Review | Xiaomi 12s Ultra review: the best 2022 phone, its Leica camera makes Apple iPhone 13 Pro photos look flat, and battery life is unbeatable
- The Chinese phone maker’s flagship model features a custom-built Sony camera sensor that reduces the need for night mode and takes photos with a lot of depth
- With a new, energy-efficient Snapdragon processor the 12s Ultra has power to spare after a day’s heavy use, and sells in China for under US$900
Xiaomi smartphones have seen a rapid improvement in recent years and the Chinese company’s latest super flagship handset, the Xiaomi 12S Ultra, has the most impressive camera hardware yet seen in a smartphone.
Design and hardware
The Xiaomi 12S Ultra is grabbing all the consumer tech site headlines for its main camera: a brand new, 50-megapixel sensor custom built by Sony for Xiaomi (Xiaomi contributed US$15 million to the development process). This camera features a 1-inch camera sensor, which is significantly larger than the 1/1.3-inch sensors used by phones like the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra.
The camera module certainly looks premium and professional – it’s a gigantic circular island wrapped by a 23-carat gold ring that protrudes noticeably from the phone’s back. Despite its top-heavy build, the phone is comfortable to hold thanks to a curved design, with a vegan leather back that adds grippy texture.
The phone is also among the first to ship with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 processor, the newest silicon, that is noticeably more energy efficient than the previous chip.
The rest of the package is also high-end, but not as unique as that 1-inch camera.
The display, for example, is a 6.7-inch 120Hz OLED panel that looks great, but no better than other Android flagship phones’ screens. The Xiaomi’s 4,860 mAH battery is large, but Samsung’s Ultra phone packs a larger one.
The Xiaomi 12S Ultra camera set-up includes a pair of 48-megapixel lenses for ultra-wide and zoom photography, and while both are very good, they perform about the same as those of other top Android phones.