Amongst of the newest trend of having a new tier of “Ultra” Android flagship devices that are specced and priced at a notably higher tier than the traditional high-end designs, we saw Xiaomi jump onto the fray with the new Mi 11 Ultra. Announced back in March, the phone took a few months to get to market with any reasonable availability and a bit more for more reasonable pricing, however the device is now fleshed out, and after our in-depth camera review a few weeks ago, deserves an accompanying device review.

The Mi 11 Ultra in a sense is a sibling to the Mi 11 – and it is clear they are of the same generation family, having the same display specifications and the same device footprint, however where the Ultra differentiates itself is a much more massive and technically superior camera array. Let’s go over the specifications:

Xiaomi Mi 11 Series
		Mi 11 Ultra	Mi 11
SoC		Qualcomm Snapdragon 888  1x Cortex-X1 @ 2.84GHz 3x Cortex-A78 @ 2.42GHz 4x Cortex-A55 @ 1.80GHz Adreno 660 @ 840MHz
DRAM		12GB LPDDR5-6400	8/12GB LPDDR5-6400
Display		6.81" AMOLED 3200 x 1440 120Hz Refresh 480Hz Touch HDR10+ / 10-bit panel
Size	Height	164.3mm	164.3mm
	Width	74.6mm	74.6mm
	Depth	8.38mm	8.06mm
Weight		234g	196g
Battery Capacity		5000mAh (Typical) 67W Charging	4600mAh (Typical) 55W Charging
Wireless Charging		67W	50W
Rear Cameras
	Main	50MP GN2 1/1.12" 1.4µm 4:1 Binning to 12.5MP / 2.8µm f/1.95 w/OIS 24mm eq.	108MP HMX 1/1.3" 0.8µm 4:1 Binning to 27MP / 1.6µm f/1.85 w/OIS 24mm eq.
	Telephoto	5x optical telephoto 48MP IMX586 1/2.0" 0.8µm 4:1 Binning to 12MP 1.6µm f/4.1 120mm eq.	5MP (Macro only) f/2.2 48mm eq.
	Extra Telephoto	-	-
	Ultra-Wide	48MP IMX586 1/2.0" 0.8µm 4:1 Binning to 12MP 1.6µm f/2.2 128° FoV	13MP f/2.4 123° FoV
	Extra	dToF Sensor	-
Front Camera		20MP 0.8µm 4:1 Binning 5MP 1.6µm f/2.2
Storage		256GB UFS 3.1	128 / 256GB UFS 3.1
I/O		USB-C
Wireless (local)		802.11ax (Wifi 6E), Bluetooth 5.2	802.11ax (Wifi 6), Bluetooth 5.2
Cellular		4G + 5G NR NSA+SA Sub-6GHz
Special Features		Under-screen fingerprint sensor Full-range stereo speakers IR Blaster Second 1.1" 126 x 294 Rear Display	Under-screen fingerprint sensor Full-range stereo speakers IR Blaster
Splash, Water, Dust Resistance		IP68	No rating
Dual-SIM		2x nano-SIM
Launch OS		Android 11 w/ MIUI	Android 11 w/ MIUI
Launch Price		12+256GB: 1199€	8+128GB: 749€ 8+256GB: 799€

The Mi 11 Ultra shares the same Snapdragon 888 as the Mi 11 and many other flagship devices in 2021. We’ve covered the SoC plenty this year in the various implementations, including Xiaomi – so there’s nothing particular in terms of standout features for the Ultra in this regard. Xiaomi does deliver the Mi 11 Ultra only in a 12GB DRAM and 256GB storage configuration which corresponds to the higher-end option on the Mi 11.

From the front, the Mi 11 Ultra is nearly indistinguishable from the Mi 11 as it features the exact same screen and front facing design. The 6.81” AMOLED display comes with a resolution of 3200 x 1440, and features 120Hz refresh rate in a 10-bit colour panel, and Xiaomi advertises a touch input sample rate of up to 480Hz which is incredibly high in the market. Much like on the Mi 11, what’s lacking here is any more advanced technology to help with the power consumption of the panel – while there’s some coarse software refresh rate switching, there’s no real VRR and the display seems to be generally technically equivalent to what we’ve seen last year with the Galaxy S20 series devices. Keep this in mind throughout the review as it ends up being one of the Mi 11 Ultra’s key weaknesses.

