Xiaomi 15 Ultra review: One of the best designed phones I’ve ever seen

Xiaomi has two new phones on the way, having just announced the Xiaomi 15 and Xiaomi 15 Ultra at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. While these phones likely won’t go on sale in the U.S., both phones do have an awful lot to offer — especially the Ultra model. There’s very little that this phone actually does badly.

On paper, the Xiaomi 15 Ultra offers a lot of great specs. Powerful Leica-tuned cameras, including an absurd 200MP telephoto lens, a large battery, and all the performance of the new Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset. However, like all Xiaomi phones, there’s a big emphasis on the own-brand software, rather than a cleaner variation of Android.

As you’ll read in my full Xiaomi 15 Ultra review below, this is a fantastic phone to have. With a great screen, an incredibly smart and unique design, great cameras and a long battery life, the phone's a success basically across the board, even if it’s not as widely available as some might like.

Xiaomi 15 Ultra review: Specs

Xiaomi 15 Ultra review: Price & availability

Xiaomi has confirmed that the Xiaomi 15 Ultra will be released on March 4, but it’s safe to say that it won’t be officially coming to the U.S. There’s no reason why Xiaomi would start now. That said the phone will be coming to Europe, and presumably the U.K. as well. Prices will start at $1,499 ($1,599), the same as the Xiaomi 14 Ultra. While Xiaomi hasn’t confirmed, we assume this means the £1,299 starting price will be sticking around in the U.K. as well.

Xiaomi 15 Ultra review: Design & display

The Xiaomi 15 Ultra packs a 6.73-inch AMOLED display, offering a QHD+ resolution and an adaptive 1-120Hz LTPO-powered refresh rate. Other notable display features include support for HDR10+ and Dolby Vision, up to 3,200 nits of brightness and an ultrasonic fingerprint sensor under the display.

The screen itself is made from the second generation of Xiaomi’s Shield Glass, for an extra boost to durability. According to Xiaomi, this means the 15 Ultra has up to 16 times better drop resistance than 2023’s Xiaomi 13 Ultra. Other durability flourishes include IP68 water and dust resistance, a high-strength aluminum frame and an aerospace-graded glass fiber back plate. All to make the phone seem more robust, without being too heavy.

However, with different options weighing between 226 and 229 grams (7.97-8.07 ounces), the phone isn’t any lighter than the iPhone 16 Pro Max — and actually weighs more than the Xiaomi 14 Ultra and the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra. It feels pretty hefty in my hands, but not obnoxiously so. The 0.37-inch thickness also means this is far from the skinniest phone on the market, but again that’s not a dealbreaker.

I reviewed the Silver Chrome edition of the phone, which has been designed to look like an old-school camera. While I’ve always hated the abnormally large camera bumps Xiaomi tends to employ on its phones, this version actually looks a lot better than its compatriots. It almost looks like an old-school Leica camera, complete with the faux leather coating. I could do without the curved screen, though.

That particular display design has fallen out of favor with most major flagships, but it seems to be flourishing in China. To make matters worse, while some phone makers have utilized curbed displays to reduce the bezel, the Xiaomi 15 Ultra does have a relatively thick bar around its edges. Just slightly thicker than the already-chunky bezels on my Pixel 9 Pro — especially around the corners.

The screen does look very nice during use, and that is immediately apparent. Even if you’re just scrolling through apps and Google Play, the on-screen experience is surprisingly enjoyable. Naturally watching movies on Disney Plus is an experience I have no complaints about. The picture and colors are great, though the usual pitfall of excessive black space does irritate me. Sadly that’s just the downside of watching movies on your phone.

You do have to make sure you have the right viewing angle, though. As bright as the Xiaomi 15 Ultra is, catching it from a side-angle in sufficiently bright conditions turns it into a slightly-effective mirror. Looking at the screen more or less head-on is usually OK though.

Xiaomi 15 Ultra review: Cameras

The Xiaomi 15 Ultra packs in four rear cameras, alongside the usual hole-punch-style selfie camera at the front. That rear camera setup features a trio of 50MP lenses with the main, ultrawide and “floating” telephoto lenses (3x optical zoom) all offering the same level of resolution. Meanwhile, the periscope telephoto lens boosts that figure up to 200MP (plus 4.3x optical zoom), with the selfie camera offering a pretty standard 32MP sensor.

