Xiaomi 11T — Excellent Flagship Phone

Xiaomi often comes along and undercuts the likes of Samsung, offering a similar set of specs and design elements for a lower price. But usually, there’s a trade-off. Xiaomi’s MiUI isn’t known for its stability, and Samsung has spent years refining its now-excellent cameras. The latest phone, the Xiaomi 11T.

The set price of the price is at £499/€499. Let’s take a look at the specs and the features of the phone.

Design —

The Xiaomi 11T looks like pretty much every mid-tier Android phone in 2021. It’s got an edge-to-edge display with a hole-punch cutout for the front-facing camera, along with a large rectangular camera bump on the top left of the back, a USB-C port on the bottom, and so on. Around the edges, you’ll get all the usuals, including a volume rocker, USB-C port, and power button. That power button offers a fingerprint sensor built into it, and I found it to be fast and accurate almost all of the time.

The phone is built from relatively high-quality materials, including a glass front and back. There’s a metal frame holding it all together, too, which helps make it generally look and feel premium.

Display -

On the front of the Xiaomi 11T, you’ll get a 6.67-inch display with a 1080p resolution and a 120Hz refresh rate. That means that while it’s not the highest-resolution display out there, it looks pretty good, and is able to easily deliver a smooth and responsive feel. Out of the box, the phone is set to 60Hz, so if you want that responsive feel, you’ll have to switch to 120Hz in the Settings app. The display boasts a peak brightness of 1000 nits, which means that even in direct sunlight, you should be able to see what’s going on. The vast majority of the time, you won’t need to crank the brightness up that high.

Performance —

Under the hood, the Xiaomi 11T offers a MediaTek Dimensity 1200 chipset, coupled with 8GB of RAM and 128GB or 256GB of RAM. In other words, it’s a midrange phone that should still be more than powerful enough for the majority of users.

Battery and Charging —

The Xiaomi 11T offers a pretty large 5,000mAh battery, and the result is that it should easily last a full day of even relatively heavy use. Even with the high refresh rate display enabled, the phone will last a day of gaming, multitasking, and so on. Unlike the more expensive 11T Pro, the phone doesn’t offer 120W fast charging. It does, however, get 67W fast charging, which is still able to charge the device extremely quickly. There’s a 67W fast charger in the box, so you can take advantage of the tech right away.

Camera —

The Xiaomi 11T comes with a triple camera system, which is made up of a 108-megapixel main camera, an 8-megapixel ultrawide camera, and a 5-megapixel “telemacro” camera. The telemacro camera on the device was found to take incredibly close-up shots, and that remains true on this phone, which gets the same treatment.

The 108-megapixel main camera allows the phone to create a very detailed 12-megapixel image with a 9-in-1 pixel arrangement, with little noise. That’s good news — it means that you’ll get solid images the majority of the time. The phone comes with a number of camera features that can help. There’s a Pro mode, which lets you tweak things manually, and there are other modes, like a VLOG mode that lets you capture dual video. It’s a solid selection of features.

Software —

The Xiaomi 11T comes with Xiaomi’s MiUI. he operating system comes with random apps like AliExpress, PUBG Mobile, and WPS Office out of the box, and it’s plenty buggy. These bugs are a near-daily occurrence with MiUI, and if you buy a Xiaomi phone, you’re going to have to get used to them.

If you do get used to them, there are some positives to MiUI. Xiaomi has taken a page out of Apple’s book with a Control Center feature that lets you access quick settings without swiping through your notifications.

There are other neat touches here and there to enjoy, and I genuinely like the improvements that MiUI has made over stock Android.