Design-wise, I really like Xiaomi’s flagship line-up this year as they combine aesthetics with extremely good ergonomics and handling. It’s to be noted though that at 74.6mm device width, it’s on the larger side of the device spectrum, although the rounded frame of the phone helps it feels smaller than comparative sized devices with more squarish edges.

On the back of the phone, we find the phone’s very distinguishing feature, and that’s a massive camera setup that attempts to be outright unapologetic about how big and noticeable it is. Xiaomi had to make the camera bump large because it houses the largest camera sensor of any current generation phone on the market – a 50MP 1/1.12” main module that’s pretty much gargantuan for a smartphone.

Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra Cameras
	Optics				Sensor
	35mm eq. FL	FoV (H/V/D)	Aperture	OIS	Resolution	Pixel Pitch	Pixel Res.	Sensor Size
Ultra-Wide	12.99	106.3° 90.0° 118.0°	f/2.2	✗	48.0M native (8000 x 6000) 12.0MP binned (4000 x 3000)	0.8µm 1.6µm	47.8″ 95.6″	1 / 2.00" 6.40mm x 4.8mm 30.72mm²
Main (Wide)	23.01	73.9° 58.9° 86.5°	f/1.95	✓	49.9M native (8160 x 6120) 12.5MP binned (4080 x 3060)	1.4µm 2.8µm	32.6″ 65.2″	1 / 1.12" 11.42mm x 8.56mm 97.88mm²
Telephoto	119.07	16.55° 12.45° 20.60°	f/4.1	✓	48.0M native (8000 x 6000) 12.0MP binned (4000 x 3000)	0.8µm 1.6µm	7.45″ 14.9″	1 / 2.00" 6.40mm x 4.8mm 30.72mm²

Although the camera bump seems humongous, it’s not really that complicated when it comes to the actual camera module configuration as the phone “only” features three units. The aforementioned 50MP main module is what characterises the device as special from the competition, using Samsung’s GN2 sensor at 1/1.12” optical format with f/1.95 optics and OIS, and a relatively wide 23mm equivalent focal length. This is accompanied by a 48MP ultra-wide module with 13mm equivalent focal length, and because it’s an Ultra phone, Xiaomi also included a periscope telephoto module with the same sized sensor as on the ultra-wide at 48MP, and a native focal length of 119mm equivalent – or 5x magnification in relation to the main sensor.

Xiaomi’s three cameras appear simpler than the competition which may have more modules, but Xiaomi’s implementation is actually the technically superior one as it takes advantage of the dual-resolution nature of the quad-Bayer sensors on the main camera and the telephoto, which switch over from binning to their native resolutions, allowing for loss-less 12MP cropping, essentially adding in a virtual 2x telephoto as well as a 10x telephoto module in terms of picture quality, allowing the Mi 11 to be the most versatile phone camera on the market right now when it comes to various focal lengths and quality steps.

Alongside the three cameras, the Mi 11 Ultra is also characterised by having a tiny rear OLED screen alongside the camera setup, which is actually why the camera bump is the size of most of the width of the phone. The secondary rear display can act as a clock face, a custom text label, or custom image – with displaying secondary information such as battery status or a notification light (no actual notification info). When using the camera, the rear display can also be enabled to act as a preview screen which allows for high quality selfie pictures using the main cameras. It also serves as a general preview for subjects, however in 4:3 view it really becomes quite small so the subject can’t be too far away as it’s otherwise hard to make out what’s on the quite small screen.

