Xiaomi 13T Pro long-term review

Performance, smoothness

The 13T Pro is powered by the Dimensity 9200+ SoC, which is no longer MediaTek's latest and greatest, having been superseded by the Dimensity 9300. Don't let that fool you, however, into thinking that it's some kind of performance slouch. It's not. For all day-to-day activities that don't involve heavy games (this reviewer is not a gamer), this thing absolutely flies, and side-by-side with a device powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, there's absolutely no perceivable difference in performance for normal tasks. You will absolutely not have any regrets, at least not rational ones.

When it comes to smoothness, the story is a bit more complicated. This is a very smooth phone, however it's not smoother than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2-powered 13 Pro which we've reviewed long-term last year. It's on par, which makes it share the crown with that device for 'smoothest phone we've ever reviewed long-term' up until this moment.

Of course, that shared achievement may not last a long time, with a lot of contenders coming out using the newer Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and Dimensity 9300, but we'll let you know when or if things change. For now, this - and the Xiaomi 13 Pro alongside it - is the smoothest, with the OnePlus 11 coming in as a very close next contender. When we review the OnePlus 12 long-term, that may well change, we'll have to wait and see.

Battery life, charging

Battery life has been outstanding on the 13T Pro, but unfortunately we can't show you the usual screen on time screenshots, because Xiaomi's HyperOS simply doesn't let us. We've encountered the exact same problem on MIUI 14 on the Poco F5 a few months ago, and it's still baffling to us why Xiaomi would choose to remove this important feature - all the while Samsung, in its latest One UI 6, has actually improved the way it shows screen on time, allowing you to get a one-week history of it even.

So you'll have to take our word for it. From a 5,000 mAh cell on a high-end phone, with our use case, it doesn't really get better than this, battery endurance-wise. On our busiest days (which are more intense than the usual ones described below), we never once finished with less than 25% battery left. On an average day, we finished with about 30-35% still left, and that's a great reserve to have for when unexpected things happen.

Battery life section doesn't have screen on time

Our use case involves about 12-16 hours off the charger in a day, with primarily Wi-Fi 6 connectivity, about an hour on 5G, Bluetooth always on, an hour or two of listening to podcasts or music via TWS earbuds, an hour or so of phone calls via TWS earbuds, and about 30 minutes of GPS navigation via Waze, with location always on along with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi scanning. Of course, if your use case is vastly different from ours, you will find yourself finishing a day with less remaining battery, or might even require a midday top-up.

Thankfully, the 120W charging makes that a breeze - the 13T Pro goes from zero to hero in 26 minutes in our testing, which is amazing and only surpassed by a few mere minutes by other devices (including, intriguingly, the 12T Pro which comes in at 23 minutes). The usual caveat applies here - to reach such speeds you need to use the bundled charger and cable - by the way, there's a charger in the box! Take that, Apple, Google, and Samsung!

Wireless charging was sacrificed on the altar of the 13T Pro's price point, and we don't miss it at all, especially considering how fast the wired charging is, but you might, and unfortunately there's nothing you can do about it.