Xiaomi 15 Ultra Review

Introduction

Xiaomi promised ‘pinnacle performance’ ahead of the international reveal of the Xiaomi 15 range at MWC 2025, and the top-end Xiaomi 15 Ultra doesn’t disappoint.

Photography is clearly the primary focus here. The camera hardware includes some of the most capable on the market, including a 1-inch-backed main camera, a floating telephoto, and an impressively high-res periscope lens, with Leica-branded tuning and filters serving as the icing on a very tempting cake.

It’s not just a camera phone, though. It packs a top-end screen, a powerful processor, some genuinely handy AI photo editing features, and all-day battery life that make the Xiaomi 15 Ultra an easy recommendation – for those who can afford its undoubtedly premium £1,299 price tag anyway. 

Design

• Similar design to Xiaomi 14 Ultra
• New Leica-inspired Silver Chrome finish
• IP68 and Xiaomi Shield Glass 2.0 protection

The Xiaomi 15 Ultra is a familiar-looking device, sporting the same general look and feel as its predecessor. And yes, that means that the frankly massive camera housing has returned. 

It’s easily the most divisive aspect of the phone, and those who have seen me using it for the past week have given mixed responses. However, there is a good reason for it – more on that later.

That does mean that the phone can’t sit flush on a flat surface, propped up slightly by the camera housing, but it does also provide a nice place to rest your finger and support the phone when used one-handed. Swings and roundabouts, y’know. 

It comes in the same Black and White finishes as last year’s model, with the latter sent in for review. I love the bespeckled look of the glass rear, shimmering in the light while completely negating fingerprints, with a nice red ring around the camera that nods to the Leica branding.

Those are the subtle facets, anyway. More charming – or on the nose, depending on your opinion – is the new Silver Chrome finish. Designed to closely resemble the look of a Leica camera, including a Leica logo just above the camera housing, it really plays into the phone’s camera-first nature. 

That model is a little thicker and heavier as a result, but given that the black and white models already measure in at a not-insignificant 9.3mm thick and 226g, it’s not that much of a dealbreaker. This is a chunky phone; there’s no getting around that fact. 

Thankfully, the 6.7-inch phone’s curved edges make it sit more comfortably in the hand, and a combination of IP68 dust and water resistance and Xiaomi Shield Glass 2.0 tech gave me the confidence to use the phone without a case. You do get a transparent silicone case in the box if you’re not quite as confident as I am, though.  

Screen

• 6.7-inch curved AMOLED display
• Natural colour tuning compared to vibrant alternatives
• Stereo speakers

Somewhat paradoxically, the Xiaomi 15 Ultra’s 6.7-inch AMOLED screen is one of the best around and slightly annoying.

The latter point primarily comes down to the panel’s curved design. It’s not as aggressive as curved screens from the late 2010s, instead offering a more subtle curvature to all four edges of the device. The intention is clear – make swiping from the edges feel smoother than flat-screen alternatives – but old issues with curved screen technology make a return. 

I’m mainly talking about mispresses here; despite offering a customisable dead-zone to stop accidental presses from the palm when reaching across the display, I found that I’d still often tap icons and open apps accidentally.

That’s not an issue you’ll find with flat-screen alternatives, and after using the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra and iPhone 16 Pro Max recently, it’s slightly annoying. Granted, curved screens look more premium, but in terms of usability, flat screens have my vote every day of the week. 

Thankfully, that’s my one and only major complaint about the Xiaomi 15 Ultra’s screen – in every other regard, it’s a fantastic panel that makes scrolling, binging TikTok and playing games an absolute pleasure. 

It helps that it packs screen tech that lets it compete with the best. It matches the WQHD+ resolution of the S25 Ultra and has an LTPO-enabled 120Hz refresh rate for responsive scrolling and full-screen always-on display support. 

It’s also strikingly bright with a maximum brightness of 3200nits, and with Xiaomi’s Wet Touch technology, you can use the screen without mispresses when raining. 

In stark contrast to most smartphones, which default to a saturated hue, the Xiaomi 15 Ultra’s screen is more colour accurate out of the box – though this does mean that, to my indoctrinated eyes, the screen looked less vibrant than alternatives. 

Thankfully, Xiaomi lets you select between three colour modes and create your own custom profile to achieve your preferred look. 

Stereo speakers back up the top-end screen experience, though I’ve found these to be quieter than the speakers found on the S25 Ultra and the Honor Magic 7 Pro. Volume aside, the speakers should be more than enough for some casual gaming or streaming, but I’d recommend sticking to headphones for music playback. 

