Xiaomi 13T Pro: Is it worth your money?

Nov 4, 2023

As some of you might already know, I have been using my Xiaomi 13T Pro for a month now. I’ve put it through quite a lot. Anything from some rather intense benchmarks, to stress tests, to taking at least a few hundred photos by now, with all of this I can say that I have a rather conclusive opinion regarding this phone. And this review will be just that: Conclusiv.

There are no categories, but there will be a pros and cons at the end. I will talk about anything I can. Anything I’ve done or used in the last month, I will talk about.

So, let’s begin with the most important things: Battery, performance, cameras, and display.

Battery

In my previous review I grilled the battery life of this phone. And rightfully so! I had barely 3 to 4 hours SOT before it would be at 0%, which is abysmal for a brand new phone. I tried updates, I tried factory resets, I tried changing my usage, but to no avail. Recently I contacted Xiaomi support and talked to them a little. We tried a few things, and the last thing we tried was reinstalling the system updat.

That fixed it. It went from 3 to 4 hours to estimates of upwards of 6, might even push 7 hours SOT. [INCORRECT DATA. Check Correction 1] It’s not exactly perfect and I would love to get up to 10 hours SOT, but I’ll give Xiaomi some credit, this is a brand new phone with a MediaTek SoC (ew) and there’s plenty of optimizing to be done. Still, I would love better SOT. However, what I did not like was the false advertising during the launch event. They advertised up to 13.5 hours, I get barely half.

Charging

The charging is awesome. It’s genuinely something I can’t even begin to explain. I plug my phone in for what feels like three seconds, I check up on it, and it goes from 34% to 68% (Just an example). I also mentioned this in my previous review, but I stopped overnight charging. You know how people kept saying “Stop charging your phones overnight, it’s bad for your battery” back in the day because that’s what we all believed? They’re kind of correct now, just for a different reason – there’s no point. Charge once when you get home, use phone, keep it not charging overnight, wake up, plug in to charge, go do whatever you do to get ready, come back, and it’s on 100%. 120W is amazin.

Though I do have to say, I find the 120W figure a bit false advertising. Most of the time, it stays around 40W, initially jumps up to 60W. If you use boost charging, it stays around 60W, jumps to 80W. However, this is due to the battery safety feature present on this phone, and all phones charge a little slower than their advertised speeds. There’s also another battery safety feature, actually. MIUI will adapt to your charging habits and change the speeds of charging depending on what it thinks you are charging for.

Performance

In terms of performance, this phone is quite good. It’s not 8 gen 2 good, and I would love a Snapdragon SoC, but it is quite good. Averages ~56.8 fps at ultra graphics in the underwater region of Fontaine and is pretty much locked at 60fps in most of the Genshin regions leading up to Fontaine. In regular day-to-day use, it’s more than enough. All social media works great and it can run anything you would wan.

It has 12GB of ram, which allows it to keep a LOT of apps open and not close them, which is really nice. I have opened apps that I hadn’t opened in days only to find my progress was still there where I left off. It’s amazin.

It also comes with 512GB of storage, which is a lot and definitely enough for me.

Cameras

The cameras, though, are amazing. I complained about the nighttime mode a while back – it was fixed. It’s good now. Not exactly great now, but good. It does overexpose far away signs and it does sometimes blow out certain areas, but it no longer has the major issue of overexposed signs and light.

The main, 1x camera, is awesome. It’s genuinely crazy good. I said this a week ago, but I genuinely love how convenient it is. I never bring my DSLR with me unless I need to take photos of stuff far away. The convenience of being able to just point at whatever and get a perfect image 99% of the time is insane. The photos have great HDR most of the time, they sometimes overexpose the sky, but they perfect everything most of the time and I never need to edit them.

"Macro" mode with a 2x digital crop The UW is, well, an UW. It’s ultra wide. Like the 1x, just wider, and awful quality, as with any UW. Unless you are in perfect conditions and the UW lens is clean, you really have no use in the thing. The sensor is too small to do anything good with and it’s just not a good lens in genera.

The 2x could be a 3x, and it lacks proper OIS, but it’s a 2x, I suppose, so it’s better than nothin.

The portrait mode by default is great. Perfect edge detection, great bokeh, and it‘s something I am genuinely impressed by. The 35mm documentary mode is... something? I‘ve got no clue what actually changes other than the focal length other than the bokeh. The 50mm swirly bokeh looks a bit odd and out of focus, and the 90mm soft focus is just not it. I don‘t get this system and I don‘t quite understand how it‘s better than just the basic mode, but options are always nice.

