XIAOMI 11T PRO
Price from £539 / stuff.tv/11tpro
hones at this price don’t tend to push at the boundaries of tech. It’s not really their job. But the mid-priced Xiaomi 11T Pro really does qualify as a flagship smartphone, in at least one small but useful way.
This phone has 120W charging, almost three times as powerful as the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra’s. Sure, the power brick is a bit of a beast as a result, but Xiaomi says it will up the 11T Pro’s battery in just 17 minutes.
But does it? We got out the stopwatch for a test and used the same method as Xiaomi, charging from 2% to avoid the slow safety charge that kicks in if it dies completely. At 5mins we were at 38%. It hit 69% by 10mins. And, sure enough, at 17mins it reached 100%.
The 11T Pro doesn’t charge up in 17 minutes and 57 seconds, it’s 17 minutes and zero seconds. Fair play, Xiaomi.
PKey specs: beefy
Fast charging is not why you should buy a Xiaomi 11T Pro, mind. It’s all the rest that makes it such a compelling alternative to spending £1000.
The speakers are loud and meaty, laid out in a proper stereo array. Its screen is a big ’n’ bold 6.67in OLED panel topped with Gorilla Glass Victus, not normally seen in mid-range phones. The back is glass too, although the outer part of the sides is plastic. You should probably use the supplied case anyway.
The high-end Snapdragon 888 CPU completes the picture, making the 11T Pro one of the very best gaming phones that won’t obliterate your overdraft.
Screen: zingy
Let’s dig into the display a bit more. It’s a 120Hz OLED with support for Dolby Vision and peak brightness of 1000 nits. Only the resolution shows this up as a mid-range display – it’s 1080p, not 1440p – but the difference is not that obvious in person. Colour is deep and rich and, as ever, OLED tech brings those true deep blacks that never get old.
The 11T Pro is a great media phone, perfect for all the content guzzlers out there. Youtube, Fortnite, Netflix? It feasts on the stuff. And if you’re less bothered about the gaming side, you should also consider the non-pro Xiaomi 11T. It has a slightly less impressive Mediatek CPU and slower 67W charging… but neither of those is exactly sluggish.
There has to be a hitch with the 11T Pro, right? You can’t save hundreds of pounds and only end up with a lower-res screen and a hint of plastic in the design…?
Cameras: ordinary
Yep: the 11T Pro’s cameras are decent, but you don’t get the killer flexibility and reliability of the world’s best top-end smartphones here.
A Samsung 108MP sensor takes the spotlight. It can take confident pics during the day and decent ones at night, but will not get close to matching the Pixel 6 for night-time image quality and all-round consistency. And there’s no zoom camera at all – just an OK ultrawide, plus a good telemacro that lets you get incredibly close to your subject. We’d trade it for a 3x zoom, but you can bet the phone would cost more as a result.
One more thing: in our initial review, we noticed that the Xiaomi 11T Pro tends to get toasty after 20 minutes of gaming. A little more digging shows why, though: all top-end phones ration their power after a pretty short period, and this one does so a whole lot less than the iphone 13 Pro Max or Galaxy S22 Ultra. It’s a
‘heat versus power’ trade-off, and Xiaomi chooses power every time.
TECH SPECS
● 6.67in 2400x1080 120Hz AMOLED ● Snapdragon 888 ● 8/12GB RAM
● 128/256GB ● Android 11 + MIUI 12.5 ● 108+8+5MP rear, 16MP front
● 5000mah ● 164x77x8.8mm, 204g