Xiaomi 14 Review: A Leica Rangefinder Makes For a Good Phone

Xiaomi 14 packs some of the best hardware we have seen on a smartphone in 2024.

Xiaomi's premium phones have really good cameras. It established photography as a major focus in 2020 when it decided to launch the Mi 10 and then the Mi 11 Ultra, but 2022 was a bit of a disappointment as the Mi 12 Pro was not on the same level as the Mi 11 Ultra. Then came the Xiaomi 13 Pro, which was the company’s first phone with Leica optics in India.

Xiaomi’s co-engineering partnership with Leica might not be as integrated as the one Vivo has with Zeiss, but it is going places, and the Xiaomi 14 is a testament to that. It also packs some of the best hardware we have seen on a smartphone in 2024. It is not as large as most other modern premium smartphones, and has fewer compromises from a hardware perspective than even the Samsung Galaxy S24.

So, the Xiaomi 14 looks like a strong contender in the compact phone market and for those looking for the best camera, but beyond these categories, could it simply be the best Android smartphone available in India right now? Read on to see it manages a home run.

Design & Build Quality

The Xiaomi 14 is very reminiscent of the iPhone in recent years. In terms of design, it comes closest to the iPhone 12-14 because of its flat sides, front and back. The camera island is in the top-left corner of the rear. So, zero marks for originality, but hey, it is a very good design, particularly for a phone that has a 6.3-inch display.

One of the advantages of this design is that it feels premium, just like an iPhone. You do get that feeling of using an expensive device. This is also not a light phone, at 193g and it’s rather chubby at 8.2mm, so you get that feeling of holding something substantial. I like its ergonomics, but some people will be expecting it to be lighter.

On the other hand, the flat iPhone-like frame digs into the palm, which can be uncomfortable for some. The sides don’t have a matte finish or a subtle bevel like the iPhone 15 or the Galaxy S24 series for ergonomics, but these are minor quibbles. This is a very well-made phone, which is compact and attractive. The stealthy Matte Black finish looks really classy, if a bit dull, but then there are Classic White and Jade Green options as well. I do wish the Xiaomi 14 was also available in brighter colours with a polished frame.

Xiaomi has used Corning Gorilla Glass Victus on the front and standard Gorilla Glass on the back. The frame is made out of aluminium, and this phone is also IP68 water and dust resistant.

Hardware & Display

The Xiaomi 14 also packs a lot on the hardware front. You get a 6.3-inch display which has a 2K resolution. The screen is gorgeous as it leverages OLED technology with a high refresh rate of 120Hz, Dolby Vision, and up to 3,000 nits of brightness. This is a lovely screen which is amply bright and reproduces colours well. It works well for watching films like Dune on, especially with Dolby Vision. It is also great for reading text. Also, it’s a relief that all of this can be done one-handed, considering how phones these days have become ginormous.

That being said, I'd still slightly prefer the display on the Samsung Galaxy S24 which feels brighter under direct sunlight despite having a lower peak brightness level. But still, the Xiaomi 14 is exceptionally good, it's more a case of the Samsung being the master of display tech.

Performance & Software

The Xiaomi 14 is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC. It has 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM, and up to 512GB of UFS 4.0 storage. So if you're comparing it directly with the Samsung Galaxy S24, which has a slightly inferior Exynos chip, less RAM and less storage,, it's got it beat on paper.

Reality is not far from what we see in the specifications on paper. The Xiaomi 14 feels fast, like really fast. In synthetic benchmarks, it has the Samsung beat and also gets the jump on the MediaTek Dimensity 9300-powered Vivo X100. I name these two phones apart from the iPhone 15 because these are its main rivals.

The Xiaomi 14 has a pretty big vapour chamber to keep the SoC cool, which makes it a delight to play games like Call Of Duty: Mobile on for long periods. Sustained performance is a forte of this phone. On top of this, Xiaomi's improvements with HyperOS truly shine, making the day-to-day usage experience fluid.

That said, if you're looking for clean software and general simplicity, HyperOS is not what the doctor ordered. With OneUI 6.1, Samsung has taken a ginormous leap on the software side, adding generative AI capabilities along with promising seven years of software updates. Xiaomi's HyperOS has become less convoluted compared to the mess MIUI had become, but it still has a long way to go. There’s less bloatware, but bloat remains and some of its core apps, like for example the Music app, still threw up notifications before I had even loaded any music on it. When you're gunning for the premium segment, this kind of a software experience doesn't cut it.

