When you’re looking outside the mainstream brand names for a flagship phone it can be difficult to figure out what you should go for. You want something with the best features and capabilities, but you want to avoid the big names like Samsung and Apple. For 2023 there are two very clear alternatives:the OnePlus 11andthe Xiaomi 13 Pro.
Both offer great specs and performance, triple camera systems, big displays with smooth refresh rates and fast charging. However, the Xiaomi is quite a bit more expensive. So which should you consider of the two, and does the extra money charged for the Xiaomi mean a much better phone?
OnePlus 11 5G
OnePlus went back to its roots for the latest flagship phone, delivering a fast, smooth phone that doesn’t cost a fortune. It’s a powerful device with clean, customisable software and a brilliant display. It’s cheaper than the Xiaomi too.
Xiaomi 13 Pro
Xiaomi’s top-tier global flagship is a masterclass in design and high end features, offering a stunning bio-ceramic finish, a fantastic display and a stunning camera system. If it weren’t for the MIUI software it’d be almost perfect.
Your first hint that the Xiaomi is worth more than the OnePlus comes in the design and build of the phones. The bio-ceramic material used on the back of the Xiaomi 13 Pro is more expensive and time-consuming to work with. It is more durable though and it looks genuinely stunning, giving off this dark, smoky but glossy appearance when you catch it in the light. It attracts fingerprints like nobody’s business though and is very slippery.
It also gives the phone more weight, and when you go from one to the other, the Xiaomi feels heavier and chunkier. There’s not much in it, in terms of pure measurements, but there’s enough that you can feel the difference. In truth, both phones are quite big and will force you to stretch to get to those elements in the top corners and edges of the display if you don’t have the one-handed mode enabled.
Both use Gorilla Glass Victus on the front and yep, we’ve managed to scratch them both in a very short space of time.
From a purely aesthetic standpoint, the Xiaomi’s combination of the seamless ceramic finish ramping up the edges of the camera housing and the simple, minimalist lines separating the lenses give a classier look to the 13 Pro. We find it more visually appealing than the big, round, almost glittery camera unit on the back of the OnePlus.
From a more objective standpoint, however, the Xiaomi wins out on water and dust resistance. It’s been certifiedto IP68 levels, and that means it can be submerged in water for up to 30 minutes and still be okay. OnePlus 11 only has IP64 rating, which means it’s certified for spray or light rain. It is worth noting though that - while it isn’t officially certified higher - it’s built to cope with everyday accidents and spills. Being dropped in a basin full of water likely won’t harm it.
Displays and software
Moving on to displays, it’s safe to say both companies were keen to equip their phones with the best panels available. Both are large, 6.7-inch displays; technically Xiaomi is 6.73-inches, so it’s slightly bigger. Regardless, they’re similar,offering 120Hz refresh ratesthat can adapt efficiently between 1hz and 120Hz. They’re also both QuadHD resolution - although you do have to enable that in the settings. It means they’re both really crisp and detailed displays.
They’re both really bright too, although Xiaomi does trump the OnePlus here, with its peak 1900 nits of brightness being able to hit higher peaks than the 1300 nits on the OnePlus. Most of the time you won’t notice this until you’re outside in bright daylight, which has been a little limited here in the UK recently. Crank them up to full brightness, and you can definitely see the extra light coming from the Xiaomi.
In their default vivid settings, the Xiaomi 13 Pro also seems to balance colours a little better and doesn’t push the oranges and reds as hard as the OnePlus display. However, both phones do let you customise the colour temperature and profile to suit you.
Now we have to mention software, if only briefly because it does make a difference to the usability of the devices, and in some ways impacts the experience quite negatively - at least when using the Xiaomi.
MIUI 14 on the 13 Pro requires a lot of taming to make it less frustrating and more intuitive. It constantly tries to force you to use its wallpaper carousel feature on the lock screen, even putting a shortcut to the button on the lock screen and constantly pestering you with notifications to switch it on.
If you want to change your notification sounds or ringtones, or even select a new wallpaper, Xiaomi forces you into its Theme Store, rather than just giving you a simple menu to choose from some pre-installed options. It’s a real pain when you want to change the look or sound quickly, as is the split control centre and notification set-up when you first use it. you may bring back an older style view where quick settings and notifications come down with the same swipe, but it’s not the default. What’s more, Xiaomi doesn’t make use of the Android ability to match system accents to your wallpaper.
OnePlus’ approach is very different. It’s lightweight, customisable, bloat-free, and just makes more sense. If we had to choose based purely on the software experience, it’s an easy decision.
Performance, battery and charging screens
Now speaking about performance and speed, there’s really not much to separate these two phones. They’re both using theSnapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor, and both have fast refresh rate displays, and so the feeling on both phones is of smoothness and fluidity. They’re responsive, load games quickly, and generally don’t struggle with any game or app, regardless of how demanding it is.