All four rear cameras offer Leica optics, though this privilege apparently hasn’t been afforded to the selfie camera — for reasons unknown. However specs are only able to go so far, and to see what the Xiaomi 15 Ultra is capable of we put it head to head against the Google Pixel 9 Pro — one of the best Android camera phones on sale.

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Here you can see the main lens in action, with a photo of a sculpture down by the Barcelona beachfront. The most obvious difference is that the Xiaomi’s photo is much darker than Google’s, albeit with a slightly wider field of view. See past that and the quality isn’t immediately different, but zoom in and you’ll find that the 15 Ultra does a much better job of the smaller details.

Whether we’re talking human faces, the texture of the wooden panelling, or just the text on the side of the bar, Google’s image comes off much blurrier and lacks the same detail as Xiaomi.

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Take the cameras indoors and the opposite is true. The Xiaomi 15 Ultra is brighter and a little hazier than the Pixel 9 Pro -- especially in the background. That also makes it harder to see the reflection in the can, though the can itself looks surprisingly crisp compared to the Pixel, especially when you zoom in.

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There isn’t much of a difference with the lighting on this ultrawide shot, of the W Barcelona hotel, although the color of sky on the Pixel 9 Pro seems a little more muted than Xiaomi - truer to the actual conditions when this photo was taken. Once again, though, the image is much crisper with the Xiaomi 15 Ultra, with the phone able to pick up a lot more detail without the increasing levels of haze as you zoom in. Sadly Google can’t say the same.

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Testing the telephoto lens at standard magnification, and the Xiaomi 15 Ultra produces a much darker photo once again. Significantly darker than the Pixel 9 Pro, though while Google's camera is brighter the hotel itself is quite overexposed. The quality is also nowhere near as good as the Xiaomi 15 Ultra, though that isn’t saying much. Xiaomi’s camera may pick up more details with the telephoto lens, but it still doesn’t look all that great either.

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Up the magnification to 2x and things haven’t really changed. The Xiaomi’s photo remains quite dark, and lacks a lot of details that I’d have liked to see. That said the Pixel 9 Pro seemingly does a worse job, with less clarity and the same overexposure on the hotel building.

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Boosting the magnification to 5x and the overall quality photo looks significantly better on both devices. The Xiaomi 15 Ultra is still quite dark, but not as much as it was at lower magnifications. The coloring seems to be a lot better than the Pixels 9 Pro’s too, which retains some of that hazy overexposure that affected the other telephoto shots.

As for quality, it’s much harder to say. But I feel it will have to go to the Xiaomi 15 Ultra, on account of the fact you can pick out the seagulls flying around almost immediately. The Google Pixel 9 Pro still managed to pick them up, but they’re not nearly as noticeable - with many of them almost simply blending into the background.

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Xiaomi’s selfie capabilities aren’t bad, and the colors come out with quite warm coloring compared to the Pixel 9 Pro. The images are also a lot crisper, with finer details like hair strands standing out more on their own. The Pixel 9 Pro does seem to have picked up a much better image of what I actually look like, though, picking out more freckles and pores than seem to appear on the Xiaomi image. It even captured my pasty complexion in a more true-to-life way.

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In terms of Portrait mode, both phones came out more or less equal. The Xiaomi 15 Ultra offered a warmer image again, but it also failed to pick up some of the finer skin details that the Pixel 9 Pro has. The bokeh effect also neatly cuts me out away from the background, with no major issues to be seen. Though the Pixel does seem to blur the background a little more, if that’s something you actually care about.

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The low light photography is fairly evenly-matched on both phones, with the Xiaomi again darkening up the colors a bit more than the Pixel 9 Pro. That said the image itself is still plenty bright, and the automatic nighttime mode kicked in wonderfully. Look closer, though, and the Pixel seems to have picked up a better quality photo - with the graffiti on the pillar coming out much sharper than the Xiaomi managed.

It’s more than fair to say that the Xiaomi 15 Ultra has an excellent set of cameras, not just in terms of the overall quality but in a lot of cases offering warmer and more true-to-life colors. At the same time it avoids some of the pitfalls I found with the Xiaomi Mix Fold 4 last year -- which seemingly used post-shot processing to try and make up for its weak camera, to limited success.