In general, in my usage, I was relatively ambivalent about the rear display – it’s useful for quickly glancing at the time – which can be set up to light on when you pick up the phone, or when you double tap the rear screen. Beyond it delivering a relatively gimmicky feature, what Xiaomi’s design does is to bring symmetry to the camera bump which I came to realise is actually quite important when you have a camera bump of this size. It is very stable when lying on surfaces, and the bump is high enough on the phone that you generally do not notice it in everyday portrait usage. It’s still a characteristic which you will either be fine with, or hate – so generally I’d recommend people to attempt to get a hands-on experience before committing to it.

The bottom and top of the phone are characterised by dual-speaker setups, although Xiaomi’s design here can be a bit misleading as the top speaker grill isn’t actually an outlet where sound comes out, it’s the earpiece slit which is still serves as the top speaker output. There’s still some internal connection between the grill and the speaker as it does reduce distortions, but covering it up doesn’t do much in terms of audible volume difference. In general Xiaomi’s audio quality here is good, however clarity, soundstage and L/R balance is better on a S21 Ultra for example.

As with the Mi 11, the screen is curved both on all sides, left/right and top/bottom, with the corners towards the metal frame being flatter, essentially making the frame corner protrude out more. In general, I think the design decision here was made with durability in mind as if the device drops it would have a heightened chance to drop onto the metal frame rather than on the display glass.

The phone is IP68 water resistant which is a feature the Mi 11 doesn’t have, along with added in WiFi 6E capability, but what’s somewhat weird for the phone is that Xiaomi for some reason still only enables USB connectivity over 2.0 data-rates, which makes it notably slower than other 3.0 capable devices on the market.

Overall, the design and ergonomics of the Mi 11 Ultra are good – at least if you keep in mind that it’s still a large phone, and at 234g, it’s also one of the heaviest in the market right now, so definitely not something which will cater to everybody’s tastes.

System Performance - Extremely Snappy

When we reviewed the Mi 11 earlier in the year, that should have generally covered the performance evaluation for the Mi 11 Ultra as well as both devices are on the exact same hardware platform and also feature the same OS. However, since the Mi 11’s release, Xiaomi has released and pushed out an update to MIUI in the form of version 12.5 which has promised considerable improvements in terms of performance and responsiveness of the system.

On top of that, this spring, UL has released a new PCMark suite version 3.0 – while the workloads here are generally the same as that of version 2.0, the new application is built using the newest build tools and is now 64-bit capable. In past generation devices, the performance difference between 32-bit and 64-bit was relatively small, however recent generation Cortex CPU cores from Arm have had more stark feature discrepancies in regards to performance of AArch64 vs AArch32, favouring the former newer ISA as next year we expect 32-bit SoCs to be partially deprecated, and see a full shift to 64-bit only in 2023 devices. The new benchmark version here adapts to the shifting landscape, and more accurately represents the performance of today’s devices.

The web-browsing workload is sensible to frame-rate of the display, as well as how aggressive the scheduler and DVFS of the chips are. The Mi 11 Ultra here generally performs excellently as is in line with the Mi 11 and the Snapdragon 888 S21 Ultra. There’s a few devices which are a bit more aggressive but this also comes at a cost of more battery drain.

In the writing subtest which is one of the most representative for general device responsiveness in every-day usage, the Mi 11 Ultra is extremely well performing and just notches out the S21 Ultra – only the Exynos here is slightly even more aggressive. There’s quite a bit of a difference to the Mi 11 which is to be noted.

Photo editing workloads generally fall back to the GPU via RenderScript, and we see the Mi 11 Ultra take the top spot by a smidge of a performance advantage over the Axon 30 Ultra.

The data manipulation test is mostly single-threaded bound and here it depends on how the OS schedules things on the UI. The Mi 11 Ultra falls in the middle of the pack.

Overall, the Mi 11 Ultra falls in amongst the top performing flagship phones in 2021, which is unsurprising and very much what we expected.

Web Browser Performance

Alongside a new PCMark version, this year we’ve also hit the reset button on our browser benchmark results due to the introduction of 64-bit web browsers. For the same reasons aforementioned in PCMark, the new AArch64-only software packages for browsers mean that the new results can take better advantage of microarchitectural features of CPUs which were previously not used in the 32-bit variants, augmenting the scores for newer generation devices, making the scores incompatible. We’ve retested a range of recent flagship devices:

In all the web tests, the Mi 11 Ultra also performed admirably, as one of the top-performing Snapdragon 888 devices on the market.

