Xiaomi 15T review: A premium mid-range phone with a flagship feel
The Xiaomi 15T features a sleek, minimalist design with a matte fibreglass back. Picture: Noel Campion.
The Xiaomi 15T might sit below the 15T Pro, but it’s no lightweight. After two weeks of daily use, I’ve found this phone delivers plenty of flagship-style performance, design finesse, and battery endurance, all without the steep price tag.
The Xiaomi 15T has a clean, understated design, but it feels well-built and relatively light at 194g. The matte fibreglass back feels premium, especially in the elegant black finish I tested, and it resists fingerprints far better than glossy alternatives. The flat frame is plastic rather than aluminium or glass, but it’s well put together and never feels cheap in the hand.
The squared rear camera module doesn’t protrude as much as on some flagship models, while the phone's overall proportions make it comfortable and practical to use one-handed.
The 15T is IP68-rated and can withstand submersion to a depth of three metres in fresh water. That’s an impressive safety net in this price range.
The 15T’s 6.83-inch OLED display is bright, sharp, and smooth, with a 1.5K resolution. It’s a great size that makes everything, from videos to apps, look fantastic on the expansive screen. While its refresh rate has dropped slightly from last year’s 144Hz to 120Hz, the real-world difference is negligible. Animations, scrolling and gameplay feel fluid, while the adaptive refresh rate scales down to conserve power when you’re reading or idling. It also uses 3,840Hz PWM dimming to reduce screen flicker, making it easier on the eyes during long sessions or nighttime use.
This is a 12-bit colour panel with HDR10+ and Dolby Vision support, covered by Gorilla Glass 7i for added durability. The viewing experience is excellent, with colours that pop without looking oversaturated and contrast levels that are deep and rich.
This is a top-notch display with a peak brightness of 3,200 nits, delivering superb outdoor visibility, even in bright daylight.
You also get a stereo speaker setup with Dolby Atmos support that delivers surprisingly decent audio. There’s a nice balance of highs and mids, though bass response could be fuller. Still, for movies, gaming or music, the sound quality is decent.
The under-display fingerprint scanner is quick and accurate, though I’d prefer it positioned slightly higher up. Xiaomi also includes an IR blaster, letting you use the phone as a remote control for compatible home electronics, a handy feature that’s becoming increasingly rare.
The 15T packs a versatile triple-camera setup with a 50MP main sensor, a 50MP 2x telephoto zoom and a 13-megapixel ultra-wide lens. The main camera captures detailed, well-balanced photos in daylight, with natural-looking colours and excellent dynamic range thanks to aggressive HDR. There’s a touch of softness in finer details, but overall image quality is excellent. Portrait mode works well, with realistic skin tones and good background separation.
At night, the phone automatically engages Night mode, which produces clean, sharp images with minimal noise and well-handled highlights. Occasionally, warm tones appear slightly exaggerated, but results remain impressive.
The 2x telephoto lens is surprisingly capable for mid-range hardware, with Xiaomi applying computational photography wizardry to upscale images. It delivers sharp, detailed shots with pleasing contrast, even though the dynamic range doesn’t quite match that of the main sensor. You can stretch to 5x digital zoom, though the results start to look soft and less defined.
The 13MP ultra-wide camera performs decently in good lighting, capturing accurate colours and respectable detail. At night, its limitations become more obvious, with visible softness and noise, but the results are still usable for social sharing.
The 32MP selfie camera is a solid performer at this price, capturing sharp details with good contrast, dynamic range, and colour accuracy.
Video recording is supported up to 4K at 60 frames per second across all three cameras, and footage from the main sensor is sharp, vibrant and well-stabilised. Even low-light video looks clean, with decent colour accuracy and minimal noise.
Powering the Xiaomi 15T is the MediaTek Dimensity 8400 Ultra, a capable upper-midrange chipset designed for both performance and efficiency. My review device came with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, but there’s also a 12GB model with 256GB of storage.
Day-to-day use feels fast and responsive, with no noticeable lag or stuttering, even when multitasking or switching between demanding apps. Gaming performance is decent. I had a quick playthrough, and titles like Genshin Impact and Call of Duty: Mobile ran smoothly at high settings, though you may notice a slight drop in sustained frame rates during longer sessions.
While the phone does get warm under load, it never overheats. In extended stress tests in 3D Mark, CPU performance remained around 79% of peak, indicating consistent optimisation. Storage options include 256GB or 512GB of UFS 4.1 storage, ensuring speedy app loading and file transfers, though there’s no microSD expansion slot.
The 15 T has a 5,500 mAh battery that easily lasts a full day and a half of heavy use. It supports 67W wired charging that can fill the battery from empty to 70% in just 30 minutes, with a full charge taking under an hour. The only omission is wireless charging, which remains exclusive to the Pro model.
The phone runs HyperOS 2.0, Xiaomi’s latest interface built on Android 15. The experience is sleek and customisable, with clean animations and a host of smart AI-powered tools for image editing, voice translation and summarising on-screen text. Xiaomi promises four years of major Android updates and six years of security patches, which puts it on par with most premium brands. While HyperOS is feature-packed, it’s still quite busy out of the box. Some users may find the number of pre-installed apps excessive, but most can be easily uninstalled or hidden.
The Xiaomi 15T delivers excellent value — pairing premium build quality, a stunning display and dependable performance with long battery life and solid cameras. It may lack wireless charging and the extra polish of flagship devices, but at this price, it’s a superb all-rounder that punches above its weight.
€649 in Black or Rose Gold with 12GB RAM and 256GB storage. Buyers can grab special launch offers: a free Xiaomi Smart Projector L1 from Harvey Norman and Vodafone (1 Nov 2025–2 Jan 2026), a €200 Xiaomi voucher from Tesco Mobile (3 Nov–1 Dec 2025), or a free Redmi 15C 5G from Eir (1 Nov 2025–2 Jan 2026).
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