Xiaomi 14 Civi phone review. Check the price, technical specifications, camera, hardware, software, battery, charging speed and other features of the Xiaomi 14 Civi phone.

Xiaomi 14 Civi review

Introduction

The Xiaomi 14 Civi is the latest in the company’s Civi series, which are premium mid-range smartphones that focus on camera features and performance.

This particular model we are reviewing is the Indian variant of the Xiaomi Civi 4 Pro, which was a Chinese exclusive that was released a few months ago.

Specifications of Xiaomi 14 Civi at a glance:

• Body:  157.2×72.8×7.5mm, 178g; Glass front (Gorilla Glass Victus 2), glass back or silicone polymer back (eco-leather), aluminum frame.
• Display:  6.55 inch AMOLED, 68B color, 120Hz, Dolby Vision, HDR10+, 3000 nits (peak), 1236x2750px resolution, 20.02:9 aspect ratio, 460ppi.
• Chipset:  Qualcomm SM8635 Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 (4nm): Octa-core (1x 3.0 GHz Cortex-X4 & 4x 2.8 GHz Cortex-A720 & 3x 2.0 GHz Cortex-A520); Adreno 735.
• Memory:  256 GB 8 GB RAM, 512 GB RAM 12 GB; UFS 4.0.
• OS/Software:  Android 14, HyperOS.
• Rear Camera:  Wide (main): 50MP, f/1.6, 25mm, 1/1.55″, 1.0µm, PDAF, OIS;  Ultra-wide: 12 MP, f/2.2, 15 mm, 120 degrees, 1.12 µm;  Telephoto: 50 MP, f/2.0, 50 mm, 0.64 µm, PDAF, 2x optical zoom.
• Front Camera:  Wide (main)  : 32MP, f/2.0, 26mm, 1/2.8in, 0.8µm, AF;  Ultra Wide Angle  : 32MP, f/2.4, 100˚, 1/2.8in, 0.8µm.
• Video recording:  Rear camera  : 4K@24/30/60fps, 1080p@30/60/120/240/960fps, 720p@1920fps, gyro-EIS.  Front camera  : 4K@30fps, 1080p@30/60fps; Gyro-EIS.
• Battery:  4700mAh; 67W wired, PD3.0, 100% in 40 minutes (advertised).
• Connectivity:  5G; two SIM cards; Wi-Fi 6; BT 5.4; NFC; Infrared port
• Other specifications:  fingerprint reader (under the display, optical); Stereo speakers

Like previous Civi phones, the Civi 14 comes with multiple cameras. There are three cameras on the back, including a 50MP main camera, a 2x 50MP telephoto, and a 12MP ultra-wide camera. On the front, there’s not one, but two 32-megapixel cameras, one with autofocus and one with ultra-wide. These are all Leica-branded, so you get all the Leica-specific features like color science, filters, and watermarks that you’ll find on Xiaomi’s premium models.

But it’s not all about the cameras. The phone is powered by the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 chip, which has proven to be quite capable. You can also get up to 12 GB of memory and 512 GB of storage. The phone also has a 6.55-inch AMOLED display with quad-curved glass and support for Dolby Vision. And finally, the 4,700mAh battery supports 67W fast charging.

All this comes with Xiaomi’s usual enticing price tag. Let’s check the performance of the phone.

Unboxing

The Xiaomi 14 Civi India review unit comes in the Leica-branded Xiaomi 14 series black packaging. Inside the phone, you’ll find a 67W charger and a USB-A to C cable.

Inside the box is a hard clear case, which is nicer than the usual soft silicone ones you usually see. The frame is quite thin and adds to the minimal dimensions of the phone. It’s also nice that it has an open bottom edge that makes navigation gestures easier to use.

Design

The Xiaomi 14 Civi really impresses in the design department. For starters, the phone is relatively compact, thin, and lightweight, which is an absolute joy to hold and carry.

Part of this is the way the front and back glass panels curve around the frame. On the front, it has what Xiaomi calls a quad-curved display, where the glass is gently curved on all four edges. This is then repeated on the glass back, which, along with the intentionally thin aluminum side bezel, makes for a phone that’s deceptively thin in the hand.