Subjectively, the Mi 11 Ultra is absolutely one of the fastest and most responsive devices on the market right now. When Xiaomi had pushed the new MIUI 12.5 version to the Mi 11 back a few months ago, I immediately noticed the vast improvement in overall UI performance, actually making me rank the Mi 11 and consequently also the Mi 11 Ultra as amongst the fastest Android phones out there.

The only real negatives I would have about Xiaomi’s software stack today is that the devices’ 60Hz mode is still seemingly extremely unoptimized compared to their 120Hz modes. I’m not exactly sure what is happening here, but it feels as if Xiaomi is not properly scaling or altering various scheduler settings to 60Hz down from 120Hz, or I also suspect that Xiaomi is tying the touch sample rate to the refresh rate, as I notice vastly increased delay in the 60Hz mode, something which doesn’t happen or is nearly as noticeable on Samsung’s 60Hz mode on their 120Hz devices.

GPU Performance: Fast & Hot

GPU performance on Xiaomi phones has always been a bit of a can of worms over the last few years due to the various device’s thermal behaviours. Thermal behaviours in the sense in that seemingly Xiaomi had no real thermal throttling at all and the phones were allowed to reach very high temperatures, naturally resulting in very high-performance figures. We already saw this on the Mi 11 earlier in the year and I had made a remark about it.

The Mi 11 Ultra behaves the same as the Mi 11 in that it pushes out extraordinarily great performance at extraordinarily high device temperatures reaching and exceeding 50°C skin temperature mesurements.

Following our little OnePlus 9 application “optimisation” debacle, I delved a little deeper into Xiaomi’s device behaviour to discern what was happening on the Mi 11, and was able to confirm that Xiaomi is featuring a similar mechanism as OnePlus in that anonymous and third-party applications are allowed full performance without throttling (on the GPU side of things), while popular games such as Genshin Impact would be throttled. Again, I confirmed this by spoofing a benchmark as the actual game. The actual performance of the Mi 11 in games throttles down normally as many of the other devices in the charts – I’ll be updating the figures once I experiment a bit more on getting accurate figures.

While the aforementioned blacklist behaviour is valid for the Mi 11, it seemingly doesn’t apply to the Mi 11 Ultra. This latter device still doesn’t actually throttle down actual games such as Genshin, and I was able to actually have the phone prompt its overheating warning in the game itself (Which does happen under more strenuous conditions than benchmarks), with the device still hitting in excess of 50°C skin temperatures.

So, while it does appear the Mi 11 Ultra does allow full performance in actual games, Xiaomi’s GPU and thermal behaviour still remains extremely questionable.

Display Measurement

The display of the Mi 11 Ultra is relatively quite straightforward: it’s the same one as on the Mi 11.

The 1440p OLED panel features 120Hz refresh rate, however lacks any kind of more advanced battery saving mechanism that are featured on newer generation panels such as on the Note20 Ultra, S21 Ultra, or claimed on the OnePlus 9 Pro. There is a coarse software-based refresh rate switching mechanisms but this only works at brightness levels above 110 nits.

In terms of colour management, the Mi 11 Ultra features the same complex and comprehensive display settings as on the Mi 11, which allows for extensive tuning and change the characteristics to one’s liking.

We move on to the display calibration and fundamental display measurements of the Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra screen. As always, we thank X-Rite and SpecraCal, as our measurements are performed with an X-Rite i1Pro 2 spectrophotometer, with the exception of black levels which are measured with an i1Display Pro colorimeter. Data is collected and examined using Portrait Display's CalMAN software.

In terms of brightness, oddly enough I wasn’t able to have the Mi 11 Ultra to measure in as bright as the regular Mi 11, only reaching 747 nits in auto-brightness when under high ambient light. That’s a bit of an odd discrepancy, but generally the only one when it comes to the differences between the two devices.