Portrait mode, .

Then there are a few extra modes. There‘s the usual pro mode which is really nice, then there‘s also document mode, which I LOVE. It automatically detects a document – be it a book page, an artwork, or even a screen and crops to make it the only thing visible. There are two modes that you can also select after taking the image – B&W and Enhanced. B&W makes the photo black and white, enhanced does that but also amplifies colours if they are presen.

Then, we have the “More” category. Rapidfire revie.

50MP – Useless mode unless you care about that 0.5% extra image qualit.

Panorama – Good for panorama.

Short film – Quite cool presets for videos that turn something into a short advertisement that is easy to recor.

Slow motion – Slow, but not exactly ideal. Usable, I suppos.

Timelapse – Really nice, but would appreciate a post-video taking speed change, at least to increase spee.

Long exposure – Odd. It doesn’t work like a long exposure, but rather just an image cloning thin.

Macro mode does not exist, but the 1x with digital crop takes really good macro images to.

Video, though, is awesome. I said this in my initial review, but it ***seems*** to be better than an iPhone 14 Pro. The 4K60fps has some insanely good image stabilization, and it goes up to 8K24fps. However, 8K is kinda useless on a phone and 4K does the job perfectly. It does have HDR mode, but it limits it to 4K30, so I rarely use it. There’s almost no visible difference, anyways. It also has LOG mode, but I have never used it and I have no clue ho.

The selfie camera is just not good. That’s all.

Display

Finally, out of the primary parts, the display. The display is great. Simple as that. I would appreciate 1440p, not 1220p, but it’s still not exactly bad. The sharpness is quite nice, and the display is bright. It’s more than visible in direct sunlight. A great part of the display, however, is the smoothness. It’s 144hz, and even though it stays at 120hz most of the time, it’s amazing. Finally, the best part of it – the glass. I don’t know what they made it out of, but man is it amazing. With a few swipes of my sleeve I can clean it from any fingerprints and it’s smooth no matter what. Even with sweaty hands, it doesn’t stick to the display and the glass doesn’t feel oily. And if it does, just give it a good rinse! IP68 is awesome.

Minor things

So with all that done, let’s talk about the minor things. This phone ships with MIUI 14 and as of 2023-11-02 @ 14:10 GMT+3, the latest version is MIUI 14.0.14.0, which brings October security patch and came quite quick, so I’m anticipating November patch within a week. It’s guaranteed to get HyperOS in the first non Xiaomi 14 series batch, globally hoping for around Late January, Early February. [Update: I received it just before New Year's, on December 31st.]

About phone

Build quality and other minor things

The sides are plastic and the back depends on what colour you get. Black and Green come with glass, but blue comes with the greatest thing in the history of phone materials – vegan leather. The blue model is the one I have and I explicitly got it because of this vegan leather. I use this phone caseless because it’s so nice to hold the back in my hand. It has a nice grip, feels not too hard not too soft, and doesn’t show fingerprints. It’s awesome.

Blue Vegan Leather back & IP68 rati.

The bezels, though. They do get in the way sometimes. Especially the frontfacing camer.

It’s USB 2.0, which I hate. I would LOVE USB 3.2, as it’s very convenient for transferring file.

It has 5G, but I can’t really use 5G as my plan doesn’t support it and my city doesn’t really have i.

It has Wifi speed boost where it connects to two wifi connections at once, but it’s not really that much bette.

The haptics are quite nice. They feel soft, but not too soft, and it’s nice to type and in general feels great rather than the “Heavy” haptics on my old Redmi Note 10 Pro.

One thing I would like to add, however, is that the notifications are the worst thing ever on this phone. I don’t understand how such a simple thing - a notification - can be so awful. They either arrive late, are desynced and send you the wrong notification, and are just overall very frustrating. [Update: Notifications issue resolved post-HyperOS update, now the problem is that Twitter is a garbage app and doesn't send the notifications in time. Not Xiaomi to blame anymore.

There’s not much more to discuss about this phone, so I’ll just conclude my review. I believe this phone is now worth the 900€ I paid for it, but if you get the offer to get this phone with a gift – do it. The effective value of my phone is actually 600€ now, because I got it with a gift that I resold.