I don’t like the fact that the images produced by the 15 Ultra are quite dark, and I feel like the telephoto lens could have performed a lot better. Especially considering it's running on a 200MP sensor. But, overall, I wouldn’t be disappointed to have the Xiaomi 15 Ultra as my main camera phone.

Xiaomi 15 Ultra review: Performance

Like most flagship Android phones coming this year, the Xiaomi 15 Ultra is powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset and 16GB of RAM. Qualcomm’s current flagship chip has proven to be something of a performance powerhouse, especially in multi-core and graphics testing. So how will things play out on Xiaomi 15 Ultra?

The 15 Ultra is middle of the road compared to other phones running on the 8 Elite chipset, and single core testing came out with some very middle-of-the-road figures compared to other phones. The 2,986 score is less than the 3,031 recorded on the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, but higher than the OnePlus 13’s 2,893. It’s also quite a bit lower than the 3,386 score recorded by the iPhone 16 Pro Max’s A18 Pro.

Multi-core results are a different matter, with the Xiaomi 15 Ultra scoring 9,064 — which is pretty close to the OnePlus 13’s 9,058. Interestingly it is leagues behind the 9,829 scored by the Galaxy S25 Ultra, likely thanks to the fact the Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy chip was built to be more powerful. Once again the iPhone 16 Pro Max’s 8,306 multi-core score falls significantly behind all three models.

Graphics testing wasn’t quite on the same level as the other phones with the Snapdragon 8 Elite, The Xiaomi 15 Ultra scoring 10,100 in 3DMark’s Solar Bay Unlimited benchmark test. That’s significantly lower than both the Galaxy S25 Ultra and OnePlus 13, both of which scored a respective 11,140 and 10,741 in the same test.

Likewise the 15 Ultra’s 38.4 average frame rate was the lowest of the three, with Samsung averaging 42.4fps and OnePlus 40.84. Still, Xiaomi still managed to leave Apple in the dust, with the 16 Pro Max scoring a relatively meager 7,396 and 28.1fps.

The video transcoding test did work out fairly well in Xiaomi’s favor — comparatively speaking. The 15 Ultra was able to convert a 4K video into 1080p in 48 seconds. That's four seconds faster than the Galaxy S25 Ultra’s 52, and considerably faster than the OnePlus 13’s 61 seconds. That said it still falls way behind the iPhone 16 Pro Max, which managed the task in less than half the time — 21 seconds.

Gameplay was seamless and smooth, without any major choppiness from the player character and their surroundings. However the movement of other players in the distance did get a bit erratic and jumpy, and didn’t have the same fluid motions as my own shooter. I also didn’t notice any residual heat as I played.

Xiaomi 15 Ultra review: Battery

Xiaomi has a 5,410 mAh battery hiding inside, which is quite a long power reserve — even among premium flagship phones. But having a large battery is one thing, what matters the most is whether that battery will be able to last a long time between charges, and it seems as though the Xiaomi 15 Ultra is capable of that.

Our battery test involves playing a YouTube video at 1080p resolution for three hours with the phone set to 50% brightness. At the end of those three hours, the Xiaomi 15 Ultra had lost just 11% of its battery, compared to 14% loss experienced by the Xiaomi Mix Fold 4 and 21% experienced by Google’s Pixel 9 Pro. Clearly the big battery and the more power-efficient Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset are working together quite nicely.

Should you ever need to recharge, the 15 Ultra supports 90W wired and 80W wireless charging thanks to Xiaomi’s HyperCharge technology — assuming you have the appropriate first party chargers. While I didn’t have a 90W charging brick, I did have a 67W Hypercharge brick to hand, which managed to restore 46% of the battery in just 15 minutes. That figure jumped up to 81% after half an hour.

According to my USB-C multimeter the charging speed topped out at around 61.9W. But for the majority of testing those speeds fluctuated between 25W and 40W. As impressive as these figures are, I would guess anyone with a faster Hypercharge brick would see considerably faster recharge times. Which is impressive, considering how speedy the 67W brick is. Sadly the charging brick was not included in the box, so you’ll have to source one by yourself.