The Shadow Black model shown here has a frosted back glass. The back is very good at preventing smudges and fingerprints and is also easy to clean if it gets dirty. The blue cruise model has a two-tone textured back glass.

Then there is the Matcha Green variant, which uses a vegetable leather back with a glass panel. The glass panel has a random pattern that is unique to each one produced, making each model look slightly different. The Matcha Green version is 0.3 mm thicker than the glass models, but also about 2 grams lighter.

The back of the phone also houses the camera array at the top, which is placed inside a circular arrangement with a curved ring around it and covered by a single glass panel. Inside, the Leica logo is surrounded by a glittery design. Each circular element within the set also has a beveled edge.

In addition to being comfortable to hold, the Xiaomi 14 Civi is also very well-built. The solid aluminum frame and solid glass panels create a compact-feeling screen in the hand that’s somehow surprisingly lightweight. But as nice as the phone looks and feels, there’s a notable lack of any explicit IP rating for the device, meaning it likely only has the bare minimum level of intrusion protection you can get today.

I wish it wasn’t because otherwise, it’s hard to complain about the design and overall the Xiaomi 14Ci does very well in this department.

Display

Xiaomi 14 Civi has a 6.55-inch AMOLED display with a resolution of 2750 x 1236 and 120 Hz. The screen is described as quad-curved, but that’s just the Corning Gorilla Glass Victus 2 on top, not the panel itself, which is flat. The curved glass looks like a curved display that smoothly merges into the frame on all four edges. However, there is still a noticeable edge to the metal frame as it protrudes slightly from the sides.

The maximum brightness of the display is 3000 nits, which is usually achieved for a very short period or in a very small part of the display. Xiaomi doesn’t specify the maximum stable brightness figure, nor what you can achieve manually via the slider. Regardless, the phone’s screen is very bright and remains perfectly legible even outdoors.

120Hz refresh rate works well enough too. You can set the phone to set the refresh rate automatically or set it manually for each app. You also get a high refresh rate in games, but only one of the games we tested (BGMI) supported this feature.

The display supports the full range of settings you’ll find in premium Xiaomi phones. You can choose from the original PRO color preset, which claims to reproduce true colors through color calibration, Vivid, Saturated and advanced settings. The last option allows you to select your desired color space and adjust color balance, hue, saturation, vibrance, contrast, and R, G, and B gamma.

Using the original PRO color preset, colors look fairly accurate. However, the default white balance is on the cooler side and you have to change the color temperature to warm, which fixes most of the color issues.

The Xiaomi 14C also supports HDR10, HDR10+, and Dolby Vision, the latter of which is fully supported in the Netflix app. The display has excellent HDR and Dolby Vision performance with high brightness and excellent color reproduction.

The Civi 14’s display has a pill-shaped notch at the top for the two cameras. Although it’s not as big as the new iPhones, it can still be distracting when watching videos and especially when playing games.

Finally, the display has a built-in fingerprint sensor. The sensor is located at the bottom of the screen and is not in the most convenient place. That said, it works well and is fairly fast.

Overall, the Xiaomi 14C’s display is excellent and one of the most impressive things about this phone.

Battery and charging

The Xiaomi 14C has a 4700 mAh battery, which is small for a phone in this class. The phone supports 67W fast charging and comes with a similarly rated charger in the box.

In terms of charging speed, Xiaomi 14 Civi has released impressive numbers that can be fully charged in just 44 minutes. However, the phone does get quite warm, and picking up the phone mid-charge is not very pleasant.

The phone allows you to charge at full speed or perform optimized charging, which learns your usage pattern and adjusts the charging speed and duration at night. In addition, you can also enable the limited charging feature, which charges the phone only up to 80% to preserve battery health.

As for battery life, we didn’t do our full battery life test on this handset. But during our normal usage, the phone lasts for about a day, so it needs a daily charge.

Speakers

The Xiaomi 14Ci has a set of stereo speakers, one at the bottom and one inside the phone. The speaker of the phone also has a grill on the top of the phone for better sound reproduction.

The speakers have midrange and high-frequency performance which is good for watching YouTube videos and such. However, when listening to music, there is a distinct lack of low frequencies throughout almost the entire audio range, except at the top, where there is a faint hum. Unfortunately, by then, the overall sound has changed drastically and doesn’t sound very good. However, the speakers sound reasonable.

