Well, this is Xiaomi’s most hyped flagship, Xiaomi 14.
Now, there’s a general trend if you have seen, both Samsung and Apple concentrate their highest
features on the Ultra and Pro series which cost way more at 1.2, 1.5 lakhs, god damn.
So, the flagship space between 60,000 to 80,000 is now empty.
Enter this, Xiaomi 14, Xiaomi’s best smartphone for India, they have literally put the
best specs you can get, you get the latest Snapdragon 8th gen 3, 50 megapixel triple
camera, 90W fast charging, 12GB RAM, 512GB storage.
So the question that has to be asked is, is this phone only hardware specs or is it really
that good? We’ll find it out together. Now you get the phone, case that’s a good black case,
Paperwork, 120W charger, USB A to Type-C cable, same ejector tool, like come on, it’s a flagship phone, take away the charger.
On a serious note, the charger that you get with the phone also supports PD charging
so see here you can even charge your laptop with the same charger so you don’t need
carry these bulky laptop charger in the back. Now, there are three really
interesting things with the phone where Xiaomi has actually built exclusively
for this phone and this is what makes this Xiaomi 14 stand out. Number one
display. Now, the Xiaomi 14 has a 6.36 inch 1.5K AMOLED display and if you
compare it with compact phones like S24, it is slightly bigger but the round
edges, thinner bezels make it much more one-handed phone and still
compact. It’s like between large phones and compact phones. Now, this display is a
8 billion colors, all top notch specs. It can go really bright up to 3000 nits peak brightness
but in our testing, it is reaching around 2000 nits in HDR videos and even in outdoor
conditions under direct sunlight, the display does appear very bright. Another thing is
the display dynamically goes from 1Hz all the way up to 120Hz, so if you’re doing
nothing on the screen, it goes to 1Hz, 10Hz and once you start browsing the display,
automatically goes back to 120Hz to give you that smooth experience. This really
helps save battery life. But one thing that I noticed is that by default, it runs
YouTube at 60Hz so the scrolling on YouTube feels a bit jittery but you can go back to
display settings and force apps to run at 120Hz which solves the problem.
Now the CA display flickers a lot less like seen in a dark room at very low brightness
if you see the iPhone flickers quite a lot as compared to the Xiaomi 14.
Now this flickering is what strains your eyes at night when you use a smartphone
it’s good that brands are now paying more attention to this feature.
In fact the Xiaomi 14 has some TUV rain lens protection for flickering, blue light
emission and all of that. Now the second most exclusive thing was software.
This is the first Xiaomi phone to come with Xiaomi’s new OS, Hyper OS 1, based on Android 40.
And right out of the bat, Hyper OS feels much more responsive.
See this animation of opening and swiping away apps is much more smoother to scroll through the phone.
And I noticed this is the latest MIUI 14 phone and if you see,
the OS storage is much higher compared to this HyperOS phone.
So right out of the bat, HyperOS is much more lighter and a lot of bugs are improved.
Like see, if I show MIUI, if I pull down this notification shade on Prime Video app,
it is transparent and this is only with Prime Video app.
But if I do the same now on HyperOS, it’s solved, proper translucent.
So, HyperOS is now starting to roll out on Xiaomi phones, here are the phones that will receive HyperOS.
Now, there are a few pre-installed apps in this phone, it’s like Facebook, Snapchat, Netflix.
So, apart from Facebook, I use all of them, so I just uninstall Facebook, bye-bye.
Also, Xiaomi is promising 4 years of Android updates and 5 years of security updates,
and HyperOS comes with Google dialer, but now if you go to Google dialer,
settings, call recording, you can now mute the
this call is now being recorded option. It now does this simple.
Moving on to the third and the best part of the phone, camera.
So you get a 50 megapixel triple camera setup.
You see here, the main sensor is changed.
You get a 50 megapixel Xiaomi exclusive Light hunter 900 camera sensor
and the photos from it are sharp.
Now, the photos come out good.
If you zoom in, it has enough details.
At some instances, it felt like it tries to brighten the face slightly.
However, the overall HDR in the photo is pretty good.
Now, one really good thing that I noticed, like see here this is the iPhone and if I
open the camera app, you see here the sky is all blown out and just to show you the
difference, see here Xiaomi 14 side by side with the iPhone, in the Xiaomi 14, the sky
looks properly exposed in the camera preview itself.
So the Xiaomi 14 has one of the best HDR previews that I have seen so far.
Talking about the best, you get a 3.2x telephoto camera, this is a floating camera
so it can adjust focus to take telephoto as well as macro photos.
First of all, the telephoto pictures come out really cool, like if you click photos
In portrait mode you get about 13 filters, my favourite is this Leica black and white
filter like we just had access to Leica camera and Leica black and white is super famous
and the portraits contrast here came out good, you also get these portrait presets like 35mm
documentary, swirly bokeh, it uses the main and telephoto lens to shoot these four
portrait styles, now the same telephoto camera also acts as macro camera, you can get
so close to the subject and since this is telephoto and not ultra wide angle,
the background blur in the portrait photo is so good.
Like we bought this watercolour and tray and if you see the macro shots from this,
you can also do 4K 60fps macro videos and have a look at this.
Now, talking about videos, you can go 8K 24fps on the main camera,
but you’ll be mostly shooting in 4K 60fps and this is how the video quality, stabilization and mic quality is.
And on the front, you get a 32MP selfie camera that can finally, finally record in 4K 60fps.
Now, I found the selfie camera by default is a bit wide, but the skin tone and everything came out pretty close to natural.
Also, Xiaomi doesn’t advertise this much, but you get a bunch of AI features in the gallery app like object eraser, adding a background blur, etc. Here’s my favorite, you can change the sky in your photos like this and here’s a side by side.
It’s so good that the original photo is clicked in daytime and here’s the night version of it.
Like if I don’t tell you, it’s very hard to believe that it’s an AI photo.
And I was watching the Hyper OS launch, they have a lot of generative AI features coming up with updates where you can generate photos, etc. smartphone companies are now going all-in on AI in 2024.
Now, before we get to the conclusion, the Xiaomi 14 comes with the latest Snapdragon 8th Gen 3.
You also get 12GB LPDDR5X RAM and 512GB UFS 4.0 storage.
I believe this is the only variant that will come in India.
And we ran all benchmarks and from AnTuTu to CPU throttling to 3DMark, it scored very good, like a flagship.
Now, one thing to point out is, in one of the benchmarks, the temperature went up to 50 degrees. That’s a bit high, but it didn’t throttle.
Now, we also played Genshin Impact for some time and the performance was good.
You also get 4,610 mAh battery which is good enough for one day usage like for a medium user.
It charges at 90W though, so you get 100% in about half an hour. Here’s what I can understand.
If you compare spec by spec or even in terms of practical usage,
the Xiaomi 14 has one of the best spec at this price.
And I really like brands launching their best phone or flagship phones under 1 lakh rupees.
So, we just got to know the pricing of the Xiaomi 14.
it is 69,999 with bank offers and everything, it comes down to 59,999.
So, let me know what do you think about a Xiaomi flagship at this price.
