Xiaomi 14T Pro Review: Liquid Metal

Remember the Xiaomi 14 Ultra? The ultra-premium Chinese flagship was more than deserving of its name, with a price tag at launch of 1,499 euros. The regular Xiaomi 14 didn't improve the price situation when it launched globally at 1,099 euros, so these wonderful flagship phones were somewhat limited by their price.

Enter the Xiaomi 14T Pro. It's hard to describe the T-series, but you can think of it as something similar to the OnePlus R or the Galaxy FE. It's a trimmed down, affordable flagship. In the case of the Xiaomi 14T Pro, the trimming down hasn't been too radical, and consequently, the phone starts at 799 euros.

So, let's see if the Xiaomi 14T Pro can take on the competition and win some ground in the everlasting battle for tech popularity.

Smartphones look very similar nowadays, and it's hard for manufacturers to produce something really distinct. The Xiaomi 14T Pro doesn't stray off too much from the overall 14-series design philosophy but adds some really cool elements.

Xiaomi has gone for an aluminum alloy frame and frosted glass back with a metallic look. The end result is a phone that looks made of liquid metal. Very cool. This applies to both the Titan Gray and Titan Blue color variants, while the Titan Black is more traditional and loses the metal reminiscence.

As far as design elements go, the camera bump on the back is square and positioned in the top left corner, housing four symmetrical camera rings. The sides of the phone are relatively flat, and the back glass is slightly curved, resulting in a nice and comfortable feeling when holding the device in your hand.

Another notable design element is the textured power button, which looks and feels quite premium. Nothing else stands out too much; the overall design of the Xiaomi 14T Pro is very pleasant, and the device is relatively compact and lightweight.

Bad news, guys. Xiaomi has joined the "no charger in the box" club. We used to praise the brand for its lavish retail boxes, but no more. That said, there's a silicon back cover included and a pre-applied screen protector, which is more than you normally get with other, more popular flagship brands.

The display of the Xiaomi 14T Pro deserves attention, as it boasts some impressive specs. It's a 6.67-inch AMOLED panel with a 2712 x 1220 resolution (446 PPI), 12bit color reproduction, Dolby Vision, HDR10+, 3840Hz pulse width modulation dimming, and a dynamic refresh rate that can go up to 144Hz.

Xiaomi also advertises the maximum brightness to be up to 4,000 nits and the overall screen-to-body ratio to be 93.3%. But these are all specs, and to test all the claims, we've put the Xiaomi 14T Pro through our rigorous display benchmarks in our lab.

Initially, we planned to pit the Xiaomi 14T Pro against the likes of the Galaxy S24 FE, OnePlus 12R, and probably a Pixel, but the phone is actually priced at the level of vanilla flagships such as the regular S24 and the iPhone 16. Furthermore, the test results also show that the Xiaomi 14T Pro is more than capable of taking those on, so we're pitting it against the big boys.

Looking at the test results, it's plain to see that Xiaomi has opted for a very nice AMOLED panel with great color accuracy, temperature, and a respectable maximum brightness of around 1,000 nits. When we add the 144Hz refresh rate, the phone is at least on par with its competitors, with the Galaxy being able to go a bit brighter.

There's an in-display fingerprint scanner onboard, and it works pretty fast and accurately. You can also enroll your face to use facial recognition, but it uses only a photo, so it's not as secure.

The main camera of the Xiaomi 14T Pro can record videos in 8K at 30 frames per second, which is still overkill. The good news is that 4K videos look really nice with a wide dynamic range, good color reproduction and sharp detail. 

You can switch between the cameras during recording, pause the video, and also apply Leica filters if you feel in a Kubrick mood. There's a perceivable difference between the cameras, so for best results we advice to choose a camera and stick with it. The image stabilization works best in 1080p mode, as there's more image to be cropped. 

This chipset is absolutely on par with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and even outperforms last year's Apple A17 Pro in GPU performance. What's even more impressive is that under load the chip performs quite well, with no major drop in performance. The phone comes with 12/256GB as a base memory configuration, and you can go all the way up to 1 TB of storage.

Needless to say, the Xiaomi 14T Pro works smoothly and effortlessly in day-to-day use, and there are several UI tweaks to make it feel even faster (such as animation speed).

Speaking of UI, the phone uses Android 14 as a base with Xiaomi's proprietary HyperOS UI on top. There's a lot of customization at hand; you can make this look stock Android or opt for a more iOS-like experience.

In the age of AI, we just can't ignore the software tricks that this phone offers. Xiaomi has decided to partner with Google and hop on the Gemini train rather than developing its own AI from scratch. You have Circle to Search, Gemini, AI Image Editing, AI Notes, and AI Recorder with real-time translation, speaker identification, summary generation, and more.

The Xiaomi 14T Pro comes with four years of major OS updates and five years of security patches, which is not as robust as the seven years that Google and Samsung are offering but still quite decent.

Looking at our battery test results, it's plain to see that the new Dimensity 9300+ is pretty efficient, and some of that efficiency can probably be attributed to the LTPO screen of the Xiaomi 14T Pro. 20+ hours of constant web browsing places the phone near the top of our benchmark sheet, and the video streaming and 3D gaming results are equally impressive.

When it comes to charging, the Xiaomi 14T Pro is a beast! The phone can charge from 0 to 100% in just 23 minutes (very close to the advertised 19 minutes), but there's a caveat here. You need to buy the 120W fast charger from Xiaomi to be able to get up to those charging speeds.

The same goes for the wireless charging support; the phone can charge with up to 50W wirelessly, and if you have the proprietary tech, you can fill up the battery wirelessly in about an hour.