Lounge
Xioami 15 Ultra: All about the camera, but is that enough?
Summary
Xiaomi clearly wants to compete at the high end with this phone, which stands out for its camera but lacks software finesse
The highly commoditized smartphone market in India rarely gets devices that stand out. Truth be told, it’s difficult to really call any smartphone ‘different’ in today’s market, but if they can get any different at all, the Xiaomi 15 Ultra is likely as far as it can get.
Case in point: over the past half a decade, Xiaomi has been trying to take a very specific approach with its flagship smartphone of the year. It is a sign of acceptance from Xiaomi that as far as flagships go, most buyers shelling out a lakh for a phone today would simply buy Apple’s iPhones. If they do pick an Android phone, it is likely to be either Samsung’s Galaxy S or Z (the foldable) series devices, or the newest Google Pixel. Perhaps, even OnePlus might be in the fray.
Xiaomi has always been seen in India as a value-first pick for phone buyers. For the longest time, it was almost a default pick for any smartphone purchase at under ₹25,000. That gave it considerable brand weightage in India—a clear recall among consumers, just not in the premium segment.
To change this, Xiaomi has thrown the proverbial kitchen sink at its latest flagship, the Xiaomi 15 Ultra. It has the latest 3-nanometre Snapdragon 8 Elite processor—the best on offer in smartphones today in terms of gaming, artificial intelligence (AI) tasks, and everything else in between. It uses the latest quality of memory and storage chips, which is to persuade a consumer that as far as the quality of hardware goes, there’s nothing that’s amiss with Xiaomi, when compared with Samsung and Google.
The differentiators, then? Camera and software. In these two departments, the Xiaomi 15 Ultra is undoubtedly different from the rest of the pack. While one is a good thing, the other is not necessarily so.
The camera
The Xiaomi 15 Ultra’s rear panel design leaves no room for misunderstanding—this phone is all about its camera. It has a massive, bevelled and circular camera module, with very visible Leica branding. For the most part, the Xiaomi 15 Ultra’s rear panel’s design has polarized people around. While geekier, younger audiences are drawn to it with curious glances and a lot of intrigue, corporate professionals were considerably less impressed. From a usage standpoint, the Xiaomi 15 Ultra’s camera module leads to the phone being propped up at an angle. Credit where it’s due—the phone does not wobble if you use it on a tabletop, largely thanks to this module being centrally aligned.
Straight off the bat, this is a phone with a very good camera—without a doubt. Photographs and videos taken in most lighting conditions throughout the day offer a very good balance of contrast, colour shades and details, and the fidelity produced by the phone’s new optical zoom lens is possibly the best that any smartphone zoom lens in the industry produces right now.
Two interesting things about the phone’s camera experience are its ‘Leica portrait’ mode for a low-contrast, neutral colour tone, and its capability to record 10-bit Dolby Vision-certified HDR videos. The latter gives the phone significant pedigree to rival Apple’s iPhones—the gold standard of mobile filmmaking around the world so far.
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On overall terms, the Xiaomi 15 Ultra renders the best quality of details, colours and light in its photos, among Android smartphones. This is taking into consideration the latest generation of offerings that include the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra and the Google Pixel 9 Pro XL—both very good camera phones in their own rights.
So, if what you want is out-and-out the best camera phone in the industry right now, the Xiaomi 15 Ultra is perhaps the right device to consider. But, there is a problem at hand.
The software
When we used the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, we were particularly impressed by its software interface—Samsung’s custom OneUI, atop Android 15. While the Galaxy S25 Ultra did not do much different from other premium phones, its software experience—with clean layouts, user-friendly gestures and crisp formatting, made it one of the best flagship smartphones around.
The same applies for the Google Pixel 9 Pro XL—its ‘clean Android’ pitch, coupled with the promise that you’re using the ‘true’ version of Android, is a compelling factor for many to consider.
It is difficult to say the same for Xiaomi, which, with its HyperOS interface, can be borderline frustrating at times. Advertisements spam your notifications even when you have the Glance-powered lock screen and targeted advertising disabled, and there is a general clunkiness to the overall interface that doesn’t do much to impress—especially for a phone that costs ₹109,999.
Xiaomi is not the only brand that has aped Apple’s software interface layout, where you can swipe from top-left for notifications, and from top-right for the control panel with quick-access settings. But, this layout does not look as neatly tucked-in as Samsung’s interface—which is something that will eventually begin to bother you if you see the two devices next to each other.
This predicament of a rather gaudy interface design is what makes the Xiaomi 15 Ultra a difficult smartphone to recommend. Just doing one thing right is often not enough to entice a buyer—especially when it has competitors that have nearly-similar cameras, and exactly the same amount of other features on tap.
It’s perhaps a good thing that Xiaomi does not oversell artificial intelligence right now—a small relief in a software experience that needs a minimalist approach imminently. Until it gets that right, the user experience undoes much of the good that its class-leading camera pulls off.
The right pick?
The question here is that when you spend over ₹100,000 on a smartphone, you’re likely looking to get an experience that is as much about social validation, as technology itself. Even with flagship specifications, the Xiaomi 15 Ultra is hard to recommend over its Samsung and Google counterparts. If it had a cleaner, neater, friendlier and more premium software design, the verdict would have likely been very different.
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