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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

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The Xiaomi 12S Ultra has a 6.7-inch 120Hz OLED display that looks great, but it’s the back of the phone that’s a game-changer, with a world-beating Sony/Leica camera. Photo: Ben Sin
Ben Sin

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.

This sensor is also covered by Leica optics, with an eight-layer lens co-engineered by Leica and Xiaomi.
The camera module on the Xiaomi 12S Ultra certainly looks premium and professional – it’s a gigantic circular island wrapped in a 23-carat gold ring that protrudes from the phone’s back. Photo: Ben Sin
The camera module on the Xiaomi 12S Ultra certainly looks premium and professional – it’s a gigantic circular island wrapped in a 23-carat gold ring that protrudes from the phone’s back. Photo: Ben Sin

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.

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