The phone lacks a headphone jack, but both active and passive USB audio dongles work well.

Software

Xiaomi 14 Civi runs on HyperOS, which is the company’s updated layer on top of Android 14. For this device, Xiaomi promises three years of basic Android updates and four years of security updates.

HyperOS is Xiaomi’s replacement for its previous MIUI. The company claims a major overhaul under the hood, but on the outside HyperOS looks more like a more advanced version of MIUI, with a few extra customization features. We’ve already covered the operating system in our review, so check it out for more details.

More broadly, HyperOS is very familiar to anyone who has used MIUI before. On the one hand, anyone who isn’t adventurous and just wants something they’re already familiar with will appreciate this. On the other hand, this major OS update looks like someone has downloaded a new theme to MIUI, which has already appeared in Tooth. More importantly, this version does nothing to shy away from the heavy and obvious influence of iOS, and if anything leans into it harder.

Talking about the Xiaomi 14 Civi specifically, our review unit was relatively light on bloatware for an Indian unit. We counted six non-native apps, all of which could be uninstalled, and the rest were either Xiaomi or Google apps. You can also uninstall many Google apps and some Xiaomi apps, although others can only be hidden or disabled.

Unfortunately, Xiaomi still insists on installing bloatware through its GetApps app store, which almost every time you open it, prompts you to install the entire bloatware of the Xiaomi 14C. In addition to the regular recommended apps, Xiaomi’s original apps still have ads in weird places, and you have to manually go into the settings of each one to disable them along with any other recommendations.

Look at this example in particular. Did Xiaomi really need to show ads instead of album art when playing some locally stored music? No. But did he choose to do so anyway?

The existence of all these factors is still a black point against the overall experience of Xiaomi software. It’s not too much that you want your premium smartphone to not be inundated with non-native apps and ads at every opportunity, and then struggle to figure out how to get rid of them. This software review has been around for as long as the company has been around and has shown interest in addressing it.

Read more:  Xiaomi 14 Ultra review, price and technical specifications

Performance

Xiaomi 14 Civi uses Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 chipset. Our review unit had 12GB of LPDDR5X memory and 512GB of UFS 4.0 storage, all impressive stats for a phone in this price class.

This phone performed very well in daily use with smooth scrolling and responsive user interface. Sometimes they got slow which prevented a perfect score, but these seem like software optimization issues that can be addressed in a patch.

This phone also performs well in games. While it can’t hold a constant 60fps in modern titles like Wuthering Waves and Zenless Zone Zero, you can lock to 30fps for a constant framerate or keep the settings at 60. The touch of the phone gets a little warm, but it keeps.

In our throttling test, the Xiaomi 14 Civi performed well. In the CPU test, the phone maintained 79% of its peak performance after an hour of use. Similarly, in the 3DMark Wild Life GPU stress test, the phone retained roughly 82 percent of its peak performance after 20 loops.

This shows that despite the relatively compact dimensions of this phone compared to some of its competitors, the device is quite capable of spreading the heat of the Snapdragon 8s 3rd generation chip. In fact, it fared better than the Realme GT 6, which had the same chipset in a larger body and still struggled in the GPU stress test.

  
CPU throttling test • 3D Mark Wild Life stress test

Camera

The Xiaomi 14 Civi has a Leica-branded triple camera system on the back that includes a 50-megapixel f1.63 main camera that uses the OmniVision Light Hunter 800 (OVX8000) sensor and a 50-megapixel f1.98 2x optical camera that Samsung uses ISOCELL. JN1 sensor and 12MP f2.2 ultra-wide camera that uses the OmniVision OV13B sensor. On the front, there are two identical 32-megapixel sensors, one of which has a wide-angle lens with f2.0 aperture and autofocus. The other has an ultra-wide lens with f2.4 aperture and fixed focus.

The camera app on the Xiaomi 14 Civi is fairly sophisticated and almost on par with flagship devices. You get all camera modes including movie mode with a fixed 21:9 aspect ratio. Being a Leica-branded device, you also get Leica’s Vibrant and Authentic modes, along with plenty of Leica color filters. You can also add Leica branded watermarks through the camera app or after the fact through the gallery app. Images are captured in the Display P3 color space and use the Pro HDR display feature to show a wider dynamic range in the Gallery app, but this was buggy on our unit and sometimes didn’t work.