Portrait Displays CalMAN

In terms of greyscale accuracy, we’ve measured the calibration in the phone’s “original colour” mode which seemingly is the most accurate profile.

The results here are near identical in every way to what we measured on the Mi 11 – including all of the defects, such as too warm white tones, and a virtually identical gamma curve and greyscale inaccuracy error curve.

Portrait Displays CalMAN

Saturation and gamut accuracy are also near the same as on the Mi 11, with the same slight deviations in the reds and magentas, and ending up with almost identical dETIP error values.

Portrait Displays CalMAN

In the GretagMacbeth patches of commonly found tones such as skin tones, the Mi 11 Ultra is consistently inconsistent in how it behaves, as it matches what we’ve measured to the Mi 11 to a high degree. This includes tones being slightly too dark due to the higher gamma curve, and larger colour deviations in the reds.

Generally speaking, the Mi 11 Ultra screen is very much identical to the Mi 11 one, both in its strengths and weaknesses. Strengths are good brightness, contrast, resolution, and of course the 120Hz refresh rate. The weaknesses are still somewhat off colours, but which can be at least customized to taste thanks to Xiaomi’s extensive software controls.

It's more on the hardware side where the screen doesn’t do as well, lacking either the more advanced LTPO panels of the competition, nor seemingly featuring any newer generation and more efficient OLED emitter, which will impact the phone’s power efficiency.

Battery Life - Only Average

The Mi 11 Ultra’s battery life is certainly one of the weak points of the device. Although the phone features a 5000mAh battery which is 8.6% larger than the 4600mAh unit of the Mi 11, it’s also a device that has more internal hardware, and we don’t know exactly how features such as the secondary rear display affect the phone’s power consumption.

Going forward, I’ll be presenting our battery results both in 60Hz and high refresh rate charts, in order to simplify the admittedly quite messy results over the various new HRR display phones over the last year or two.

Starting off at 60Hz, the Mi 11 Ultra really doesn’t do well at all given its hardware specs. The phone landed in nearly identically longevity as the Mi 11 sibling with a smaller battery, which is quite perplexing due to the seemingly identical display. Besides the display, the only thing that is different and should impact the Mi 11 Ultra over the Mi 11 is the different camera setup, the rear screen, and a WiFi 6E module from Qualcomm. The cameras and rear screen should be generally irrelevant in our battery test as long as power management is properly implemented. The WiFi is also hard to single out.

What’s clear is that the Mi 11 Ultra is falling in 27% behind the Galaxy S21 Ultra – or better said, the latter lasts 35% longer than the Mi 11 Ultra. While superior display of the S21 Ultra certainly gives it a unique efficiency advantage, the Mi 11 Ultra also fares worse than the S20 Ultra. We know that the Snapdragon 888 is more power hungry than the Snapdragon 865, but this is still a large discrepancy in battery life.

At 120Hz mode, the Mi 11 Ultra this time at least manages to slightly outlast the S20 Ultras, although it still falls notably behind the S21 Ultras which are still 20-27% ahead.

I’m still in the process of re-running new the PCMark 3.0 figures on various devices and missing some 60Hz figures for now, but again the important comparison is the Mi 11 Ultra against the S21 Ultras. The Mi manages to outlast the Exynos S21 Ultra due to having a more efficient SoC, but falls behind the Snapdragon S21 Ultra.

In 120Hz mode, unfortunately the Mi 11 Ultra falls back in the rankings, this time even falling below the battery life of the regular Mi 11.

As with many other non-Galaxy devices this year, there’s a very weird level of inefficiency tied to the Mi 11 Ultra. The fact that the phone barely manages to differentiate itself, and even in one test lasts less than the regular Mi 11 is perplexing, and makes you question as to what’s actually going on. The Mi 11 Ultra is certainly aggressive in its performance metrics, but it’s still somewhat disappointing in how it ends up. It’s certainly not showcasing itself as what you’d expect from a 5000mAh battery class phone.

