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- The Xiaomi 15T Pro has received its first major discount, dropping from the retail price of £649 down to £449
- We rated this phone five stars in our review and gave it our Recommended award
- A big part of its appeal is the excellent camera suite, including 8K video and a fantastic 5x telephoto lens
We’ve come a long way since single-digit MP phone cameras, and now you can get a whole suite of sensational shooters without breaking the bank. Of all the mid-range phones that I’ve tested and reviewed, my favourite cameras were found on the Xiaomi 15T Pro. Not only are detail and colours exquisite, you also get brilliant zoom shots from a 5x telephoto lens and pristine night photos, too.
This was my top-rated mid-range phone for photography back when it launched for £649. That was only a couple of months ago and yet it’s already received its first discount in the Black Friday sales – and it’s a doozy. You can now snatch up the Xiaomi 15T Pro for just £449, saving a whopping £200.
What did we like about it?
As mentioned, the biggest appeal here is the cameras. The 5x telephoto lens captured incredible zooms shots in my testing – just see the crisp and colourful ladybird on a leaf below – and the 50-megapixel main camera delivered outstanding results in all light conditions, with broad dynamic range in daylight and keenly retained detail after dark.
I was also very impressed with the massive 6.83in AMOLED display. In my testing, this screen proved to be capable of phenomenal brightness, hitting over 2,500 nits when displaying HDR content. It also nailed my colour accuracy testing, delivering an average Delta E of just 1.07 – we’re looking for 1 or under here, so that’s right on the money.
In fact, it’s not just the display that is easy on the eyes, the design as a whole is gorgeous. Especially in the luxurious Mocha Gold colourway shown in the pictures here. It’s also decently robust, with an aluminium frame, IP68 dust and water resistance and Gorilla Glass 7i sitting over the display.
Performance was on the better end of things, too, with the Xiaomi 15T Pro’s MediaTek Dimensity 9400+ chipset delivering decently competive speeds in the CPU tests and framerates over 60fps in the GPU benchmarks. Battery life is solid, if not the best in this price range, lasting for over 27 hours in our standard looping video test.
Any drawbacks?
Xiaomi consistently delivers on the hardware front, as detailed above, but software never quite reaches the same heights. I find Xiaomi’s HyperOS launcher to be cluttered and unnecessarily messy, lacking the streamlined and accessible nature that makes a software feel user-friendly to me.
Beyond the aesthetics, Xiaomi’s software also doesn’t get as long a support roadmap as some of the competition. The Xiaomi 15T Pro is set for four years of OS updates and six of security patches, which is fine enough but rivals offer more – the Honor 400 Pro is set for six of each, for instance, while the Google Pixel 9a gets seven.
Those are very minor niggles in the grand scheme of things, especially when we’re faced with such high-class cameras for such a low price. If you’re sick of dull, blurry photos or skin tones looking all wrong in your portrait shots, this Xiaomi 15T Pro deal is the best way to upgrade your camera game on the cheap.
To see what other cheap handsets are on offer this Black Friday, head over to my roundup of the best Black Friday phone deals. Or, have a browse through our main Black Friday deals hub, where we have the biggest discounts on mattresses, TVs, laptops, coffee machines and much more.
