Xiaomi 13T Pro Long term review.

May 20, 2024

I bought my Xiaomi 13T Pro 7 months ago. At the time, the biggest problem was the battery life. I never could have anticipated what I was in for.

Battery life

The biggest problem with this phone and the biggest headache for me. It's abysmal. And that is being kind. I average drain rates of 20%/hr with the screen on and sometimes up to 12%/hr with the screen off. Yep. You read that right. Not 1.2%/hr, not anything else, I genuinely, unironically, in the most serious way possible, got 12%/hr drain with the screen off. At that point, what's the point of even turning the phone off? Might as well just keep it running.

I've gone through so much troubleshooting of every form ever, and the only conclusion I can come to is that this is just Mediatek doing Mediatek things and being terrible. I hope I can somehow sell this phone and buy the Poco F6 instead because this is just abysmal drain. And people still continue to say that this phone is great.

Updates

Another huge issue that results in problems in all the other sections is the abysmal update pattern. To go from the first to the second HyperOS version launched for this phone, it took me 99 days. 99 days. I can complete high school in that time! So far, in the last 5 months and 21 days, there has been ONE update for this phone. That means one chance for Xiaomi to get their stuff together, and yet they didn't.

And this isn't unusual. This is how Xiaomi's phones work. Great hardware (sometimes), terrible software experience. It feels neglected and like a mere afterthought. I hope someone finally flips a switch in the executives' minds and they actually understand that in order to fix problems, they need to issue updates. But because Xiaomi has made anywhere from 5 to 1000 models in one year, it's impossible to give each model the care and effort that they need. Why do you think brands like Apple or Google launch so few phones? Because that way they can take care of the models better.

On the topic of more models, I find it honestly insulting how a flagship from 2023 that costs 900€ gets less updates than a 200€ phone from 2021 and has an older android security update. Like come on, at least make it equal.

HyperOS bugs

System crashing

This is a big one. Before factory resetting (yes, it got that bad.), I could expect my phone to crash up to twice a day at random points in time and it'd be out of commission for up to 3 minutes while it restarted. Imagine trying to get on public transit and your phone decides that it doesn't want to work anymore. You're now left waiting and hoping you can get it to turn on before the transit leaves.

It'd happen at random, too. No indication as to what was about to happen until suddenly your display would stop responding, the phone would have the app you're running crash, at which point SystemUI would stop responding and crash too. And that involved your phone restarting.

Luckily after my factory reset I haven't had that yet, but I have had drastically worse battery life. (yay!)

Bluetooth issues

This one is very annoying. I suffer from Misophonia, which is where certain sounds invoke aggressive reactions. These sounds vary anywhere from chewing to breathing. These sounds also appear louder tho those suffering from Misophonia than "normal" individuals. One of these trigger sounds, to me, is a pop. That's the best way I can describe it. So you can imagine that when your earphones keep having constant connection issues resulting in this sound being played hundreds of times a minute, it gets very frustrating. On numerous occasions I have wanted to rip the earphones right out of my ear and throw them on the ground, and have, multiple times, covered my head like you would imagine from someone who wants to not hear anything.

This happens frequently, too. Sometimes the frequency is lower than during other times, but it always happens at least once a day.

Another issue is how it will randomly just disconnect the earphones and require me to manually go into Bluetooth settings and enable it.

Bluetooth crashing

This happened once, but it happened one too many times for me to not mention. This was the last straw before my factory reset. I was on a bus ride when I heard the sound of my earphones disconnecting. This happens quite often, so I didn't think much of it. I simply go into bluetooth settings and manually connect again. However, this time, it refused. It was stuck on "connecting". The same was with my Xiaomi Smart Band 8 Pro, it would not connect. This went on for a good minute before finally, by some miracle, the bluetooth decided that it wanted to work again, at which point both devices connected and nothing else happened.

I didn't stick around and wait for it to happen again, so the next day, on Friday, I factory reset my phone. Haven't had this since.

Losing features

Oh boy. Where do I even start.

When HyperOS launched, it felt awesome. I saw new stuff galore and was so happy with things like Advanced materials being added or the new haptic system that I completely missed the fact that Xiaomi pretty much cut a lot of the features.

The main one is the missing expand top notification feature. It was there on MIUI and was very useful as it meant I could save half the button presses I would normally need. Now, for whatever dumb reason, they removed it. So if I want to, say, stop an alarm, I have to click once to expand it and then again to stop it. On MIUI, I would press just one button.

But don't even get me started on the features that are there and aren't ever accessible.

There's an awesome new menu for the music player, you can change what device the media is playing on. Seems useful, right? You can probably think of where you would use it. But, because the almighty Xiaomi gods have spoken, we don't have that feature. It's missing. Everything is right there, you can use an activity launcher to literally access the exact menu, it is as simple as adding some code to say that "If hold down on location x, then menu pops up", but no, that's too difficult! Let's make the battery life terrible instead and cut some more features!

Those are the two notable examples I have, but there are so many missing features that never made it to HyperOS global. Also, Mi AI, which was announced months ago, has only made it to like two models in global so far.

Overheating

It seems like alongside getting rid of features, Xiaomi also got rid of any attempts to control the heating. My phone reaches 45°C any time I charge it with the official powerbank and I've noticed similar heating while charging at 18W. 18W should never produce heat at all, my Redmi Note 10 Pro heated less than this thing, yet for some reason it just refuses to stay cool. And heaven forbid you dare leave it in your pocket, because it will discipate absolutely no heat whatsoever and stay hot for a long time.

Battery replacement in 3 months, anyone?

Conclusion

In the last 7 months, this phone has been the single biggest nightmare in my life (ignoring every other problem I've had) and has genuinely been so bad that I've considered leaving Xiaomi for my next generation. The current plan is to, when the Poco F6 comes out, if this phone hasn't fixed the battery issues yet, sell this phone and buy the F6 base model or pro, depending on how much the budget allows.