Camera - Recap

In terms of camera evaluation, I’ll refer to our recent more extensive camera review and device overview from a few weeks ago which also contained the Mi 11 Ultra:

• Mobile Flagship Phone Cameras 2021 H1 Review: Megapixels & Telephotos

What really make the Mi 11 Ultra special over other devices in the market is that although it’s only a three-module hardware setup, Xiaomi takes advantage of the quad-Bayer dual-resolution capabilities of its sensors to add in additional “virtual” focal lengths that still are able to resolve high quality 12MP captures. In that sense, the Mi 11 Ultra essentially has 13, 23, 46, 119 and 238mm “native”-level quality focal lengths, and these are highly performant modules and camera sensors at each focal length.

 [ Axon 30 Ultra      ] 
[ Mi 11 Ultra      ]  [ Mi 11      ]
[ S21U(S) ] [ S21U(E) ]
[ OnePlus 9 Pro ]
[ S21(E) ] [ iPhone 12 Pro ] [ Pixel 5 ]
[ X-T30 (     ) (       ) ]

The Mi 11 Ultra’s 10x shot, in terms of detail retention, it’s notable that this should be a crop out of the sensor’s native 48MP mode, as it’s much better quality than a scaled up 12MP result from a 5x magnification. The Mi 11 Ultra definitely doesn’t do well in textures – I’m not sure if this is a result of the processing or a result of the lower colour resolution due to the quad-Bayer colour filter which does come into play here at the phone’s 48MP sensor capture mode. It also can be a result of the dynamic range of the pixels due to it working with 0.8µm pixels versus the S21 Ultra’s 1.22µm pixels. What’s clear though is that the overall image is too dark, with the shadows being unnaturally pronounced.

The phone does extremely well in resolution, however the exposure and HDR is quite bad, with the histogram of the picture being empty in the last 15% of intensity levels, just being underexposed or just wrongly processed.

[ Axon 30 Ultra    ] 
[ Mi 11 Ultra    ]  [ Mi 11    ]
[ S21U(S) ] [ S21U(E) ]
[ OnePlus 9 Pro ] 
[ S21(E) ] [ iPhone 12 Pro ] [ Pixel 5 ]
[ X-T30 (     ) ]

In Ultra-Wide shots, technically, the Mi 11 Ultra should be at the top, but is hampered by bad optics and not too great HDR which doesn’t recover as much dynamic range as many other competitor processing algorithms. The blurred optics on the edges of the ultra-wide module unfortunately would be a hardware characteristic and not something which could be fixed or improved upon in firmware.

[ Axon 30 Ultra    -    ] 
[ Mi 11 Ultra    -    ]  [ Mi 11    -   ]
[ S21(E)    -    ]
[ S21U(S)  -  ] [ S21U(E)  -  ]
[ OnePlus 9 Pro  -  ] 
[ iPhone 12 Pro ] [ Pixel 5  -  ]
[ X-T30 (   ) ]

In low-light, the Mi 11 Ultra’s giant sensor is what allows it to perform outstandingly well compared to pretty much any other phone out there. Xiaomi also has an adequate night mode which further improves shadow details in dim light.

Overall Camera Conclusion

Generally, the Mi 11 Ultra is definitely one of the strongest camera solutions out there today. The hardware setup, even though it’s “only” a 3-camera solution, smartly takes advantage of the quad-Bayer sensors, effectively turning the system into a “virtual” 5-camera setup, bar a quality gap from around 70-120mm.

The huge new 1/1.12” main sensor allows for extremely good retention of natural details – well actually, all the sensors have this common characteristic as Xiaomi seems to employ an extremely light touch (or even none) when it comes to postprocessing here, which is great.

The only one negative I would say is that its HDR processing isn’t quite as capable in recovering information as some of the competition’s implementations, so I found the phone is maybe too conservative there and doesn’t pull out the full capabilities that the hardware is capable of. This is especially valid for the periscope telephoto – while technically excellent, the image processing here in terms of exposure metering and HDR leaves things to be desired.

