I don't know if anybody has been following my reviews here on GBAtemp, but this is an exciting first for me. Reviewing a smartphone has been something I have wanted to do for the longest time, so I jumped at the chance to offer my opinion on what is such a crucial device to modern life. With Xiaomi providing the 11T a good bit ahead of their announcement today, I've had plenty of time to experience their latest device to give you my complete thoughts as to what works and what doesn't.

• Model: Xiaomi 11T 5G (21081111RG)
• Materials: Gorilla Glass + Brushed Metal (Available in Midnight Grey, Celestial Blue, and Moonlight White)
• Sim: Dual Sim (Double layer caddy)
• OS: Android 11 (RP1A.200720.011), upgradable to 12 (guaranteed 3 OS updates and 4 years of security patches)
• MIUI: 12.5.1 Stable 12.5.1.0 (RKWEUXM)
• Dimensions: 16.4cm x 7.6cm x 1cm (inc camera) / 0.8cm (body)
• Weight: 203g
• Screen: 6.67" AMOLED Flat DotDisplay, 20:9 aspect, 60-120 Hz AdaptiveSync, up to 480hz touch, HBM 800 nits (1000 nits peak brightness), FHD+ True Display 2400 x 1080 Resolution, over 1 billion colours, 440 dpi/399.05 ppi density, HDR10+,
  contrast ratio: 5,000,000:1 (typical), 1 Billion colours,
• CPU: MediaTek MT6893Z_D/CZA Dimensity 1200-Ultra 6nm with dual 5G, Octa-Core (Arm64-v8a, Armabi-v7a, armabi), 3 clusters, max 3.0GHz
• GPU: ARM Mali-G77 MC9, Vulkan
• Board: Amber (Also the codename)
• Ram/Storage: 8 GB / 128 GB (No expansion slots, though an 8 BG / 256 GB option is also available)
• Front Camera: Single 16mp front f/2.45 aperture, hole punch style
• Rear Cameras: 108MP wide-angle camera, 0.7µm pixel size, 2.1µm 9-in-1 superpixel, f/1.75 aperture 7P lens, Dual Native ISO, 8MP ultra-wide-angle camera, 120° FOV f/2.2,  5MP telemacro, f/2.4, 3-7cm AF
• Speakers: Dedicated Dual Dolby Atmos
• Sensors: Gyro, Fingerprint, 360° ambiet light sensor (Sunlight 3.0 / Reading mode 3.0)
• Motor: X-axis linear vibration motor
• Security: Power button fingerprint / Facial recognition / Pin or Pattern
• Connectivity: Bluetooth 5.2, NFC, Wifi 5 GHz frequency, 5G mobile networking, USB-C, IR-blaster
• Charger: 67w turbo charging (Included in box)
• Battery: 5000 mAh Li-Poly (4.247v), 40+ hrs (Saver: 60+ hrs, Ultra Saver: ~400hrs)
• Pricing EUR 499 (128 GB)  / EUR 549 (256 GB)

My first impressions of Xiaomi's 11T quite swiftly blown any Android-related preconceptions from my mind. For starters, the device has a screen protector pre-installed on it and a clear protective case in the box as standard, which is a nice change coming from an iPhone previously. Judging by the dual-sided nano-sim tray's red rubber surround, I would assume this device has a reasonable level of waterproofing, though I'm certainly not brave enough to submerge it, especially without seeing a suitable IP rating on the box or accompanying paperwork. Of note, the phone features a fingerprint scanner built into its power button. There is a little division as to where a fingerprint scanner is best fit, with iPhone users being fond of their home button placement and many liking the under-screen options, but I can say it really doesn't take much getting used to the power button placement, The scanner itself is incredibly responsive, which is great for something most people will be using as their primary means of unlocking the device. 

Between the power under the hood and the screen's 120Hz refresh rate, I was immediately impressed with the the device's performance, as well as the wealth of options and tweaks available to me. Probably the most significant of these options to me was the ability to pick between launcher styles, allowing me to opt for a more Apple-friendly layout with all apps displayed on pages. Due to the additional battery drain that comes with it, the 120Hz refresh rate isn't enabled by default. It is something I wholeheartedly recommend trying though. The trade-off between fluid motion and longevity is something each person will consider, but it really does look incredible across the AMOLED display for everything I could throw at it.

