It's quite a season for smartphone launches. We've just seen Google release their most comprehensive, and perhaps best, line-up of Pixel phones ever, Samsung has already released a new Fold and Flip, and Apple is still stealing headlines with the iPhone 16 launch and Apple Intelligence. Amidst this chaos, Xiaomi has released an update to their otherwise quite popular 14 called the "14T Pro", which, like many similarly named smartphones, is an inbetweener of sorts.
You have a 14, you have a 14 Ultra, and now you have a 14T, which is designed to be more budget-friendly, but it's also the only phone in that line-up that has a "Pro" on the back. No, Xiaomi doesn't do itself any favours with confusing marketing, but that doesn't mean the phone is uninteresting.
Inside, you won't find the latest Snapdragon, but a Mediatek Dimensity 9300 SoC. It's joined by up to 1TB UFS 4.0 space and 12GB RAM, three camera lenses, stereo speakers, a 5000mAh battery with 120W wired charging and 50W wireless, and a price tag of around £650. Performance is sublime, no doubt about it, and while it's hard to comment on smartphone performance over the five or six years most people expect to rock the same phone, it remained snappy and responsive throughout our rather long test period, where all kinds of functionality was met with plenty of horsepower. In benchmark tests like AnTuTu and GeekBench, the Dimensity 9300 performs quite nicely to say the least, but while we didn't experience significant thermal throttling like some other media, the phone does get warm under pressure, for example when doing long exposure shooting or gaming in something like Genshin Impact.
The frame is aluminium, the back is matte glass, the whole package is IP68 certified, yes, while this is technically a cheaper version of the 14, the 14T Pro isn't a smartphone that has obvious shortcomings, and if you either prefer Leica colour filters, Xiaomi's HyperOS or just like the look, then this is a reasonable purchase, although we do miss the leather back they have offered in the past.
Likewise, the display is more than you'd expect. We're talking a 6.67" 1220x2712 AMOLED display at 144Hz with support for Dolby Vision, HDR10+ and up to 4000 NITS brightness under the right conditions. There's a fingerprint reader under the glass and a small hole-punch for an improved 32 megapixel selfie camera. 1220p and 144Hz in a phone for around £650? That's not bad. However, the user interface itself runs at 120Hz, so it requires that the apps you run specifically support a higher frame rate. And it's not an LTPO display either, so there's no granular control to customise the display and native frame rate.
Xiaomi continues with their Leica collaboration and the legendary camera manufacturer is now also providing input on lens selection and specific hardware tweaks. The result is a 50 megapixel 23mm wide with optical stabilisation, a 50 megapixel 60mm telephoto with 2.6 optical zoom and a 12 megapixel 15mm ultrawide at 120 degrees. All of these are Leica lenses, and while they don't always result in industry-leading images, they do have something that many other phones lack - an attitude. This comes in the form of fairly even colour chemistry and dynamic range, which may not match the automatic systems that sharpen iPhone and Pixel images, but still produce decidedly impressive results here and there.
In fact, all three lenses pass in both good and relatively low light conditions, and quite often produce dramatic images that focus on tonal extremes. Yes, this means you lose a little realism, but what you get are often quite punchy images that retain detail in shadows.
However, Xiaomi can't escape the fact that a telephoto lens with just 2.6x optical zoom is a bit dull to use. The depth-of-field on the main sensor is so soft that you can easily use this as a portrait camera, and now that you can't use telephoto to get much closer to your subject without using digital crop, there's not much to get excited about. However, Xiaomi makes up for this with a wealth of Leica-specific settings that are surprisingly fun to play with.
As it stands, you can choose this or a regular Galaxy S23. It's pretty amazing how much difference there is, and it's comparisons like these that work in Xiaomi's favour. Yes, it's a little confusing which phone in the 14 series you should actually buy, and it's disappointing that here too we're buying a phone without the power supply you need to charge it, but this is a pretty solid smartphone with very, very few real pitfalls.