Xiaomi 15 Ultra review: Software

The Xiaomi 15 Ultra runs on HyperOS 2, which is based on Android 15. According to Xiaomi this phone will get 4 generations of Android system updates, and 6 years of security updates. It’s not quite as high as what Google and Samsung are offering (7 years of both), but it’s still higher than a number of other Android phonemakers.

The OS is very reminiscent of Apple’s iOS. Down to the split pull-down menus for notifications of Xiaomi’s Control Center clone. I don’t use that term lightly, because this menu shares a lot more with iOS than it does with Android’s Quick Settings menu.

Though this isn’t to say that HyperOS 2 doesn’t feel like Android, it definitely has all those touches you only get from Google’s operating system — like the Discover bar or the general way that the settings menu is laid out. But it’s definitely very different from the likes of Google’s own Pixel Launcher or Samsung's One UI.

Xiaomi is still making a big push towards AI, and the 15 Ultra comes with a huge suite of first party features — dubbed HyperAI by the company. More familiar Google AI features are also on offer, including the Gemini AI assistant and Circle to Search. Xiaomi is also offering a 3-month free trial for Gemini Advanced with every 15 Ultra.

Those are the same features you’d find on other Android phones, a if you look at the HyperAI feature list you’d wonder whether Xiaomi is actually offering anything different.

The unfortunate thing about the HyperAI features is common to a lot of AI phones — the phone gives you little to no indication on where you can find the features. They are scattered all over the place, and if I hadn’t gone looking online for Xiaomi 14 Ultra tips, I never would have realized where some of them are. Like AI subtitles, for instance, which was an optional extra for the Control Center menu.

AI Subtitles were somewhat inconsistent in my experience. Sometimes the subtitling would work really well, like translating French to English. However other times it only picked up a handful of words here and there, like when I was trying to watch the Korean dub of Squid Game. While this could prove particularly useful, temper your expectations a little bit. And be prepared to read fast, because the window isn’t very big.

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AI Image editing features are much easier to find, though they’re not too dissimilar to the kind of things you’d find in Google Photos or on Samsung Galaxy phones. Generally, these features are quite good. Image expansion isn’t perfect, but it created a pretty strong recreation of my current desk setup. Image erasure is another matter since it doesn’t actually erase objects in frame - it simply transforms them into something else.

So the Android figurine on my desk was turned into a green teapot, while the drinks cans sitting next to my laptop were shrunk down into little metal pucks. Which is far from ideal. When you’re offering an object erasure feature, the least it can do is actually erase the objects. The Magic Sky feature could have a little trouble detecting the sky as well, which is a rather big problem for a feature called "Magic Sky".

The AI Writing tools function more or less the way you’d expect. You can summon a chatbar from the keyboard app, and type in your prompts on what you’d like the AI to do for you. I had it create me a shopping list so I could cook lasagne, then asked HyperAI to give me a recipe -- because I don’t mind if it thinks I’m a dummy that can’t cook lasagne. Other additional features include changing the tone of your written work, summarizing, proofreading and expanding on something you’ve already written.

So if you plan on using AI on a Xiaomi 15 Ultra, be sure to temper your expectations. But if all else fails at least you have Gemini and Circle to Search to fall back on.

Xiaomi 15 Ultra review: Verdict

Overall the Xiaomi 15 Ultra is a great phone with all the qualities you’d expect from a premium-priced smartphone. The camera quality is excellent all round, and doesn’t fall into the trap of utilizing too much AI or post-image processing in a way that spoils the final image. Battery life is similarly good, and you shouldn’t have issues running out of power in the middle of your normal day.

The thing I like the most about the Xiaomi 15 Ultra is the design of the SIlver Chrome edition. I’ve made no secret of my dislike for large camera bumps on phones, so the fact Xiaomi has adopted that shape to emphasize the retro camera design is pretty marvelous. I hope that’s a trend that continues, especially if Xiaomi continues its partnership with Leica in the future.

There are some issues I have with the 15 Ultra, though. AI features are, at best, basic without any real unique selling points. At worst they just don’t work the way you’d expect, and that means the company is falling behind rivals like Google and Apple. The iPhone-inspired software design isn’t to my taste either, though I could see how that might appeal to others.

If you can get over the fact that HyperOS is very different to other varieties of Android, like the Stock or Pixel launcher, then this should prove to be an excellent choice in phone. Assuming you’re able to buy one, that is.