My early Black Friday pick is this superb Android phone with excellent cameras

If you want to buy the best smartphone possible for the lowest price possible, Black Friday is the time to search for one. The famous sales event is already underway, as it's now on for most of November in the UK rather than just on one day, which is traditionally the first Friday after Thanksgiving in the US.

At Express.co.uk, we've been hunting down the best tech deals in these early Black Friday sales, and one particular offer over on Amazon caught my eye, as it's a great deal on a phone that has only been on the market for a month or so.

Amazon is selling the Xiaomi 15T Pro with 12GB RAM and 256GB storage for £449, a £200 discount on the phone's £649 RRP. Amazon lists it as a "limited time deal", with no indication how long it will last.

It's rare to see such a good offer on a phone that has only just come out, and even more so on one that was already a good deal at full price.

As I described in my review of the Xiaomi 15T Pro, the device punches well above its price point - though of course, £649 is already a lot to pay for a phone. But some smartphones in 2025 command prices close to double that, the 15T Pro distils everything you actually need in a premium Android smartphone and delivers on all fronts.

It really has very few flaws. The design is a little dull, but aside from that you get a bright, sharp 6.83-inch AMOLED screen, triple cameras including a 50MP main and 50MP periscope telephoto, the latter of which has a 5x optical zoom you rarely see on phones of this price.

I found these cameras utterly wonderful to use. I captured shots I simply couldn't do on my iPhone 16, for two reasons: photo processing and that telephoto lens. Xiaomi partnered with Leica to make the 15T Pro, and it has excellent film filters and processing to give shots a contrasty, film-like look that I prefer.

View the Xiaomi 15T Pro at Amazon

With the optical zoom lens, I had much more versatility in cropping in, especially with street photography, where you can get candid shots of people and of architecture to quickly snap some arty shots. It's a phone that inspires creativity in the camera app, which isn't true of every phone I test (and I test many every year).

There's also a 12MP ultra-wide and 32MP selfie camera, with everything powered by the very capable MediaTek Dimensity 9400+ chipset. The 15T Pro launched with Android 15 but is getting the update to Android 16 this month, and Xiaomi will give you five full years of Android updates and six of security updates to 2031, meaning this is an excellent purchase for long-term use.

For £449, this is a very solid early Black Friday deal. You may well want to wait to see what the rest of November brings in terms of discounts on other phones, especially if you had your eye on an Apple, Samsung or Google phone.

But Xiaomi phones, despite being less well known, are more than good enough to rival those brands, and the 15T Pro is one of my favourite phones of the year. I would pick it over the Samsung Galaxy S25 or Google Pixel 10 this year, and that's thanks to a great all-round phone with a superlative and interesting camera system.