Even with the in-display fingerprint sensor reliability the two are very evenly matched, and both feature a premium haptic motor system that taps subtly when typing on the keyboard or when you reach the top or bottom of a menu screen in the phone UI. There’s not a lot of difference here.
Where we - perhaps surprisingly - noticed more difference was in battery life. Despite its slightly smaller 4820mah battery - versus the 5000mAh battery in the OnePlus - it was the Xiaomi 13 Pro that seemed to go longer between charges. There wasn’t a huge difference, but enough that we noticed it.
It drained slower in standby mode and seemed not to drain as quickly when using intensive games or testing the camera. Both are comfortable getting through a full, busy day, but with our own moderate usage of 2-3 hours of music, social media and gaming, the OnePlus would often finish with somewhere around the 30 per cent mark left, and the Xiaomi would be between 35-40 per cent.
In truth, neither phone gave us battery anxiety as long as we had the chargers nearby because they’ll both charge really quickly. The 120W adapter with the Xiaomi 13 Pro is genuinely life-changing, delivering a full charge in 19 minutes. OnePlus isn’t far off with a full charge in 25 minutes with its 100W charger.
What it meant, in reality, was we never charged them overnight. We’d just wait until they hit below 20 per cent, then usually plugged them in for 10-15 minutes, and carried on with a virtually full battery again. Where Xiaomi does offer a difference is that it has wireless charging. Even that’s relatively quick, with 50W speeds delivering a full charge in 35 minutes with the proprietary wireless charger.
Both of the phones have a triple camera system, made up of a primary, ultrawide and zoom. And the first thing we noticed is that the zoom on the Xiaomi is more capable. Its 3.2x floating zoom lens combines with the higher resolution sensor offer up to 70x zoom, where the OnePlus goes up to 20x. Of course, on both phones, once you get to those extremities, the quality of the image is quite poor, looking more like a watercolour painting than a photo. However, the quality falls off much sooner on the OnePlus.
As for overall image qualities, regardless of which lenses we were comparing, in most conditions, OnePlus’ results had a more artificial feel to them. Caused primarily by that over-sharpening in the processing that gives pictures a contrasty edge, delivering unnatural textures and colours at times, particularly in the shadows.
Xiaomi on the other hand seems to do a better job of making details and textures look more real. The other thing we like is that it offers two different image styles or colour profiles to choose from, both created with Leica. There’s an authentic mode and a vibrant mode, with the former being a bit more muted and natural, and the latter offering slightly more saturation and contrast. Although, never to the point where it gets extreme. Still, we often found shadows a little too dark from the Xiaomi.
If you’re wanting a phone that’s good for close-up and macro shots, the Xiaomi is the better phone here. If only because when it automatically switches to macro, it focuses quickly and easily, and is more reliable. The OnePlus would often switch between macro and not macro, jumping between two lenses, and even on the right lens it’d sometimes struggle to focus. It’s not impossible to get it working, it’s just slower and less consistent than the Xiaomi.
In our testing at night, with the phone set to night mode, the Xiaomi was fantastic when using the primary sensor. Its larger size and bigger pixels combine to offer far better light capture than the OnePlus, and delivered pictures with a lot less noise. However, it didn’t seem to process images with the same level of light lifted from the darker parts of the image from the ultrawide and telephoto, sometimes to the point where it may as well not have a night mode at all on the second and third lenses.
However, it is hiding a bit of a trick up its sleeve: Supermoon mode. Using the zoom lens, you can point it at the moon, zoom between 5x and 60x, and it’ll automatically process the image and make the moon look sharp and detailed. Not just a glowing, blown-out orb in the sky. It also has a really neat portrait mode, delivering four unique effects which change colours, sharpness and depth to offer different styles, including one really effective black-and-white mode.
In the end - in most instances - we liked the results that came from the Xiaomi more than the OnePlus.
Here’s perhaps the one area where OnePlus gets one over the Xiaomi: pricing. Xiaomi’s phone is an ultra-premium device with top-tier performance and capabilities and is priced as such. Using UK pricing as an example, it’s considerably more expensive than the OnePlus, breaching the £1000 price barrier. At £1,099 it’s nearly £400 more expensive than the entry-level OnePlus 11.
As much as there are hardware elements where the Xiaomi outperforms the OnePlus, and even - to an extent - has a better and more durable design, there are two things to consider before taking the plunge on it over the OnePlus 11. Do you really want to drop £370/€470 or so more to get it, and are you willing to live with the unintuitive software?
OnePlus returned to its original ethos of delivering a flagship experience at a price point that’s far more accessible than most of its rivals. You do have to put up with it missing a few luxuries like wireless charging and an official water-resistant rating, but it’s a far easier price tag to swallow than Xiaomi’s.
However, when it comes to almost every element - whether it be the battery performance, the display quality, the cameras or the build and design - we did prefer the Xiaomi to the OnePlus. So if you want the better of the two, the 13 Pro gets our vote.
