Mi 11 Ultra hands-on: Xiaomi has truly outdone itself with this superphone By CNET

Are two screens better than one Xiaomi hopes to prove so with the 11 ultra. It's the Chinese company's latest super phone that rounds out its flagship me 11, lineup, everyone, I'm Serena, and I've been using the me11 ultra for a couple of days now. So I'm going to give you my early take on one of Xiaomi's, most expensive phones, some housekeeping for those tuning into my videos. For the first time, for the sake of transparency, I wanted to share that. Xiaomi actually sends me its latest devices, usually before or after the launch, but don't worry that won't affect my opinions on the device. This is the first time.

Xiaomi is releasing a me11 ultra ultrafine overseas and a version with 12 gigs of ram and 256. Gig storage is slated to be released in Europe if it hasn't already for 1119 euros. I believe there's an India launch coming up on April 23rd, though the ultra variant launch there might be slightly different to better suit the country, unfortunately, for those in the U. S. Xiaomi has no plans for a release stateside.

So, let's not waste any more time and dive right in design, wise I'd, say its business on the front and a party on the back. Basically, the mi 11 ultra features the design trappings of a standard, android flagship in 2021 from the front, at least it has a hole, punch, notch, housing, the selfie camera, a gently curved display and ports or buttons in their usual locations. Once you flip it around, though you see this second display living in a super-sized camera bump that takes up roughly a quarter of the meal of an ultra's rear, and it eclipses the massive bump scene on 2020s galaxy s20 ultra. The rear display is a 1.1 inch, AMOLED touchscreen with 123 by 294 resolution. So it's not very sharp, but it's.

The second display useful, well kind of when it's face down or if you double tap it can do things like tell you the time. Show you what song you're listening to or display notification alerts from, say WhatsApp, for instance. The best use for the rear display, however, is to preview selfies, meaning you have the privilege of using the three higher resolution. Cameras on the back to help you nail those selfies or group photos, so you can take an ultra-wide shot, normal ones or really zoomed in ones. If you want to do that.

At the same time, however, I can't say I'm convinced the second display feature will stick around. It has its limitations in its current form. For example, it's challenging to see any detail when snapping selfies since you're, depending on a tiny display, but it does function as a rough guide, and you can't really take video using the selfie viewfinder and portrait mode cannot be used at all. Although I didn't wind up using the rear screen on the back that much, I certainly had a lot of fun with it. Now, if I had to nitpick the 11 ultra would lose points for not entirely living up to what Xiaomi says it can do.

Xiaomi builds its second screen as an alternative, always on display, but it can't actually do that. In fact, the longest it can stay on is 30 seconds. Admittedly, when I use it as a viewfinder, I didn't run into that issue, but I think the second display is really just the icing on the cake. The 11 ultra holds its own. Without it, it has a six and a half inch OLED panel with wide quad HD plus resolution.

So that's 3200 by 1440 pixels. It runs on Qualcomm's, the fastest snapdragon 8 processors and has a loud set of stereo speakers co-developed by Herman and Cardin, and did I mention it has 67 watt wireless charging and 10 watt reverse wireless charging too Xiaomi usually gets a small ding in our coverage for leaving out the IP rating for water and dust resistance, but that's no longer the case as an ip68 rating on the male 11 ultra means it's water resistant one thing absent in the mi 11 ultra is a memory card slot for expandable storage. The party on the back of the mi eleven ultra continues with the stellar camera module composed of three rear lenses, a 50 megapixel main lens, with a 1 by 1.12 inch sensor, 48, megapixel, ultra-wide with 128 degree, field of view and a 48 megapixel telephoto lens the sensor on the main camera Samsung's gn2 is currently the largest ever on a smartphone, and I think the field of view is also the widest available by the way it shoots.8K video on all three cameras too. Now, with the camera system like the one I just described, taking vibrant and detailed photos was effortless photos had lovely depth of field, especially with subjects taken closer up. Zoom was impressive too, thanks to the periscope style, telephoto lens, which can do 10 times optical zoom and 120 times.

Digital zoom, which, based on the latter spec at least, means it's better than the hundred times zoom of the galaxy s21 ultra. But unfortunately, I didn't have a galaxy device on hand to stack the two up against each other, just to make sure either way. Pictures taken with 120x zoom were a jumble of pixels and entirely unusable. No surprise there, but you can get away with respectable photos up until 15 times soon, maybe 20 times on a clear day, but after that it gets pretty blurry as for night mode. I took these photos in a dim bedroom.

This photo was taken on default settings and the other one with dedicated night mode on. You can see it lights, the image up a lot and removed quite a bit of the shadow from the plant and here's another example plants again any guesses which one has night mode on now. The meal of an ultra is a meticulously designed device, and it's clear that Xiaomi paid attention to auxiliary features that don't catch attention on other devices, for instance a flashlight's, powerful rays being bright and far thanks to the triple LED lights using the m11 ultra, I managed to make it through an otherwise dark knight, with limited visibility. Now I've harped about the 11's excellent stereo speakers. So if you want to read about the quality, take a look at my review of the 11, the regular one on the CNET website.

The mi 11 ultra, as I mentioned earlier, uses the same speaker system co-developed by Herman and Cardin, as has been the case with the May 11 Xiaomi included accessories that main rivals, apple and Samsung have removed from their boxes. There's a bundled charger at 67 watts, a plastic case and an USB-C cable inside the meal of an ultra's black box. Overall, I think Xiaomi has outdone itself with me11 ultra and I can say: Xiaomi has once again leveled up its flagship game by stacking, a fabulous array of features that have left me stunned and in Europe at least the price is below the Samsung Galaxy s21 ultra, so that wraps up my preliminary impressions on the me11 ultra but check back on the CNET website in a couple of days or so because I'm going to be adding my full review where I'll add more insights. In fact, uh there's some chatter. That Xiaomi is pushing for more functionality on this rear display.

But I'd love to hear from you. What do you think about this phone? Do you think this camera bump is way too big, or what about the second display? Is it you know, do you like it or is it too gimmicky do share in the comments section below, but if you enjoyed this video it'd be awesome. If you can like and subscribe for more, but let's leave it there for now, but I just want to say thanks for watching, and I'll catch you next time.

Source : CNET