Verdict on the Xiaomi 13 Pro: The premium smartphone concept has not been fully fleshed out

In our review, the Xiaomi 13 Pro impresses with very strong performance values and a high-quality design. The camera system of the Xiaomi 13 Pro, which was developed in cooperation with German company Leica, makes use of the Sony IMX989 in 1-inch format. The resulting photos have extensive image dynamics and lots of detail. Thanks to the 1-inch sensor, backgrounds are mostly blurred in photo mode, but we occasionally found the photos to be a little too blurred.

The AMOLED display from Samsung is also decent and not only offers extremely high brightness, but also adaptive control of the refresh rate between 1 and 120 Hz as well as a high resolution of 1,440p. At present, not many other Android smartphones can keep up with the Xiaomi 13 Pro. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 performs very well in our benchmarks and usually leaves the competition behind.

As with the Xiaomi 12 Pro or Mi 11 Ultra, we find two hardware-related flaws incomprehensible. Firstly, the Chinese manufacturer has once again installed a slow USB 2.0 port without image output in the 13 Pro. Secondly, the front camera with 32 MPix and a resolution of 8,000 x 4,000 still doesn't offer a UHD option. Both are missing features that don't do justice to a premium smartphone.

Are you interested in a high-end smartphone that offers rapid charging speeds and high performance? Then take a look at our detailed review of the Xiaomi 13 Pro for further information.

But is it worth importing the Xiaomi 13 Pro from China? If using English as the interface language doesn't bother you, or you are confident enough to install external APKs or even a global ROM on your own, you can certainly save a lot of money with an import. Moreover, you should ideally be living in urban areas, as the Chinese version lacks LTE bands 20 and 28.