Xiaomi 14 Civi hands-on review

Design

The Xiaomi 14 Civi really impresses on the design front. For starters, the phone is fairly compact, thin, and lightweight, which makes it an absolute pleasure to hold and carry around.

Part of this is how the front and back glass panels curve around the frame. The front has what Xiaomi calls a quad-curved display, where the glass is gently curved on all four edges. This is then repeated on the back glass, which, coupled with the deliberately thin side aluminum frame, makes for a phone that is deceptively thin in hand.

The Shadow Black model shown here has a matte-finished back glass. The back is reasonably good at avoiding smudges and fingerprints and is also easy to clean if it does get dirty. The Cruise Blue model features a two-tone textured back glass.

Then there's the Matcha Green variant, which uses a vegan leather back with a glass panel inset. The glass panel has a random pattern, which is unique for each one that's manufactured, making every model look slightly different. The Matcha Green variant is 0.3mm thicker than the glass models but also about 2g lighter.

The back of the phone also houses the camera assembly at the top, which is placed inside a circular arrangement with a knurled ring around the sides and covered by a single glass panel. Inside, the Leica logo is surrounded by a glittery pattern. Each circular element inside the assembly also has a beveled edge.

Aside from just being comfortable to hold, the Xiaomi 14 Civi is also very well built. The sturdy aluminum frame and solid glass panels create a very dense-feeling slab in hand, which somehow also happens to be surprisingly lightweight. But as nice as the phone looks and feels, there is a notable lack of any explicit IP rating for the device, meaning it most likely only has the bare minimum level of ingress protection that you can get today.

We wish this weren't the case as otherwise there is hardly anything to complain about the design and overall the Xiaomi 14 Civi does extremely well in this department.

Display

The Xiaomi 14 Civi has a 6.55-inch, 2750 x 1236 resolution, 120Hz AMOLED display. The display is described as being quad-curved but this only pertains to the Corning Gorilla Glass Victus 2 on top and not the panel itself, which is flat. The curved glass gives the appearance of having a curved display that gently melds into the frame on all four edges. Having said that, there is still a tangible edge to the metal frame as it sticks out a bit from the sides.

The display has a claimed peak brightness of 3000 nits, which is usually achieved either for an extremely brief period or over a very small portion of the display. Xiaomi does not specify the sustained maximum brightness figure nor what you can achieve manually through the slider. Regardless, the display on the phone gets very bright and remains perfectly legible even outdoors.

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

The display supports the full range of adjustments that you'd find on more premium Xiaomi phones. You can choose from the Original color PRO preset, which claims to reproduce realistic colors through color calibration, Vivid, Saturated, and Advanced settings. The last option lets you pick the color space of your choice and adjust the R, G, and B color balance, hue, saturation, vibrance, contrast, and gamma.

Using the Original color PRO preset, the colors looked reasonably accurate. However, the default white balance is on the cooler side and you need to switch the color temperature preset to Warm, which mostly fixes all color issues.

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

The 14 Civi display does have a wide pill-shaped cutout at the top for the two cameras. While it's not as large as on the new iPhones, it can still be a bit distracting while watching videos and especially when playing games.

Finally, the display has a built-in fingerprint sensor. The sensor is placed quite low on the display and not in the most convenient location. That said, it works well and is fairly quick.

Overall, the display on the Xiaomi 14 Civi is excellent and one of the most impressive things about the phone.

Battery and charging

The Xiaomi 14 Civi has a 4700mAh battery, which is on the small side for a phone in this class. The phone supports 67W fast charging and a charger of similar rating is provided in the box.

In terms of charging speed, the Xiaomi 14 Civi posted some impressive numbers, with a full charge coming in at just 44 minutes. The phone does get fairly warm, however, and picking up the phone mid-charge isn't especially pleasant.

The phone lets you charge at full speed or engage optimized charging, which learns your usage pattern and adjusts charging speed and duration at night. Moreover, you can also enable the limited charging feature, which only charges the phone up to 80% to maintain battery health.

As for battery life, we did not perform our full battery life test for this hands-on. But during our typical usage, the phone would last about a day of use, thus requiring a daily charge.

Speakers

The Xiaomi 14 Civi has a set of stereo speakers, with one placed at the bottom and the other within the earpiece. The earpiece speaker also gets a grille at the top of the phone for better sound dispersal.

The speakers have good mid and high-frequency performance, which is fine for watching YouTube videos and such. However, there is a distinct lack of low frequency when listening to music in almost the entire volume range except right at the top, where you do get some audible low-end. Unfortunately, by then the overall timbre of the sound has changed drastically and doesn't sound very good. The speakers do get reasonably loud, however.

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