The Chinese brand Xiaomi has won its place under the sun with inexpensive and high-quality smartphones, which tech bloggers around the world called "tops for their money." However, times have changed, the market has corrected everything, competition with Samsung, Apple has become tougher and the company has been criticized for its pricing policy. And then in the fall of 2021, Xiaomi announced a return to basics and presented the Xiaomi T line of camera phones. As in the good old days, it included almost flagships worth a third of the iPhone Pro Mx, which claim the forgotten characteristic “top for soy money”.


A typical representative of the Xiaomi T series looks like this: it is a smartphone costing up to $500 - 600 with a powerful, but far from the top-end processor of the Dimensity 1200 caliber, 8 GB of RAM, capacious internal storage, modern communication modules, fast charging, optional water protection of the case (note: most often IP53), NFC, USB-C, etc. Since honey is not taken from the air, Xiaomi usually saves a little on hardware and display, so despite the power of the conditional T11 Pro, it will still be inferior in performance to the flagships of the current generation from Samsung, Apple and other AAA brands. To confirm the status of "top for the money", Chinese engineers are striving to surprise users with the capabilities of a photo and video camera. For example, the T11 Pro is equipped with a full optical zoom, which is rare for its price segment, while the Xiaomi 12T Pro is the company's first 200-megapixel smartphone.

Xiaomi followed the classic version of filling the lineup, releasing a standard version of the T smartphone and a modification with the Pro prefix. Often there is no fundamental difference between them in terms of price or basic features, it’s just that firmware usually uses slightly more powerful hardware, secondary features are one step higher, and the camera is a little better. For example, the 11th generation firmware is based on slightly more productive processors and can shoot slow motion video in 4K resolution at 60 frames per second. For comparison, the regular Xiaomi 11T can do the same, but at 30 fps. The same can be said for the 12th generation: identical screens, design and basic features, but at the same time, smartphones with the Pro prefix have more processing power and are equipped with higher-level cameras.