Xiaomi 15T Pro Review: A Real Looker

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Need-to-knows

• Superb 5x telephoto lens
• Dynamic camera system overall
• Premium design feels great in the hand
• Excellent display

Mid-range smartphones are getting harder to review. Not because they’re bad, but because most of them are just very solid phones at very reasonable prices. There isn’t much to say about them in truth. But the Xiaomi 15T Pro is bringing something relatively exciting to the table, or at least that’s what Xiaomi is claiming.

That something is a pro-level triple-lens camera system with 5x optical telephoto zoom, all for a sub-£700 price. If this system produces good results, then it would be an absolute bargain for the price. And I don’t really have reason to doubt Xiaomi here because their flagship phone photography has come on in huge strides recently.

Of course, there’s more than just the cameras (the display for a start is superb) but it’s the biggest reason you’d consider this phone, so it’s getting most of my attention. Let’s get started!

How I reviewed the Xiaomi 15T Pro

I was particularly interested in the 15T Pro’s camera capabilities after reading the marketing materials surrounding the release. So that’s how I integrated it into my life; it acted mainly as an extra camera in my pocket for a week.

Of course, I also tested it across the board whilst the phone was with me, playing some games, streaming videos and listening to music. Oh, and I threw in some AI photo editing in there, too!

At a glance

Price and key specs

Before we dive into the camera, let’s set the scene a bit. This phone costs a minimum of £649 for 12GB RAM and 256GB of storage. That places it in the slightly awkward mid-range/upper-mid-range category. For comparison, on release the OnePlus 13r cost £679, the Pixel 9a £499, the Samsung Galaxy S25 FE £649 and the iPhone 16e £599. These are a few of the Xioami 15T Pro’s competitors and we can see some differences just by looking at the spec sheet.

Xiaomi is the only one to use a MediaTek chip which, in my opinion, doesn’t really matter but there you go. It also has one of the bigger batteries in its price bracket, although not as large as the 6000mAh one in the OnePlus 13r. The 15T Pro is certainly one of the fastest chargers though out of the bunch at 90W wired.

Related: Xiaomi 15 review

The main differences are seen in the camera setups. The glaring ones being the 32MP selfie camera and the 5x optical zoom capability, both of which set the 15T Pro apart from the rest. But does that translate into real-life performance?

Camera

Xiaomi is making a big deal about the camera system on the Xiaomi 15T series. And for good reason, the specs are impressive on paper. You get a 50 MP main camera, 12MP ultrawide and, most impressively, a 50 MP telephoto with 5x optical zoom.

For a mid-range phone, these numbers are slightly higher than what you’d normally expect. For example, the OnePlus 13r comes with an 8MP ultrawide and only a 2x optical zoom on the telephoto. The Google Pixel 9a only has two rear lenses with optical zoom-quality up to 1x, with their Super Res Zoom feature taking over from then on.

That 5x optical zoom, which I’ll come onto later, is what really sets the 15T Pro apart from competitors. But first, let’s take a look at what you get out of the bog-standard 1x point and shoot.

From my time spent with the 15T Pros camera, I think the 50MP main sensor produces solid results. It’s co-engineered with Leica, so you can’t go too far wrong. I’d say that the photos are generally slightly colder than usual, especially colder than what you get from an iPhone. The images are also bright, perhaps verging on too bright, especially when indoors, where photos can appear brighter than the real-life subject.

That being said, the main lens is a brilliant camera for everyday use, especially at this price point. But the Xiaomi 15T Pro really impresses when you start zooming in.

5x optical zoom for a mid-range phone is virtually unheard of, and it is excellent on the 15T. You can see how clear and noise-free these images are below, and that is a testament to the telephoto lens. I haven’t used another phone this cheap that produces such quality when zooming in. Even the 10x optical-quality (that means it’s digitally enhanced) zoom is suitably usable, something that lots of other phones, even more expensive than this one, can’t claim.

I mean, just look at these photos above. The 5x is crisp, edges are clearly defined and the colours don’t get lost into a smudgy mess. You can also see with the comparison to the iPhone 13 what I mean about the brightness of the images that the 15T Pro produces. Bright spots are significantly more highlighted and colours look more vibrant. It’s a really excellent shooter.

I was particularly impressed with the video recording. It goes up to 8K at 30fps or 4K at 120fps with the former being especially good. I’m an ex-Android user, you see (now on an iPhone 13), and it used to be the case that Android video was just terrible in comparison to Apple.