The metal bezel is a sleek slim 4mm from screen edge to outer edge all the way around, wrapping up the device and containing it in a solid cocoon. There are just three buttons on the periphery, these being the power button with the integrated fingerprint scanner and the volume rocker. The top of the device has a simple IR dot on the left side and speaker holes on the right along with a tiny mic hole. The 11T actually has six drilled holes in both the top and the bottom edges of the device for left and right speakers, providing a loud and crisp Dolby Atmos stereo sound. The bottom edge of the device houses the sim tray with a standard pin eject mechanism, the USB-C charge/data socket, and the aforementioned speaker holes. There's also another tiny hole for the microphone making it a dual mic setup, allowing for background noise to be filtered out nicely in loudspeaker conversations. The front is Gorilla Glass with an approximately-3mm hole punch front-facing camera towards the top. The rear is a gorgeous midnight grey brushed metal with the 108MP camera on the righthand side as you look at it. The camera houses three lenses, three flash LEDs, and a microphone hole for directional recording. The top left of the rear displays the "Xiaomi 5G" moniker, and below that in the bottom left corner is the CE "Conformité Européenne" stamp and a recycle bin icon that essentially urges you not to drop your phone in the bin, mainly due to the internal battery, when you are finished with it in future; why would you when you can recycle approximately 80% of the materials that it's made from and do your bit to make the world greener?

When it comes to smartphones, the battery becomes a hotly contested issue. As is commonly the case, you'll have to dumb it down a little for the longest lifespan, but that's not to say the 5000 mAh battery won't reach that crucial day mark of standard usage. In fact, from my time with the phone, I've found regular usage to give me around 40 hours between charges. This can go even higher depending on how much you're willing to sacrifice thanks to the saver and ultra saver settings, pushing you all the way to the 400 hour range if all you're needing is calls and texts in a bind. Naturally, this isn't how I expect most people to use a smartphone in 2021, but for long hikes where you're unlikely to be checking your social media, such battery life could genuinely be lifesaving in a worst-case scenario. 

For those power users among us, a 67W charger is on hand to replenish power in mere minutes, just under 40 to be more precise. I was incredibly impressed with just how quickly this device could be charged up and ready to rock again. Given that the majority of mobile phones these days no longer come supplied with any kind of USB charging plug, just a short cable if you're lucky, the 67W adaptor was certainly a warmly welcomed inclusion to bolster this product's instant gratification. I hear 120W charging is also on the cards for a blistering 20 minutes charge time to 100%, but I wonder if this will be held onto for Pro models. I also tried to test out wireless charging with my trusty Native Union QI charger, but I couldn't manage to get it to charge on that device. Even going through the battery settings I couldn't see anything that would enable it, so I assume QI charging, and therefore reverse charging, is not included on the 11T model.

The 11T comes bundled with a reasonable number of apps that might be considered bloat. From the fairly standard gallery and theming apps, you also have useful additions like a note taking utility, document scanner, and perhaps more bizarrely, an IR blaster called Mi Remote. I find a good number of these apps useful in my working day. I'm constantly scanning documents, calculating prices, writing down notes, and setting reminders. I've been really happy with the default selection of apps in meeting my needs, and I have to praise how handy an IR blaster build into your phone could be. It's something I could really never see Apple doing. Unfortunately though, I just couldn't get any of my TVs working with it. I did take the time to submit the makes and models to Xiaomi though, so hopefully they can one day be supported. 

Outside of Xiaomi's stock apps there's an assortment of others to be found pre-installed. To the delight of many and dismay of a choice few, all your standard Google apps can be found here. That means you'll have no issues finding apps for the 11T thanks to the easily-accessible Play Store. You also get 13 other Google apps including Drive, Gmail, Maps, and YouTube. There are also apps present that exist for little purpose outside of what I assume to be advertising agreements. While some of these are staples on a huge number of smartphones nowadays, such as TikTok, Facebook, and Netflix, It's worth saying these can be uninstalled via settings, but the additional step may come as a frustration to some. 

In addition to the settings and applications are a series of modes and tweaks to improve various usage options. Among these you have Game Turbo Mode to launch installed games in a specialist, uninterrupted gaming mode, Video Toolbox to grant extra options and special features during video playback, Floating Windows to allow you to grab and manipulate notifications or backgrounded apps easily, Second Space to run apps securely in private, and Lite Mode to minimize visual clutter and enhance icon size for visibility. I have to admit the clear effort and detail that has gone into the MIUI OS is incredible; backgrounding, killing apps, scanning, cleaning and general housekeeping are all at your fingertips, and with such a diverse range of fine-tunable options, themes, and customisation, it really is a tweaker's delight. The OS also consistently tells you what memory saving has been made each time you close an app, and every time you kill all apps in the background. This useful information and even more useful abilities are things I've previously had to jailbreak phones for. I've wanted these features in my devices forever, and now I have possibly the most intuitive, smooth, and dare I say sensible version of Android I have ever experienced. All of this coupled with clever animations, such as the storage usage depicted as blue fluid in a container that reacts to gyroscopic movements on the phone, and an honourable mention of the animation of the app icon exploding into a cloud of particles upon app deletion, are terrific design choices that really elevates the usability of the phone and make you feel like you're holding a fantastic piece of premium smart tech in your hands.

