Xiaomi just announced the brand new Xiaomi 14T Pro and I have already been using it for nearly a month at this point. Thanks to Xiaomi Malaysia for sending it early, we got to test out this phone extensively.
At the starting price of RM2,599, I think this phone can compete against those flagship phones. I’m not saying that just because Xiaomi sent this phone early, but because I’ve done a lot of tests on this phone.
Performance
I’m going to talk about the one thing that surprised me and made me say this phone can compete against the flagships – and that is the chipset. The Xiaomi T-series of phones are using MediaTek chipsets exclusively, and this 14T Pro is using the MediaTek Dimensity 9300+.
When compared it with the Dimensity 9300, this plus variant just has a different clock speed for that single Cortex-X1 core. Every other CPU core and GPU are identical. Basically, this means that the Dimensity 9300+ has a slight overclock and that’s about it.
When we did our usual gaming test – ignore the temperature here since it’s displaying the CPU and GPU core temperatures and not the SoC package temperature – the performance is really good.
And yet, this phone doesn’t overheat. Xiaomi did upgrade the 14T Pro to a new Xiaomi 3D IceLoop cooling system. It essentially still is a vapor chamber but there are some curves all over and Xiaomi claims that it helps in heat dissipation.
From our tests, the phone doesn’t gets hot to the touch while playing games. We used our thermal camera to measure the surface temperature and it barely hits 40°C. The sustained performance is just impressive.
This is one of the reasons why I said that it can compete against the flagships – because I believe that this is better than the Snapdraogn 8 Gen 3 by a lot.
Battery life
But if we look closer, this chipset doesn’t have any efficiency Cortex-A520 cores. Is that going to heavily affect the efficiency? Actually, no. The Cortex-A720 cores in the Dimensity 9300+ are downclocked and I think MediaTek found the sweet spot for its performance-per-watt.
In our standardized battery life test, this Xiaomi 14T Pro can last for 14 hours and 30 minutes with its 5,000mAh battery. But again, we’re testing it at 144Hz – that’ll consume more battery compared to the usual 120Hz on many other phones available today.
Once again, impressive battery life from this phone and the chipset.
Charging speed
The charging speed is where things change. You see, the box of the Xiaomi 14T Pro is ever so slightly thinner than the usual Xiaomi phone boxes. I think you’re starting to realize what’s happening.
Yes, there is no charger in the box. Because Xiaomi is using a proprietary charging standard, we can only use fast-charging with Xiaomi’s own charger and cable.
Since we only have the Ugreen 140W USB-PD PPS charger, we’ll use that instead. By using the default settings, the phone can charge from 15% to completion in about 42 minutes. Actually, this is very good considering that the phone only takes in an average of around 24W.
We can then head into the settings menu and change it to the top speed wired charging mode and that actually makes the phone charge slightly slower, taking about 45 minutes to charge from 15% to completion while heating up a bit more. It’s still at a safe temperature – and that’s why we don’t see a sudden dip in charging speed.
The wattage intake is around 26-28W but the charging curve isn’t as linear as the standard charging speed mode.
Either way, I personally believe that Xiaomi needs to support USB-PD of up to at least 65W if they want to remove chargers from the box. As it stands now, the Xiaomi 14T Pro is advertised to have 120W fast charging but only with their own charger and cable. We can only get around 25% of the advertised speed if we’re using a USB-PD PPS charger.
Buy the way, this isn’t the first time custom is removing the charger from their phone box. We said the exact same thing few years ago and it applies today.
Screen
Now, enough about all that. Let’s talk about the screen. This phone comes with a 6.67-inch OLED screen with a slightly higher than usual 2712×1220 pixels in resolution, and also goes up to 144Hz refresh rate.
We tested the color accuracy in two modes – starting with the standard one first.
It can reach a maximum auto brightness of around 960 nits – which is pretty good even for outdoor usage – and it covers 98.25% of sRGB and 72.28% of DCI-P3 color gamuts. The ΔE number is extremely low, by the way. Less than 0.5.
Then, I switched over to the saturated color profile and it can reach virtually 100% of both sRGB and DCI-P3 color gamuts but the ΔE number rose to around 3, but I think that’s an outlier since the average is still low.
Either way, this is a good screen but the under-display fingerprint scanner is just way too low to be used.
Camera
As for the cameras, the Xiaomi 14T Pro comes with triple cameras and they all have Leica Vario-Summilux lenses, ranging from 15mm to 60mm equivalent focal lengths.
To have a look at all the pictures and videos taken with the Xiaomi 14T Pro, watch our video at the top of this review.
Software
We also need to talk about the software. This Xiaomi 14T Pro is using HyperOS version 1.0.3.0, and it works the same as the Xiaomi 14 Ultra that we have reviewed earlier this year. Unfortunately, we do get a lot of ads pushed through the notifications. It’s easy to dismiss them but when it gets mixed in with my personal notifications, it’s just annoying.
Still, I appreciate that we don’t have something like Hot Games or Hot Apps.
Design
Let’s now take a look at the design of the phone. It’s a simple one, honestly. I like the matte finish of the back and the camera bump is indeed quite huge. I’m not really a fan of it but a case will help make the camera bump look slimmer.
A few more things to mention
This phone does have a USB 2.0 port at the bottom, which takes forever to copy stuff in and out, and there is no display output via that USB-C port.
It does have a dual SIM card slot, but no microSD card support. It does also still have an IR blaster at the top – and that’s about it.
One thing that Xiaomi upgraded is IP68 rating.
Should you buy the Xiaomi 14T Pro?
Okay, should you buy the Xiaomi 14T Pro? The Malaysian price is starting at RM2,599. If we compare the price with its predecessor though, the price difference is rather weird. I have no idea why the 512GB is so much more expensive than before – but the 1TB variant remains at the same price.
Still, the answer is yes. I can recommend the Xiaomi 14T Pro. This is a surprisingly good phone. It packs lots of performance, doesn’t heat up, great battery life, rather decent cameras, and at an affordable price and you do get a lot of value for your money
Some people might complain there is no charger but honestly, I don’t care since I use my own charger since like 10 years ago. And I don’t like proprietary fast charging anyway since I need to take their own charger and cable to do so. If you really need fast charging, then you’ll have to get their own charger and cable.
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