Camera

Xiaomi’s Leica-powered camera setup is the main reason potential buyers will be interested in the Xiaomi 14. It has a triple 50-megapixel camera array with custom Leica optics and software, which basically means it is one of the best-equipped camera phones of 2024 – certainly the best-equipped compact phone. The star of the show is the primary camera, which has a 1/1.3 inch 50-megapixel Omnivision Light Hunter sensor with a shallow f/1.6 aperture and sophisticated optical stabilisation system.

The rest of the cameras are quite similar to what the Xiaomi 13 Pro had, which means a 50-megapixel ultra-wide camera with an f/2.2 aperture and 114-degree field of view, and a 50-megapixel 75mm telephoto camera, which is also optically stabilised, providing 3.2X optical zoom with an f/2.0 aperture.

As for photo quality, I can happily say that the Xiaomi 14 blows away the iPhone 15 and Galaxy S24 in the department of still photography. Leica's tuning and optics give photos that vintage film camera feel. This phone takes crisp shots in daylight with lots of natural depth. At nighttime, it also takes superb shots, balancing good lighting while giving photos a "vibe" and never really overexposing them.

The 3.2X optical zoom on the telephoto camera really helps in getting close for macro shots or even just street photography. It is a sharp lens, which is absolutely on a different planet than the one on the Galaxy S24. When the Leica-inspired portrait mode is enabled, one gets to choose from an assortment of bokeh effects, which also have different focal lengths — like documentary, swirly bokeh, and portrait — allowing one to take not only realistic shots but also very artistic ones.

Like the Vivo X100 and its Zeiss LUTs and filters, Leica has equipped the Xiaomi 14 with its vintage filters, which really do a good job. All of this expertise is also transposed to the ultra-wide camera, which takes really sharp and artistic shots, though one could argue that a wider field of view would've been handy. The 32-megapixel selfie camera is also quite decent for selfies.

Now that we have established the Xiaomi 14 is extremely good for taking photos and is easily amongst the top three camera phones for stills right now, I have to say its video capabilities have arguably taken a bigger jump, in subtle ways. The stabilisation system for the video is just fabulous, and 4K video quality is great, which means this is one of the few Android phones that I would want to create videos with. Even so, its video capabilities won’t put it in the same league as the iPhone 15 series.

The 3.2X telephoto lens is also brilliant for getting close to subjects while shooting video. There’s also a film mode and very decent video bokeh, which might fool some people into thinking a video has been shot using a DSLR. One thing that Xiaomi never gets enough credit for is its suite of editing options both for video and photos. Xiaomi provides a very impressive video editing app, which I believe is better than iMovie on the iPhone or anything that Samsung provides, and it also has the advantage of Leica filters.

Audio capture with this phone is also impressive, with smart noise reduction, dimensional immersive audio, and a live in-ear monitor mode. The quality of the audio recorded with this phone is impressive, as witnessed in this reel in which I am playing guitar.

Battery Life & Other Features

One of the reasons that compact smartphones aren’t always competitive is poor battery life. Samsung has already kind of solved this problem with the Galaxy S24, which easily lasts through a day. The Xiaomi 14 is on another level, though. It will last a day and a half on a single charge. It is thoroughly impressive. Its 4,610mAh battery is quite big for the size of this phone, and there’s also support for 90W fast charging. Yes, this phone can be juiced up fully in 31 minutes. It also does 50W wireless charging and 10W reverse wireless charging. So, it charges quicker than any phone in its segment — not just by a bit, but by a country mile, while providing better battery life.

There are also other niceties here — the haptic feedback is top-class when typing. Its fingerprint scanner is quick, so you whip the phone out, and even if you don't like to use face recognition, the fingerprint scanner will work in a jiffy. Its stereo speakers are loud and clear; an impressive feat for such a compact phone. It supports USB 3.2 data transfer speed, which means you can really use this phone as a content creation tool. Its call quality is sublime. I used this phone in Delhi NCR and Mumbai on a Jio SIM; and there was, nothing out of the ordinary to report here.

Verdict

The Xiaomi 14 is an impressive phone, and it gets a lot right at the right price. Users aren’t being shortchanged on RAM or storage. It has a unique size that I particularly love, but it has none of the flaws that compact smartphones usually have — like poor performance, poor battery life, or compromised cameras. It provides every nicety that a premium smartphone should, and then goes a couple of steps further with exceptional cameras and excellent battery life.

Xiaomi’s software could be better as it lacks the polish and cleanliness that one expects from brands that aspire to be in the premium lifestyle market. Its design could be a little more original, but at the end of the day, for most users, if a phone is meant to be functional more than anything else, then at less than Rs 70,000 right now in the Indian market, the Xiaomi 14 is the ultimate tool.