Xiaomi's Android almost-flagship has a camera worth shouting about

You might reasonably expect the best camera on a phone to be one of the most expensive, and you'd certainly be right that the priciest handsets often have great optics. The £1,099 iPhone 17 Pro, £1,249 Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra and £1,099 Oppo Find X8 Pro all have superlative snappers, but they also might require you to take out a loan to get your hands on them.

While not exactly a budget device, the £649 Xiaomi 15T Pro I've been testing for the past two weeks has thoroughly impressed me with its capable triple cameras that more than hold their own against the aforementioned flagships.

Xiaomi also has its own eye-wateringly expensive £1,299 Xiaomi 15 Ultra that I said had the best smartphone cameras I'd ever used back in April. But for exactly half that price, I recommend most price-conscious mobile photographers consider the 15T Pro.

A quick note on Xiaomi's releases: though the Xiaomi 15 Ultra and £899 Xiaomi 15 came out earlier this year, the 15T and 15T Pro launched in September aren't quite sequels. Xiaomi's T series are a complement to the high-end models, released six months afterwards with cheaper prices and different designs, with specs a rung underneath the brand's very best.

But the Xiaomi 15T Pro has a 5x optical telephoto lens, which is better than the zoom on the pricier Xiaomi 15 and, for my money, is better than the zoom capabilities of the trio of £799 phones the iPhone 17 (which has no telephoto lens at all), the Samsung Galaxy S25 and the Google Pixel 10.

Part of this is down to Xiaomi's ongoing partnership with camera brand Leica. The camera app on the 15T Pro lets you choose exclusive Leica filters to apply to your photos, as well as two overarching shooting modes of either 'authentic', which is film-like, or 'vibrant' which is more of a processed smartphone look.

With the right tweaking, results can be very good indeed and to my eyes are much more stylistically and creatively interesting than what you can get out of the stock camera app from competing phones at this price.

The main lens is a 50MP sensor with an aperture of 1/1.62, optical image stabilisation (OIS) and 23mm equivalent focal length. You can tap 1x in the camera app to cycle through 23mm, 28mm and 35mm crops all using the lens though to get different lengths, and you can even set your preferred one as default.

The 5x telephoto lens is also a 50MP sensor with f/3.0 and OIS and an equivalent 115mm focal length. This is actually quite zoomed in for portrait photos of people as you have to stand quite far back. Because of this, I found the 15T Pro better for - and great at - street photography. Whether it was people or architecture or otherwise, I took some shots when exploring Munich that I was very pleased with.

The below gallery has shots I captured using the phone's main and telephoto lenses.

The telephoto lens is the main reason to choose this phone. The clarity of shots combined with the processing and versatility on offer with the hardware and filter software is remarkable. It's a much better zoom lens than the comparatively pitiful 10MP 3x optical on the Galaxy S25, and it is of better quality than the 10.8MP 5x on the Pixel 10.

For a price that undercuts those phones, the Xiaomi 15T Pro also offers a Pro mode including the ability to shoot in RAW file format for more flexible editing on your computer afterwards - something Apple restricts to its £1,099+ iPhone 17 Pro models.

The 12MP ultra-wide camera is less impressive and more perfunctory, but something's gotta give. Plus the 32MP selfie camera makes up for it with sharp, clear images for photos or video calls.

Xiaomi still insists on a busy software skin with its HyperOS version of Android, but it's less invasive than in years gone by. I happily adapted to using the phone, and to my pleasant surprise found HyperOS more minimal and out of my face after some tweaking than Samsung's latest iteration of One UI.

If you plump for the 15T Pro, you'll get five years of Android OS updates and six of security patches, so you'll still be kicking in 2031. That's a year behind Samsung and Google's industry best, but the reality is no phone will really last seven years without some serious care and a battery replacement. It's good to see Xiaomi almost keep pace here.

The design of the 15T Pro is improved over last year's starkly utilitarian 14T Pro, but it's still a little pedestrian. I like the grey colour of my review sample, though there are black and mocha gold versions if you prefer. It's a very wide phone, which for my smaller hands made for a device impossible to use with one paw.

Battery life is excellent at about a day and a half of regular use, but there's no charger in the box - frustrating when the phone would charge at zippy 90W speeds if I had one. That's faster than any phone sold by Apple, Samsung or Google. Other corners cut include the good but not quite top-of-the-line MediaTek Dimensity 9400+, though I found performance faultless, and the 144Hz OLED screen, while excellent, is not LTPO tech, so can't tune down to 1Hz for the best energy efficiency, which would improve battery life.

But these are nitpicks.

If I had £800 to spend on a phone I would seriously consider the £649 Xiaomi 15T Pro above pricier and more well known rival handsets. It's a little non-descript in appearance and a bit wide to boot, but offers an unbeatable photography package at this level. In a year when the photos from Samsung Galaxy and Google Pixel devices have lost character and film-like glow, Xiaomi is stepping up.

The Xiaomi 15T Pro is available to buy now from Xiaomi