  
  
Xiaomi camera app

Jumping straight to image quality, we were really impressed with the performance of the main camera. The image has excellent detail with no sharpening or ringing artifacts. Most of our images were taken in the Leica Vibrant profile, which, despite its name, can be considered the default. In this mode, colors are slightly saturated but largely accurate.

   
   
   
Original 50-megapixel samples

You’d expect the Leica Authentic mode to have more accurate colors, but that’s not always the case. When enabled, the camera takes a second to assess the scene and, depending on what’s in the frame, can often produce more saturated colors than the Vibrant setting. In addition, an aggressive image is also applied to each photo, which is very situational and does not look great on any image. As such, this mode is better suited for more artistic shots rather than general photography.

   
   
50-megapixel prime examples: Vibrant Leica • Authentic Leica

In terms of dynamic range, the images were not very impressive. While highlights are captured correctly, the camera tends to crush shadow detail to achieve its high-contrast look, which is the same across all phone cameras regardless of which camera mode you’re in.

The camera app allows you to adjust the measurement for the average frame or any face that may be in the frame. If the camera detects a darker skin tone in the photo, it can cause the image to be overexposed.

   
Original 50-megapixel samples

Further, the 50-megapixel telephoto camera also impressed us with its details and overall image quality. There’s also a key for 4x zoom, which produces respectable results, but anything beyond 5x doesn’t look good outside the phone’s screen.

   
   
2 50 megapixel telephoto models

Finally, the ultra-wide camera also produced beautiful images despite the relatively low resolution of 12 megapixels.

   
   
12-megapixel ultra-wide samples

As for the front-facing cameras, they both do well, if a little over-sharpened. However, for some reason, both cameras insist on saving images at full 32MP resolution, which isn’t actually the native resolution of this sensor, which is designed for 8MP binned output. The result is images that are captured internally at 8MP and then upscaled to 32MP, which doesn’t look great when viewed at 100% scale. Even if they were native 32MP images, it could be argued that no one needs that level of resolution to capture their face.

 
32 megapixel selfie • Ultra wide 32 megapixel selfie

Overall, the Xiaomi 14C is a fun camera to shoot when it comes to stills. Saturated colors and contrasting images favor a lighter and more artistic style of photography, encouraging you to be more creative. There isn’t even an option to turn any of these off unless you shoot exclusively in RAW. How you feel about it depends on what kind of photos you like to take, but we think most people will probably enjoy the photos that come out of this phone.

Finally, when it comes to video, the Xiaomi 14C captures beautiful 4K videos from its main camera with excellent image stabilization and detail. Colors and dynamic range are similar to still images with saturation and contrast.

The main problem with video from the main camera is that the autofocus is shaky

4K video from the telephoto camera is also very good and didn’t have the autofocus issues of the main camera.

Finally, the ultra-wide also produced decent-looking 4K clips, although the problem here was noise, which was visible in shadow areas and didn’t go away even when shooting in bright light.

Summary

The Xiaomi 14 Civi has us covered on several fronts. The device feels well-built with an incredibly comfortable grip. This screen shines with its high brightness indoors and outdoors. While adjusting the camera’s color may be a bit of a matter of taste, it undeniably encourages a more artistic and less mundane style of photography with plenty of rewards if you choose to do so. Other aspects such as performance and charging speed are also significant in their own way.

As for the downsides, the software remains a sore spot, especially the intrusive ads and constant insistence on installing even more bloatware than it does. Battery life is also unremarkable on this device, and some may find the lack of an explicit intrusion protection rating a deterrent.

For a starting price of INR 42,999 (or INR 47,999 for the model we tested), we can live with some of these shortcomings considering how compelling the rest of the package is. Even the existence of expensive models of Xiaomi 14 makes Xiaomi itself a little suspicious due to the price difference and the lack of justifiable added value.

All things considered, we think the Xiaomi 14 Civi might be the best all-round package the company has to offer right now and one of the best options in its price range.

Source: GSMARENA.COM