In low-light, the phone is a top-performer, but isn’t totally consistent in its ultra-wide. As I mention the UWA – the optics quality on this module isn’t quite satisfactory on the outer frame, and performs notably below that of other devices.

Conclusion & End Remarks

As we’re coming to the end of the review, it’s also time to draw some conclusions about the Mi 11 Ultra. The phone has been out for a bit of time and Xiaomi had time to push out the several firmware updates to fix any early issues with the device, so today’s evaluation can be mostly seen as an “after-the-fact” review.

Where the Mi 11 Ultra does well is in its design. I had already noted that I really liked the Mi 11 with its design and its extremely good ergonomics, something which I value a lot in phones. The Mi 11 Ultra really is just a slightly thicker Mi 11 here, growing from 8.06mm to 8.38mm – an increase that’s not really noticeable, however the weight gain from 196g to 234g definitely is.

Xiaomi’s camera implementation with the gargantuan camera bump, as odd as it is for me to write this, perfectly reasonable and well implemented. It still looks somewhat absurd, but the phone is very unapologetic about it. What I think really makes it work is the fact that it’s symmetric in its design and feel, so it doesn’t impact the phone when lying on a surface, unlike some other wobblier camera bump implementations in the past. When holding the phone in every-day portrait mode usage it’s also not very noticeable, although you always get reminded of it during landscape usage.

The screen of the Mi 11 Ultra is very good, but it’s not top of the line. It’s the exact same panel as on the Mi 11, which means it lags behind the competition in terms of the newest technologies. In every-day usage this is not an issue, but where this matters a lot is in power efficiency.

Battery life is the Mi 11 Ultra’s Achilles heel – although the phone features a 5000mAh battery, it doesn’t manage to differentiate itself to the slightly lower capacity Mi 11, meaning the Ultra is actually a less efficient device. It’s still an adequate performer with average battery life, but it’s being vastly outpaced by the Galaxy S21 Ultra which is the Mi 11 Ultra’s direct competitor.

Performance of the phone is excellent. Thermal behaviour aside, Xiaomi has done excellently here, and in general this applies also to the Mi 11 virtue of the new MIUI 12.5 update we’ve seen the company put out.

Finally, in terms of cameras, the Mi 11 Ultra is absolutely a technical winner, as it by specifications alone has the strongest and most versatile camera solution of any phone on the market right now. While the phone has some extremely good shining moments in photography, it’s also a device that lacks consistency in pictures, and many times has troubles with HDR processing which is much weaker than that of Samsung, Apple and Google. Generally, these are software aspects that can be alleviated via firmware updates – the hardware is there and it’s plenty capable, Xiaomi just needs to put more resources in refining the experience. Whether they will do so or not, remains to be seen – and as much as I consider the hardware setup to be awesome, other phones from the competition will result in more consistent and quality experiences.

Price, value, recommendation

Finally, it gets down to price and availability. In North America, the phone isn’t being officially sold or supported, so generally the choice is made for you and there’s pretty much no other option than the S21 Ultra in this class range.

In Europe, prices and availability over the last few weeks have been spotty, but you can get the phone. The issue here is that Xiaomi’s pricing MSRP of 1199€ is too much – even more so considering that street prices at time of writing are more in the 1300-1400€ range. The regular Mi 11 costs only 627€ right now on Amazon, and the Mi 11 Ultra certainly is not "double the phone" to warrant that price difference. Furthermore, the elephant in the room is the Galaxy S21 Ultra which can be gotten at 1049€ - the Galaxy has a better screen, a bit better speaker, vastly superior battery life, and while technically inferior, an arguably better camera capture experience. Xiaomi should have priced the Mi 11 Ultra below the S21 Ultra for it to make sense. As unnatural as it is for Xiaomi devices, the Mi 11 Ultra here is just the lower value option.

As much as I can’t rationalise the Mi 11 Ultra as a purchase recommendation, I still very much like the phone, as well as the path that Xiaomi is marching on with their phones. It’s definitely the company’s most ambitious device yet, it just needs more refining and addressing of its core weaknesses for it to be a truly great phone.