Xiaomi 14 and 14 Pro Preview: The Android series to beat?

Last year, Xiaomi launched leather and ceramic options for the 13 Pro model, but there is no information on exotic materials for the 14 series other than the aforementioned titanium. Xiaomi offers a new type of glass to protect the front and back of the Xiaomi 14 series, called Ceramic Glass. This is a proprietary material developed by the company in-house, much like the Kunlun glass that Huawei uses on its models.

We still don’t know how the new Xiaomi 14 and 14 Pro feel in hand, but we do know the available colors.

Xiaomi 14 colors:

• Jade Green
• Black
• White
• Pink Snowy Mountain

Colors of the Xiaomi 14 Pro:

Xiaomi 14 screen

Luminosity Wars

The Xiaomi 14 Pro features a 6.7-inch AMOLED display, LTPO 4.0 technology and new C8 electroluminescent material. The latter allows the phone to reach 3,000 nits of peak brightness when needed, while LTPO technology gives you that dynamic refresh rate of 1 to 120 Hz. The resolution of this panel is 1440 x 3200 pixels, which which gives a pixel density of around 522 PPI. The vanilla Xiaomi 14 comes with a smaller 6.36-inch AMOLED display with 1200 x 2670 resolution and 460 PPI. This one also offers a peak brightness of 3,000 nits and a refresh rate of 120Hz. It seems the only differences between the two panels are size and resolution, but we’ll have to run our display test to be sure. sure, so stay tuned for that.

Xiaomi 14 Camera

Variable aperture makes its debut

The Xiaomi 14 series Leica-branded camera systems come with some exciting new features. There’s a new LightFusion 900 image sensor with a relatively large 1/1.3″ size and an impressive native high dynamic range of 13.5 EV. Above the Pro model’s 50 MP main camera There is an aperture that allows a variable aperture from f/1.42 to f/4.0, which should give more flexibility, especially in Portrait mode.

The ultra-wide camera has also been redesigned on both phones. The resolution is now 50MP. The third sensor in the system is a telephoto lens (3.2x optics), featuring Leica’s 75mm floating lens technology and allowing users to focus from 10cm to infinity. The Xiaomi 14 and 14 Pro can record video up to 8K at 24fps, with some more practical resolutions and frame rates also available.

Nothing speaks louder than some samples in this category, so we’ll add a detailed description of each camera once we get the phones in our hands.

Performance and references of the Xiaomi 14

The cream of the Qualcomm crop

THE Snapdragon 8 generation 3 is on duty in both phones, and there is already some videos showing Geekbench scores (2134 single results and 6757 multi-core results). We have to test the phones ourselves, but from what we’ve seen so far, the new Snapdragon 8 generation 3 could take the fight to Apple and make the A17 sweat. The storage situation is as follows: The vanilla Xiaomi 14 comes with a base memory configuration of 8/256 GB, and you can get it up to 16/1 TB. The Xiaomi 14 Pro starts at 12/256 GB and also goes up to 16 GB of RAM and 1 TB of storage.

Stay tuned for some hard numbers once we run all the benchmarks.

Xiaomi 14 HyperOS

Another interesting addition to the new features of the Xiaomi 14 family is the transition from MIUI to HyperOS. Both the Xiaomi 14 and Xiaomi 14 Pro run Android 14, with the aforementioned HyperOS on top.

Stay tuned for a full breakdown of this new UI, but according to Xiaomi, the new OS focuses on four main pillars: low-level refactoring, cross-end intelligent connectivity, proactive intelligence and end-to-end security.

⁠⁠⁠AI algorithms and on-device neural network processing are the new hype in smartphone software, so expect some clever AI tricks from HyperOS. There’s no word on software support, however, but if we extrapolate from Xiaomi’s latest generation of flagships, we should expect at least four years of major OS updates.

Xiaomi 14 battery

There’s a 4,880 mAh cell inside the Xiaomi 14 Pro and a smaller 4,610 mAh battery inside the base model. These are pretty decent capabilities, considering the overall size and thickness of both devices and the fact that both phones also support wireless charging.

We can’t comment on battery life, but common sense tells us we can expect at least a full day of heavy use, with benchmark testing to follow soon. On the charging front, we have 120W fast wired charging support on the Pro model and 90W on the vanilla.

The quoted 0-100% charging times are 18 minutes for the Xiaomi 14 Pro and 31 minutes for the Xiaomi 14. We will test these as well. Meanwhile, both phones also support up to 50W of wireless charging power and 10W of reverse wireless charging to charge QI-enabled gadgets.

Xiaomi 14 models

Xiaomi has a tradition of launching the vanilla and Pro versions of its series and then later bringing out an Ultra model to showcase some super cool features. We expect this to be the case with the Xiaomi 14 series as well. The sad thing is that most of the Ultra models are hard to get; they are intended only for the Chinese market. Hopefully, this year’s Xiaomi 14 Ultra will make it onto the global stage.

Competitors of the Xiaomi 14

Clearly, Xiaomi is targeting the upcoming Galaxy S24 series, given the Snapdragon 8 generation 3 processor and all the AI ​​tricks on board.

Another set of indirect competitors is, of course, the iPhone 15, with the usual caveats applying here as well. Xiaomi phones are hard to get in the US and, being Android devices, they mainly compete with other Android phones. That being said, we can definitely see people choosing a Xiaomi 14 Pro instead of a iPhone15so there is also that.

Xiaomi 14 summary and final verdict

The Xiaomi 14 and Xiaomi 14 Pro look very solid on paper and promise a tough fight for the Android crown. With the Galaxy S24 series with the launch getting closer and closer, the competition will be as fierce as ever.

Will all the new hardware and software tricks be enough to give the Xiaomi 14 series an edge over the competition? It’s too early to tell, but things look very promising.