi 14T Pro is an excellent and enticing smartphone – with one big, irritating flaw.