Taipei is a city built for a telephoto lens, though it doesn’t announce itself that way. You notice it slowly. The way the mountains sit behind the apartment blocks in Xinyi, close enough to feel and too far to reach with a normal phone. An old man on a scooter threading between night-market stalls, gone before you’ve raised the camera. The tiled detail high up on a temple roof that you’ll never get closer to.
It’s that Xiaomi has put a 50MP 5x periscope telephoto, a 115mm-equivalent lens, into a phone that starts at Rs 59,999. The main camera is a 50MP, f/1.7 unit on a 1/1.55-inch sensor, and in daylight it pulls bright, punchy frames with wide dynamic range. But at 6.59 inches it’s compact by the standards of a year where nearly everything else is a slab, and a week of carrying it alongside a camera and two more handsets made me glad of it.
The headline isn’t the main camera, though we’ll get there. That kind of reach has lived higher up the lineup until now. Five-times optical zoom, optically stabilised, in this segment, more or less doesn’t exist. Most phones here give you 2x or 3x at best, or they fake the reach with crop-and-sharpen trickery that falls apart the moment you pinch past the comfort zone. The 5x is the reason to buy in, but it isn’t shooting alone. It has a habit of leaning the contrast a little heavy in awkward indoor light. That’s a long-running Xiaomi trait, and one edit seemed to undo it each time. The soft spot, on early evidence and as on every phone in this family, is the 12MP ultrawide. Fixed focus, small sensor, and you can see it give way in that same lane trio, softer and flatter than the frames beside it. Daylight is kinder to it, but it’s clearly the third wheel here. The selfie camera is fine and not a lot more; with no autofocus, the group shots I took softened at the edges. Step away from the cameras and the 17T is the rare phone that hasn’t grown to fill your whole hand. It’s not a small phone, exactly.
HyperOS 3 on Android 16, slick and feature-stuffed, still shipping with a layer of bloatware to clear out on day one. The software is what you get on any Xiaomi these days. Five years of OS updates, seven of security patches, for the record.
On the 17T it’s the chip, the Dimensity 8500-Ultra. Every phone at this price has a tell, a moment the budget shows through. It’s no embarrassment; there’s 12GB of RAM and up to 512GB of storage backing it, and the phone felt quick the whole time I had it, apps snapping open, camera processing brisk, casual gaming untroubled. I’d want longer with it before saying much about the ceiling.
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