It pretty much goes without saying that this device with its 108MP feature emblazoned on its body is an extremely capable photographic device. The three lenses on the rear allow for macro, wide, and ultra-wide snapping, which you can access in their entirety via the pro mode of the camera app. Sure you can go gung-ho and use the built-in presets for night mode, panoramas, selfies, slow motion, time-lapse, long exposure, or even dual-camera video recording, but with Pro mode activated you can almost limitlessly dial in your settings for white balance (indoor/outdoor), focal length (macro/mountains), shutter speed (1/4000/30), ISO sensitivity (50/6400), exposure value (+4.0/-4.0), spot metering, flash, filters, ratios, timers, burst, grid lines, focus peaking, exposure verification, and whether or not to sack off any compression and just capture RAW format images! Any budding photographers would be mightily impressed with the sheer level of customisation offered by the photography app, and could easily ditch any old sub 20MP standalone digital camera in a heartbeat.

Taking photos with Xiaomi's 11T is an absolute pleasure. I decided to take a range of shots in my garden that best depicted standard usage, though the sun is far from a standard feature in the United Kingdom! I took a couple of plants in the sun, the sky itself, and close-up images of flowers and insects. Switching from ultrawide to macro is something my iPhone 8 Plus has never done, so capturing microscopic detail swiftly became my new hobby. With a stunning level of detail, I managed to take a few quick examples shots that demonstrated the clarity and strength of the macro lens. To give it a real test I also waited until it got dark and wanted to try to capture the LED torches we have around the edge of the patio. Each of the shots was taken side by side with my current phone, the 2017 iPhone 8 Plus, which sports dual 12MP wide-angle/telephoto lenses to show the difference between what I thought was reasonably acceptable and what the 11T can do in 2021.

With a selection of pics taken, I took them into a photo viewer app on my laptop and scrutinised each image side by side and most specifically, once zoomed in. The 11T takes a superb photo. The colours are extremely lifelike, accurately recreating pretty much the exact same range of colours and depth of white and black highlights and shadows that I could visually compare side by side to the real deal. In comparison to the iPhone 8 Plus, the images are spectacular, mainly due to the less dramatic but more realistic look to the pictures. For example, with the night shots, the LED torch seems to have a corona or bloom of light around them in the iPhone shots, which gives a warm dramatic edge to the photos, however, this simply isn't what you see with your naked eye. So while it looks great, it's not exactly accurate. The 11T provided a more natural, realistic-looking picture of the LED flames, without the over-exaggerated halo which in my opinion gives a crisper and more true-to-life representation of the lighting.

Comparison shots (Xiaomi 11t on the left, iPhone 8 Plus on the right):

Expanding an image is an extremely interesting affair; where the iPhone images obviously zoomed in far less with their dual 12MP image size, they presented grainy detail when zoomed, which I expected. The Xiaomi 11T, on the other hand, seems to add some form of filtering, when you get as deeply zoomed in as possible, with what can be best described as a vectorized look to the fine details. Cloud edges look whispy but stylized, and fabric indentation looks a little like digital camouflage when zoomed in to extreme limits. It's an odd way to capture images because at the surface level, on your initial review of taking the image, the detail looks to be an incredibly realistic capture of a moment, though zooming in breaks any notion of realism because of its clearly computer-enhanced granular detail. I discovered that Clicking the "108" button at the top also activates the 108MP Ultra HD mode, which I wrongly assumed was standard, so do not forget to toggle that on when going for a Pulitzer prize with your incredible photography. Doing so allows the 9000 x 12000 (roughly 11MB) resolution pictures to be taken as opposed to the standard 3000 x 4000 (roughly 4MB) so I understand why that is NOT toggled on by default as the space to compression ratio makes a heck of a lot more sense for the average phone user. As a direct result, I could not upload any of the 108MP images here directly as they were far too big in file size to be allowed to be attached as an image, so below is the native resolution Xiaomi 11t vs iPhone 8 Plus shots and their zoomed details for comparison:

Xiaomi 11T:

Vectorized looking zoomed-in detail.

iPhone 8 Plus:

Blurrier iPhone zoomed-in detail.

