Introducing – Xiaomi’s latest flagship smartphone. Actually, it’s not new. They released this in China since 14th December 2022, and it took them more than 2 months to bring it to the other markets. And I can assure you, a lot of things happened within those 2 months.
That aside, we now have the Xiaomi 13 with us. I do not have the Pro variant with me, but that’s a topic for another day.
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After using this phone for a week, here are my thoughts about it.
Design
Let’s start with the design of this phone. The Xiaomi 13 is rather tiny and I think it is still within the range of “small flagship smartphones. The color that we have is the Flora Green color, but it is also available in the ever-classical black and white colors too.
Unfortunately, the back of the phone is covered by what Xiaomi describes as 2.5D glass, and a glossy finish. I would’ve preferred a matte finish, honestly.
The back glass slightly curves into the frame too – and that makes the phone feel very nice to hold but adds a bit of thickness. Now, to get a frame of reference, I’m going to compare its size with the Samsung Galaxy S23. The Xiaomi 13 is slightly bigger in all dimensions, and also thicker – but not by much.
It is here that we can also see the super big camera cutout too. That big square houses all the cameras inside.
Cameras
And that means it’s time to talk about the cameras. Powered by Leica’s Summicron lens and also color profile, we set out to take some random shots everywhere. Do take note that the cameras’ focus lengths are weird. We have the usual 1.0x for the main camera as the reference, then 0.6x is the ultrawide – and 3.2x is the real focal length for the zoom camera.
We also had to enable the watermark because it was a request from Xiaomi Malaysia.
To have a look at all the pictures and videos taken with the Xiaomi 13, watch our video at the top of this review.
Performance
Okay, then the performance. The Xiaomi 13 is obviously packed with the latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset and it is performing very well. Testing Genshin Impact at the highest graphical settings, it is always near 60fps – and I’m impressed by how well the phone managed to sustain the performance. I thoroughly enjoyed my time playing the game on this phone, honestly.
The temperature is also kept under control. Even after playing the game for over an hour, the temperature is always below 43°C in an air-conditioned room of 27°C.
Screen
Now, the screen. This Xiaomi 13 uses a flat 6.36-inch AMOLED screen with 2400×1080 pixels in resolution and 120Hz refresh rate – and it also has a screen protector pre-installed.
The color accuracy of this display covers 97.81% of sRGB and 90.2% of DCI-P3 color gamuts while having a very low ΔE number of below 1. It’s not the best, but it’s one of the best.
The brightness is also fantastic. This time, I did things differently. We first turned the brightness up manually and it goes up to 500 nits only, but when I turned back to auto brightness and used our studio lights to directly shine on the phone’s sensors, the screen brightness goes up to 1200 nits. That’s super bright and you’ll be fine using this phone outdoors.
In the document that Xiaomi sent us, it did state that the Xiaomi 13 Pro supports 1920Hz PWM dimming, but this Xiaomi 13 has DC dimming. Personally, I don’t see a reason to go 1920Hz PWM dimming. If there someone is already sensitive to PWM dimming, it doesn’t matter how fast you pulse the display – DC dimming is much better.
You’ll have to enable this feature manually in the settings menu, though. It’s just called “anti-flicker” or something like that, so just turn it on.
One more thing I want to nitpick is the location of that under display fingerprint scanner. It’s placed way too low, making it very not ergonomic to use.
Battery life
For the battery life, this is pretty simple. We used the PCMark test at 100 nits brightness as usual, and this Xiaomi 13 with its 4,500mAh battery lasts for about 13.5 hours. Personally, I expected more.
Charging time
As for the charging time, Xiaomi did highlight that the Xiaomi 13 series is equipped with a new proprietary Xiaomi Surge chipsets for fast charging and battery management, which they also claim to bring more accurate battery life calculation, improved safety, and can help to delay battery aging.
That is something that we do not have the time to test. Using the included 67W charger, our battery life test shows that it takes about 45 minutes to charge from 15% of completion – and this graph is interesting. We can see that the initial charging speed is very high, hence the sudden increase in temperature.
Then, upon reaching about 25% of charge, the charging speed slows down and the temperature rises at a slower pace, then stay at around 40°C for a long time and finally settled down when the charging is complete.
We also repeated the same charging test using the Ugreen 100W GaN charger too. Unfortunately, it is still using a proprietary charging standard and does not support USB-PD, so the most that we can get is only 20W. I mean, Xiaomi themselves have already stated that it is using a proprietary Surge chipset to control battery charging and battery health.
By the way, I don’t know why there’s a spike in temperature at around the 90% battery mark. I redid the test and I got the same result.
Software – MIUI 14
Let’s move on to the software. The Xiaomi 13 is currently using MIUI 14 and honestly, it looks and feels more or less similar to before. The settings menu is the same mess as before, but I did notice one big improvement.
Now, if we install anything using the Google Play Store, there is no scanner thing that appears. This is a big user experience improvement over MIUI 13, honestly. If you sideload APKs, the scanner will still appear – which makes sense.
If I remember correctly, the Xiaomi 13 series will also get 4 generations of MIUI upgrades and 5 years of security patches. The keyword here is “MIUI upgrades” and not “Android OS upgrades” because Xiaomi always pushed new MIUI upgrades without actually upgrading the Android OS version. Yes, there are phones running old versions of Android but using the latest MIUI skin.
Few more things to mention
And finally, a few more things to mention. The Xiaomi 13 still uses a USB 2.0 port at the bottom which makes copying files super slow. A gigabyte shouldn’t take a minute, it should only be a few seconds.
Oh – the Xiaomi 13 finally has IP68 rating.
Conclusion
So, in conclusion – the Xiaomi 13 I’ll say is a weird phone overall. There are some things are done very well, some are not. For example, the phone’s design and the shape of it makes it so nice to hold but the camera certainly needs a bit more tweaking to make it better. MIUI 14 to me is a tiny incremental upgrade because they did remove one of the annoying features. The performance is amazing but the battery life is not as good as I’d expect when compared with another small flagship smartphone.
It all boils down to the price – which is something that we do not have at the time of this recording. However, that doesn’t matter.
We’ll take a look at the prices of other phones instead. The closest competitor to the Xiaomi 13 is the OnePlus 11 (review here). That phone is very well-made and it has the same specs core specs, and the OnePlus 11 has a fantastic camera system as well – powered by Hasselblad.
Another alternative smartphone that is within the same price range is the Vivo X90 (review here). We reviewed that phone not too long ago – and I’ve said in my review that the X90 is a fantastic phone with great cameras too – powered by ZEISS. It is using MediaTek’s latest Dimensity 9200 chipset and offers an exceptionally good battery life and at a similar price point to the OnePlus 11 too.
To me, I think the Xiaomi 13 has to be priced lower than both the OnePlus 11 and Vivo X90 to be appealing.
But, if you want a small phone, the next competitor is the Samsung Galaxy S23 (review here). It’s smaller than the Xiaomi 13 and has a similar battery life. The S23’s cameras are also fantastic even without collaborations with any camera makers.
I’ll update this post when I have the official retail price – so check back later.
Where to buy? (Affiliate links)
They’ll probably be updated later when I have the official prices.
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