Xiaomi 11T Pro: 5 Reasons to get this flagship beating smartphone
Forget the next generation Xiaomi 12 Pro and dig the Xiaomi 11T Pro instead. Here we look at the specs and 5 good reasons for choosing last year’s flagship. For start, the Xiaomi 12 Pro is almost twice the price of Xiaomi 11T Pro. Go Figure!
Launched Oct 2021, the Xiaomi 11T Pro is only months old when Xiaomi announced the next generation Xiaomi 12 Pro on 31 Dec 2021. Both phones are going to be staying on the shelves for a while. In 2022, the new handset is just hitting the online stores and shops. But, what about the 11T Pro, should we at least consider that too if you are in the market for a flagship especially when it has so many things going for it. Let’s take a look
5 Reasons to Get the Xiaomi 11T Pro
- Ultra Fast Charging with 120W adapter, 2-100% in 17 minutes
- 6.67-inch Super AMOLED 2400 x 1080 pixels resolution with 120Hz high refresh rate supports Dolby Vision with 1000nits peak brightness
- Snapdragon 888 with 8/12GB RAM and 128/256GB Storage
- Cameras: 108 + 8 + 5MP main shooter, 16MP front shooter
- Sound Investment
1. Ultra Fast Charging – 120W Xiaomi HyperCharge
First up, the Xiaomi 11T Pro’s ultra fast charging alone will have you reaching for your wallet. Forget to charge your phone the night before? Just plug it into the supplied 120W charger and you can have a fully charged handset in just around 17 minutes. That’s not just super fast but ultra fast. And, if you don’t even have that much time, try 40% in about 5 minutes or 70% in about 10 minutes. From that 10 minutes charge, you can carry on watching your video for up to 7 hours, conduct calls for 11 hours, navigate for 5 hours or carry on recording Full HD video for up to 2 hours.
Now if you think, all that fast charging is going to kill your battery faster, overheat, blow up or worst burn your house down, the Xiaomi 11T Pro meets TÜV Rheinland Safe Fast-Charge System Certification. It also comes with 34 safety features designed into the phone and the battery is expected to last for up to 800 charge cycles.
Never be left with a flat phone or waiting for your phone to be fully charged ever again. You may have to live with an oversized power adapter but that’s not one you have to carry around as the fully charged phone will lasts through the day and more. If you must know, the charging speed is made possible with dual charge pump, Mi-FC technology that reduces trickle charging so more current gets to the battery, MTW technology to reduce internal resistance with more charging tabs and Dual-cell battery with graphene. The last one you may have seen on Oppo Find X5 Pro.
- 5000mAh large capacity batter
- 120W Xiaomi HyperCharge Technology
- 100% in 17 minutes
2. Full View Display
Apart from the small chin, very tiny bottom bezel, you get a full 6.67-inch OLED display. This may not be curved or 4K but it comes with enough pixels to make sure that everything on the screen is sharp and full of details. At 2400 x 1080 pixels, it is slightly higher than Full HD (1920 x 1080) but not quite QHD (2569 x 1440). But is 2400 x 1080 pixels (20:9 aspect ratio) on a display good enough? Well, the iPhone Pro Max comes with 2778 x 1284 (458ppi) for a 6.7-inch display. The Xiaomi 11T Pro has a 6.67-inch display with 2400 x 1080 pixels with close enough pixel density of around 395ppi, so I think we are good.
Besides, the display is fast and super bright too. With support for Dolby Vision, HDR10+ and refresh rate up to 120Hz plus touch sampling of up to 480Hz, the OLED panel is suitable for both entertainment and gaming. And, like the OLED on the iPhone, it will product over 1 billion colours, cover P3 wide colour gamut and push a high contrast of 5 million to 1. Typical brigthness is around 800nits with a peak brightness of up to 1000nits. If you don’t want to compromise on the display, the Xiaomi 11T Pro’s OLED will get you all the flagship love you need. For protection, it is covered by Corning Gorilla Glass Victus and utilities like Reading mode 3.0 and Sunlight mode 3.0 will make using the screen a joy working with on board 360° ambient light sensor. Last but not least the panel is Displaymate A+ rated, highest performance rating a smartphone display can get.
3. Chip, Memory and Storage
So what if it comes with last year’s flagship chip? The Snapdragon 888 5G mobile platform is still pretty amazing. The chip supports everything a modern handset needs; 6th generation AI Engine, highly efficient, 5G connectivity with Snapdragon X60 5G modem-RF and WiFi 6. There is even a dedicated Triple Image Signal Processor (ISP) that lets you record 4K HDR video with Computational HDR. This little camera trickery will merge multiple shots to produce the highest quality results.
- Qualcomm SM8350 Snapdragon 888 5G (5 nm)
- Octa-core (1×2.84 GHz Kryo 680 & 3×2.42 GHz Kryo 680 & 4×1.80 GHz Kryo 680)
- Adreno 660 GPU
Then there is the memory and storage. The handset comes with the following memory and storage configurations; 8GB RAM with 128GB storage, 8GB Ram with 256GB storage and 12GB RAM with 256GB storage. These are typical flagship level storage sizes. So, no compromises here too.
4. Cameras
Circling back to that Triple ISP. The main shooter is a combination of 108MP Super Pixel main wide camera, 8MP ultra wide (120˚ FOV) camera and 5MP telephoto and macro camera (AF 3cm to 7cm). To put those cameras to good use, Xiaomi offers tonnes of professional special effects and creative options into what they call the One-click AI cinema feature. It’s computational videography and pro level editing right on the phone.
There are some cool stuff you can do with the Macro camera too like getting really close to the subject, shooting and recording stills and videos from a perspective normal phones struggles. To complete the pro-imaging features are three microphone arrays that records with varying volume based on your zoom level. Xiaomi calls this Audio Zoom, so you can be sure that the subject you choose to zoom in on a video gets the right attention. To top it off, video recording supports HDR10+, to capture vivid colours no matter the lighting conditions.
Around the front, you get an equally amazing 12MP in-display selfie camera. This is located dead centre on the top of the display in a round cutout. Okay, so none of those cameras give you optical zoom but you do get Super Pixel 108MP that can shoot flawlessly with its super large image sensor, 2.1μm 9-in-1 Super Pixel and Dual Native ISO.
5. Sound Investment
The two important aspects of a smartphone that budget handset makers typically neglect are the sound and display. Xiaomi got the display right with the 11T Pro, but got even better with the sound. Granted that it is not always that one blasts loud music or watch action flicks on their smartphone. Usually, this is paired with a good wireless headphone. If you have to, the speakers pump out high volume so you don’t miss a thing. Partnering with Harman Kardon, the stereo speaker placements, one at either end of the short edge, lets you enjoy your movies and TV shows in landscape with 360 degree surround sound with support for Dolby Atmos. This completes your entertainment experience with Dolby Vision for brightness, contrast and colours while Dolby Atmos offers premium audio to go with it.
Search Xiaomi 11T Pro on Amazon
Final Thoughts
Did we say it costs just over half that of is current flagship. There is no denying that for the money, and with all the reasons we just presented above, you can’t really fault the phone. It is a high-end phone with a mid-range price tag. Beautiful OLED display albeit Full HD resolution only, premium mobile chip, ultra fast charging, great sound and even though no optical zoom, pretty extraordinary cameras, it’s definitely right up there with the big boys. If you don’t mind paying a bit more, check out the Xiaomi Mi 11, with a bigger and higher resolution 6.8-inch AMOLED display with 3200 x 1440pixels, same mobile chip, same cameras so no telephone lens and slightly smaller capacity battery.