Cameras

• Some of the most capable camera hardware around
• New 200MP periscope lens offers impressive zoom performance
• Effortless capture regardless of shooting conditions

As you’ve probably already guessed by the size of the camera housing, the Xiaomi 15 Ultra is all about photography with a combination of a 50MP main, 50MP 3x floating telephoto, 200MP 4.3x periscope and 50MP ultrawide. Aside from the upgraded periscope, it’s a familiar setup, but given the incredible performance of last year’s flagship, I’m not complaining. 

The star of the show once again is the 1-inch-backed 50MP primary camera, offering a larger sensor than most other flagship smartphones, though it has been oddly downgraded this year. In place of the variable aperture from last year’s snapper, this year’s equivalent is locked in at f/1.63. 

It makes sense – it’s a complicated piece of kit to integrate, and with exceptional zoom lenses better suited to portrait and macro photography, it did appear somewhat gimmicky. With that said, the default f/1.63 aperture has a relatively shallow focus, noticeable mainly in close-ups, which can sometimes lead to a misplaced focus point.

Close-ups aside, the primary camera is an absolute joy to use. It captures crisp, vibrant, well-focused shots with the tap of a button. It feels almost effortless, and with Leica-branded shooting modes and filters on offer, the shots have more personality than those taken with the Galaxy S25 Ultra. 

Evening indoor photography tends to be slightly too orange for my tastes, but switching from Leica Vibrant to Leica Authentic fixes that issue.

The 1-inch sensor really comes into its own when light levels drop, drawing out light in even the dimmest of scenarios. This can deliver unnaturally bright photos in near pitch-black conditions, which is impressive, but it’s more natural with light sources like lamps and street lights in the picture. There’s very little in the way of lens flare at low light levels, too. 

Xiaomi continues to lead the pack in zoom performance, too. While the 50MP 3x floating telephoto remains essentially unchanged, it captures stunning close-up shots with pin-perfect accuracy, making close-ups of plants and other objects an absolute doddle. And, with an unusually wide f/1.8 aperture, it’s one of the best telephoto lenses in low-light scenarios. 

Of course, most of the excitement about this year’s model is focused on the upgraded 200MP 4.3x periscope lens – and it’s easy to see why. The lens can capture shots comparable to those of the 3x telephoto and the main camera in well-lit scenarios, and the detail at extreme zoom levels is unmatched by much of the competition. 

Even at the 30-35x mark, I can pick up details of a crow in a tree I took a photo of. Though images are clearly AI-enhanced at 100x, they’re still relatively detailed. 

The 50MP ultrawide is the easiest to overlook among the outstanding lenses available, but it remains impressive for everyday use and is ideal for capturing expansive scenic vistas. Compared to the other lenses, I have observed an inconsistency in colour science, with shades of blue appearing slightly different, but it’s not egregious. 

It’s just a shame that it is a fixed-focus lens, an odd omission considering the phone’s emphasis on camera performance. 

Still, the combination of high-res lenses means there’s effectively no dead zone between the 0.6x and 10x where detail noticeably drops – an issue with the S25 Ultra’s low-res 10MP 3x telephoto – and this encouraged me to use the zoom far more often than I usually would.

The Camera app has also been redesigned with a few genuinely handy tweaks to how it operates. For example, tapping the 1x sensor icon will switch between 1x, 1.2x and 1.5x, while tapping the 4.3x sensor quickly takes you up to 8.6x. 

The way you pinch to zoom has also changed. Instead of zooming quickly with a pinch, Xiaomi’s Camera app provides a slower, easier-to-control zoom. Fast zoom is now available from a radial camera menu, which can be accessed by swiping from the bottom of the viewfinder. 

It’s all very smooth and calculated, and it helps the Xiaomi 15 Ultra’s camera setup shine as one of the best, if not the best. 

Performance

• Snapdragon 8 Elite power
• Impressive everyday performance
• Stays cool under load

General performance is exceptional, as you might expect from a phone that costs just shy of £1300. The Xiaomi 15 Ultra’s Snapdragon 8 Elite is the most powerful chipset you’ll find on the market right now, apeing not only the competing MediaTek Dimensity 9400 within the Oppo Find X8 Pro but even the A18 Pro chipset within the iPhone 16 Pro Max.