Latest: iPhone 17 Pro Max review

But that is certainly not true anymore. Yes, Apple may still be ahead in that area, but most Android phones now produce great video and usually for a lot less money. And just a word for the iPhone 16e, because I can’t not mention it in this context. For £50 less, you get only a single lens with no telephoto zoom. I still don’t understand that phone.

Design and display

First off, I think Xiaomi has done a great thing with the look of the 15T Pro. It is based on the Xiaomi 15’s frame and it looks beautiful, especially in the Mocha Gold colour you can see here. It feels highly premium too, with the aluminium-alloy frame and fibreglass back cover. If you buy this phone, you won’t be disappointed by the first impressions.

It also has a nice weight to it too at 210 grams which is slightly heavier than your average phone these days. There’s a big 6.8-inch display too, which is only just smaller than that of the iPhone 17 Pro Max. So, if you like your displays to be that way inclined, you’re in safe hands.

Does thinness matter? Read Mark’s iPhone Air review!

I must also mention the bezels. Pretty much every new smartphone these days claims to have ‘razor-thin’ bezels around the edge of their displays. But it is actually true for the 15T Pro, which has a nearly full edge-to-edge display and it is fantastic to look at as a result.

And, as is typical with Android phones now, the display is simply stunning. The 144Hz refresh rate is so smooth, and 3200 nits of brightness is more than enough for your day-to-day needs. It’s also an AMOLED panel, which is another nice little bit of added value for the money, and IP68 rated.

That all adds up to a phone that could easily mix it with the £1000+ flagships from the likes of Samsung and Apple from a design perspective.

Battery and performance

The Xiaomi 15T Pro uses the Mediatek Dimensity 9400+, which is by no means a top-of-the-range chipset, but it is absolutely enough power for 99% of people’s needs. I played games on this phone and had no issues whatsoever with performance; the cooling seemed to keep on top of things, too.

The battery is rated at 5500mAh, which is pretty sizeable even by today’s increasingly unbelievable Android standards. And it does deliver solid performance, if not as impressive as others like the OnePlus 13. Xiaomi states that it delivers 15.29 hours of ‘continuous use’, whatever that actually means, but my testing showed it lasted around two days under moderate usage. So that’s a big plus!

Best battery life? OnePlus 13r review

The only areas I found some slowdowns in were the on-device Xiaomi HyperAI features, specifically the photo editing. It wasn’t catastrophic by any means, but erasing things from photos for example took a few minutes, whereas Samsung’s Galaxy AI handles it in what seems like a much shorter space of time. The integration of Google Gemini was as snappy as ever, though, and accessible via a long press of the lock screen button which is nifty.

Software

Strangely, Xiaomi decided to push the 15T Pro out with Android 15 instead of the newer 16. This also means it runs HyperOS 2 instead of the soon-to-exist HyperOS 3. For the most part, this hardly matters, especially for the average user. But it would have made the phone felt even more fresh had it come with the latest software.

It comes with some bloatware pre-intalled, but not as much as we used to get jammed down our throats a few years ago. It can all be deleted too.

Best Android phone? Check out Mark’s Google Pixel 10 review

As for the software, I have no issues with HyperOS. In fact, I think most Android reskins are absolutely fine and the people that find problems with them are looking hard for faults. It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, and it isn’t as good as One UI 8 or as original as Nothing OS. But it’s fine. And that’s all that matters.

Who should buy this phone?

Often answering this question is easy, but also at the same time quite difficult. The easy answer is ‘anyone who wants great value for money’, but picking out specifically who should buy certain mid-range phones is hard because they are often so similar.

But the Xiaomi 15T Pro has a clear marker. If you want what is possibly the best overall camera package on a smartphone for less than £700, then this is categorically the phone for you. Honestly, I don’t think you’ll find better photos at 5x zoom at this price point.

More Xiaomi: Xiaomi Mix Flip review

Add onto that the fact that the display is spectacular and the build quality feels almost exactly like the iPhone 17 Pro series, then it’s hard to argue that this phone doesn’t sit somewhere near the top of the mid-range pile.

And as I said above, it plunges the iPhone 16e into even further depths of embarrassment. For £50 more, you get a far more feature-rich experience and cameras that blow it out of the water. Would you consider the Xiaomi 15T Pro? Let me know below!