As I have seen many reviewers worth their salt do before me, I wanted to benchmark this phone the second I fired it up. Using Geekbench 5 I ran a number of tests to find out just what this device was packing, and with a single-core score of 789 and a multi-core score of 2941 the 11T MediaTek chipset sits alongside the likes of Samsung's Galaxy Note 20 Ultra with its Exynos 990, which isn't too shabby, and the Vulkan score of 4957 again rides just above that of the S20 Ultra, but it sits just below the S21 Ultra 5G's 5684. In terms of raw power, you can see a lot of Snapdragon-based devices sitting at the top of those charts. The MediaTek equivalent is good overall, probably slightly cheaper when manufactured and offers reliable performance over superior performance; however, Xiaomi are certainly pushing it to its limits in this non-Pro model, and with fantastic results. Considering my 2017 A11 Bionic iPhone 8 Plus musters a reasonable 914 single-core, a paltry 1915 multi-core, and a decent 3906 on metal; the 11T is a big upgrade in comparison to my 4-year-old hardware, thanks to the Dimensity chipset.

I also attempted to try out the Xiaomi PC Launcher, based purely on the fact this device runs MIUI 12.5.X. Using the C-Force CF008 dock from my previous review, I connected the power, an HDMI and the phone, then started the app. Unfortunately, the app itself seems to be incompatible with the 11T hardware as the phone reboots, and nothing changes. The C-Force Dock also doesn't seem to play nicely with this unit either, constantly going into charging mode and then disconnecting itself every few seconds. Obviously, you can cast your 11T's screen to a suitable media mirror, but the ability to run in desktop mode with a keyboard and mouse could have been a game-changer for productivity. Perhaps the Pro model will support this, or perhaps a software update could help enable this in the future.

Emulation on this device is relatively smooth too, with Dolphin running at an extremely playable frame rate in the majority of games tested, such as House of the Dead Overkill, Super Mario Galaxy 2, and New Super Mario Bros. Wii all holding steady enough frame rates to play at native resolution and not require any adjusting to settings whatsoever. However, there is the occasional dip here and there, and a stutter or two when the action gets really intense, but overall a very playable experience for a whole slew of titles. I often like to use the Gamecube's F-Zero GX and AX as my go-to games for testing updated builds of Dolphin, and as is the case with my Nvidia Shield TV; F-Zero on Dolphin doesn't play well at all, with a high degree of stuttering and choppiness, so be aware that not all games are emulated equally, and user experience will vary. Using the latest dev build of Dolphin available it was very much plain sailing to quickly configure it and get in-game very swiftly, in addition, you can connect the 11T to your laptop with the supplied cable and put it into file transfer mode, rather than image transfer (PTP) mode, to copy across any files you need. Retroarch was a similar story, using Retroarch Plus for 64-bit devices is easy as pie to get most games running, however, Dolphin had issues running as a core, so perhaps running individual emulators is better for this device, as even Retroarch's archaic "Retro Rating" picked up the 8-Cores and Vulkan spec yet gave it a rating of "-1" which clearly makes no sense at all. Because I'm not a huge fan of onscreen buttons, I also tested out my MOGA XP5-X to use with the phone, and within seconds of the initial Bluetooth pairing screen, I was easily able to get it connected, with buttons mapped and the game up and running in next to no time at all. Expect to read my full review of the MOGA XP5-X very soon!

I am completely in awe of this device. It has singlehandedly drawn me across from the Apple ecosystem and I am more than willing to use this device as my main mobile. Voice calls and video calls are exceptionally clear and crisp in the audio department, simple to respond to, easy to adjust, and a doddle to launch, even for the uninitiated or newcomers to the Android way of life. Texting, and using social media are all facilitated well with intuitive icons for adding photos or taking videos, editing images, and a very easy-to-use keyboard with dictation and more. Every aspect that you would expect to be not quite as smooth as on an Apple device, or not quite as fleshed out, has been made easy and fully bolstered with robust and necessary options. I didn't experience any of the reported issues with MIUI, and the whole experience was incredibly enjoyable! Apart from a few small gripes such as not knowing if the device is waterproof at all, and no expandable memory; the Xiaomi 11T is a spectacular device that puts a massive amount of functionality into one gorgeous, package. With prices starting at EUR 499 for 128 GB and EUR 549 for 256 GB, this is a great investment for those who want a range of incredible features without having to shell out for Apple's latest flagship, the iPhone 13, which should be available next month.