Paired with 512GB/1TB of storage and 16GB of RAM, the Xiaomi 15 Ultra can handle anything you throw at it without breaking a sweat. The phone is super smooth and responsive in general use, whether I’m aimlessly scrolling through TikTok or getting my butt handed to me in Call of Duty Online.  

The phone can get a little warm when doing the latter, especially over longer periods, but it doesn’t get noticeably hot like some competing flagships. I’d also recommend changing the default animation speed from slow to fast in the system settings to really feel the benefit of the chipset’s power. 

For some reason, the Xiaomi 15 Ultra doesn’t score quite as well as some other Snapdragon 8 Elite devices in benchmark testing. Granted, it’s still a massive boost from the 8 Gen 3-equipped devices we saw last year, but it trails behind the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra and OnePlus 13 in CPU-based Geekbench tests.

I’d love to provide more detail on how it handles graphically challenging tasks, but Xiaomi has put a pre-release block on most of the benchmarking apps we use to quantify performance. 

That’ll be lifted post-release, at which point I’ll run my tests and update this section, but it’s a little frustrating – especially since I’ve not noticed any graphics-related performance issues in real-world use. 

Elsewhere, expect the latest in connectivity including support for Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4 and NFC for mobile payments. In typical Xiaomi fashion, additional features boost the connectivity speeds and reliability, like connecting to two Wi-Fi networks simultaneously – ideal if your home Wi-Fi is split into 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands. 

Software & AI

• HyperOS 2 is much easier to use than MIUI
• Clean interface with handy Google integration
• Handy AI photo editing features

Software has traditionally been Xiaomi’s weak point, with a rather bloated MIUI. However, Xiaomi has improved considerably with the rebranded and redesigned HyperOS 2 based on Android 15. 

The MIUI inspiration is still clear, with returning stalwarts like the split notification shade and quick controls – though that has since become more commonplace in the Android world – but it offers a much lighter, cleaner, and more intuitive experience. 

There are still Xiaomi-branded apps that range from mildly useful to bordering on bloatware, but it’s not shoved in your face like older versions of the software, playing much nicer with Google services and apps this time around. You can even integrate your Google Photos library within the phone’s default Gallery app, allowing easier access to older photos and videos saved in the cloud.

That’s particularly important as a big part of Xiaomi’s AI gamble for 2025 revolves around photo editing tools baked into the Gallery app. You’ll find the staples of AI editing including object removal tech, alongside more interesting features like photo enhancement and photo expansion. 

Beyond the AI photo editing tools, expect a similar roster of features to other AI-powered flagships, including the ability to summarise chunks of text, transcribe recordings, rewrite text messages and the like. None of it is exactly revolutionary – I found myself using Google’s Circle to Search most of the time – but it’s nice to have. 

Long-term support isn’t exactly ideal for a £1300 flagship, however, matching the regular Xiaomi 15’s promise of four OS upgrades and six years of security patches. Considering cheaper flagships like the Galaxy S25 and Pixel 9 offer a whopping seven OS upgrades, it’s not quite up to scratch. 

Battery Life

• Large 5410mAh battery lasts all day
• 90W HyperCharge support
• 80W Wireless HyperCharge support

The Xiaomi 15 Ultra packs a slightly larger 5410mAh cell than its 5000mAh predecessor, which bolsters the solid battery life on offer. 

It’s not the biggest battery around – the OnePlus 13 offers a 6000mAh cell while the RedMagic 10 Pro packs a 7050mAh cell – but it served my purposes well, never struggling to make it to the end of the day with charge left in the tank.

That’s usually comprised of four or five hours of screen time, using anything from Google Maps to TikTok, along with a few hours of background music playback over the course of a 16-18-hour day. That’s with the WQHD+ resolution and always-on display active constantly, by the way. 

It doesn’t quite have the same two-day potential as the Oppo Find X8 Pro did with my usage, but if you’re a lighter user than I am, it could well see itself into a second day of use. 

The good news is that with 90W HyperCharge support, it should fully recharge in less than an hour. However, without a charger in the box, I could not verify this. 

Thankfully, the 15 Ultra also supports various USB-C charging technologies. When paired with the Anker Prime 250W charger, the phone could reach a peak of 76W, though it didn’t consistently reach those speeds. In the end, it managed 52% in 30 minutes and a full charge in 91 minutes. This is relatively fast, but not as fast as it could be. 

There’s also rapid 80W wireless charging, but as with wired charging, you’ll need a HyperCharge-branded wireless charger to reach those speeds, and it doesn’t come in the box.

Should you buy it?