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: Conclusive.

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.

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 update.

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.

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 amazing.

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.

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 want.

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 amazing.

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

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 lights.

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 via digital 2x zoom

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 general.

The 2x could be a 3x, and it lacks proper OIS, but it’s a 2x, I suppose, so it’s better than nothing.

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, 2x