Photo-Focused Xiaomi 14T Series Bring New Design, Better Software

Xiaomi is the third-largest smartphone brand in the world for a very clear reason. They make fantastic devices, across every single price point. However, if you ever want to see the limits of what the company can do, you have to look at its flagship phones.

The Chinese manufacturer released the pretty awesome Xiaomi 14 Ultra earlier this year; an absolute monster of a smartphone. Today, the Xiaomi 14T and 14T Pro have been unveiled, bringing some sensible and pretty notable upgrades over the regular Xiaomi 14 devices.

The Xiaomi 14T and 14T Pro Come With A Simplified Design And An Intense Camera Focus

Xiaomi’s T series is always meant to be a mid-cycle upgrade on the regular numbered phone for the year, and true to form, the Xiaomi 14T and 14T Pro are each a step up from the Xiaomi 14 and 14 Pro respectively.

The Xiaomi 14T and 14T Pro each come with a slightly new design which Xiaomi started the event with. However, a ridiculous amount of time was spent talking about the cameras, showing what the company is most proud of with these new smartphones. Let’s talk about them.

The Design

Xiaomi’s new devices bring in what the company calls “Titan Design”. For the most part, the devices look quite similar to their predecessors, though the black camera window is replaced with individual lenses. It is certainly a more simple design but I wouldn’t say I like it as much.

The Xiaomi 14T Pro has a curved glass back but the 14T has a flat glass back. There’s also a textured power button—minor, but a nice touch. The devices are both IP68-rated and come in Titan Gray, Titan Black, and Titan Blue. The Xiaomi 14T will get an exclusive vegan leather-backed Lemon colorway.

The Screen

Fortunately, you lose nothing in the display department, regardless of which phone you choose. Both have a 6.67-inch diagonal, Xiaomi’s CrystalRes AMOLED tech, 144Hz refresh rate, 4,000-nit peak brightness, and 1.5K resolution. On top of that, you also get Dolby Vision and HDR10+ certification. Plus, 3,840Hz PWM dimming will help reduce eye strain.

The Internal Hardware

The Xiaomi 14T and 14T Pro both place their bets with MediaTek to provide the power for the device. The 14T settles for the Dimensity 8300 Ultra (think of Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 levels of power) while the 14T Pro goes all out and grabs MediaTek’s most powerful, the Dimensity 9300+.

Both devices have UFS 4.0 storage and LPDDR5X RAM. They each start in a 12/256GB storage configuration. You can spec the 14T up to a 12/512GB configuration (which the 14T Pro is also available in), but the Pro model can be pushed up to 1TB.

The Battery and Charging

5,000 mAh is the standard number that should be stamped on the battery for any flagship that wants to be taken seriously. Going higher than that helps, but Xiaomi decided that number was enough for both the 14T and 14T Pro. The latter is said to have the best battery life of any Xiaomi device—15.7 hours of constant use.

The 14T gets 67W fast charging, which is an odd downgrade compared to the regular 14; but the 14T Pro maintains a 120W wired charging speed, allowing for a full charge in 19 minutes. This is also the very first Xiaomi T series to have wireless charging at all, 50W at that. It’s not bad, except only the Pro model will get the convenient feature.

The Cameras

The Xiaomi 14T and 14T Pro have somewhat similar camera setups. Both have 50MP main sensors, 50MP 2.6x telephoto cameras, 12MP ultrawide cameras, and a 32MP selfie shooter.

However, the sensors used for the primary and telephoto are different between both phones—the 14T Pro has better hardware in that regard. You’ll be able to record in 8K/30 on the 14T Pro and 4K/30 on the 14T.

Xiaomi spent a whole lot of time talking about its partnership with Leica, its new AI architecture, and vastly improved night photography. The camera is clearly what the company wants you to focus on with this phone.

The Software

The Xiaomi 14T series is going to be running on Xiaomi’s new HyperOS, which is one cool thing in the software department, but there’s more. Of course, AI is a massive focus with the usual suite of AI translation and photo editing features making the cut. It’ll also come with Google Gemini installed out of the box.

Quite notably, this is the very first smartphone not released by either Samsung or Google to come with Circle to Search support, so that period of exclusivity is finally over. Plus, Xiaomi finally gets support for Link to Windows, so a big hurray for that. That’s a good number of software improvements.

The Pricing

The Xiaomi 14T is going to start at €649 while the Xiaomi 14T Pro will cost €799, both for the 12GB and 256GB models of the smartphone. In the UK, that becomes £549 and £649 respectively.