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This is the brand new Xiaomi 15 Ultra – the company’s latest, most flagshippest smartphone in their portfolio. It promises the best cameras and the best performance – the best of everything basically. Does it live up to the hype? I’ve actually taken the Xiaomi 15 Ultra to Taiwan as well.
Cameras
So, let’s talk about the cameras first. You see this big circle? Yeah, it houses all the cameras inside. We have a total of 4 different cameras here, 3 prime lenses and one periscope lens. The focal lengths are at an equivalent of 14mm, 23mm, 70mm, and 100mm.
Now, for the sake of brevity – I am going to just show you a few shots I’ve taken with the Xiaomi 15 Ultra during my trip to Taiwan. To have a look at them, watch this video instead.
Screen
As for the screen, it’s using a 6.73-inch AMOLED screen with quad curves, has a resolution of 3200×1440 pixels, and goes up to 120Hz refresh rate. The maximum achievable brightness is at around 1150 nits only – which is rather disappointing for this level of smartphone but we can still use this phone under sunlight anyway.
As for the color accuracy, it’s the same as any other Xiaomi phones. It has a total of 3 different color profiles – and it defaults to the Original Color PRO. The color gamut coverage isn’t particularly good – and it looks quite desaturated.
If you do want a more saturated look, then go for the Vivid color profile. It cranks up the sRGB and DCI-P3 color gamut coverages – but this is not its final form.
We can use the Saturated color profile that boosts the sRGB and DCI-P3 color gamut coverages to nearly 100% – and makes the display truly vivid. So, it depends on what kind of look you’re aiming towards.
Performance
Now, the performance is an interesting one. The Xiaomi 15 Ultra is equipped with the standard 8-core Snapdragon 8 Elite, but it performs really well throughout all the gaming tests. It can maintain Genshin Impact at 60fps throughout the test at the highest graphical settings. It can also maintain COD Warzone at 60fps at the highest settings too.
But it does have some weird behavior. COD Mobile jumps between 90fps and 120fps and I have no idea why. I can’t find the cause or reason for this issue.
Zenless Zone Zero is – as usual – the frame rate destroyer. It can dip below 30fps sometimes but the overall gameplay is considered to be quite good.
I also thought the camera bump would be a heat insulator like the Xiaomi 14 Ultra – but no. It actually conducts some heat away now – and that’s good to see. This is a major improvement on Xiaomi’s part. Also, maybe it’s because this specific color does not use vegan leather.
Design
Now since we’re here, let’s talk about the design a bit. It basically uses the same design as the Xiaomi 14 Ultra. I do like the white color of this phone as it has these wave design, but the humongous camera bump is a turnoff – for me, at least. The quad-curved screen might look nice but in the long run, finding a tempered glass screen protector for it will be a pain.
I also need to mention that the speaker sounds terrible compared to the last generation. I told this to a friend and they said it’s because the Xiaomi 15 Ultra does not have those 3 holes at the top of the phone. And they’re right.
Battery life
One thing that everyone expected is that the Xiaomi 15 Ultra should have better battery life compared to something like the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra because it has a larger 5,410mAh silicon-carbon anode battery. But no. The Xiaomi 15 Ultra has terrible battery life and can last for only 14 hours and 48 minutes in our standardized battery life test at 1440p resolution.
Seriously, this is horrible since the S25 Ultra with the 5,000mAh battery can last for 15 hours and 35 minutes – a whole 12% more efficient than the Xiaomi 15 Ultra when normalized to power consumption per hour.
This is the exact same trend when we compared the Xiaomi 14 Ultra with the Galaxy S24 Ultra, by the way. Xiaomi did not address this issue at all.
Charging speed
And Xiaomi also removed the charger in the box for the 15 Ultra – at least for our region. So, we only used the USB-PD PPS charger. And this is where things get interesting. You see, there is not official specs or statement on how much wattage it officially supports via USB-PD PPS.
So, when we plugged it into our charger – it took around 90 minutes to charge from 15% to completion. However, when we analyze the wattage input – it tried to take in 71W of power before settling down to an average of 25W only.
Then, when we head into the settings menu to enable the fastest charging speed possible, it took only a few minutes faster to charge from 15% to completion – but when we analyze the wattage again, it tried to take in 71W of power for a longer period of time before settling down to an average of 25W. This is fascinating. I do believe that the phone can indeed support higher wattages through USB-PD PPS but maybe Xiaomi is locking it away so that you buy and use their proprietary fast chargers and cable only? I don’t know.
Software
And now, let’s talk bout the software. This phone is running on HyperOS 2 with the version number as shown on the screen. As mentioned earlier, I do believe that HyperOS is the reason why this phone has such terrible battery life.
Either way, HyperOS is super smooth and has a lot of fancy animations, making it a very fluid experience. There are a bunch of AI features built-in as well, but most of it are features we’ve encountered before on other phones. The AI dynamic wallpaper though, is surely interesting since it did make some of my wallpapers to move. I wish more brands have such a feature.
A few more things to mention
Anyway, there are a few more things to mention about the Xiaomi 15 Ultra. It has a USB 3.0 port at the bottom, has display output via USB-C, and also dual SIM card slots. The IR blaster for remote controls is still here, but it has been moved to the camera bump.
Should you buy the Xiaomi 15 Ultra?
At the end of the day, should you buy the Xiaomi 15 Ultra? Well, I think the price is a bit difficult to swallow at RM5,199. Yes, we do get the free photography kit – which has improved a lot over the previous generation – but I do believe that the cameras have a lot of issues, most of them are the same as the Xiaomi 14 Ultra. I guess that’s a spoiler alert for the next video about the Xiaomi 15 Ultra, whoops.
But yes, the Xiaomi 15 Ultra has great hardware on paper, but in practice – it falls short. The battery life sucks, the cameras need a lot of work to make the pictures look nice – but the gaming performance is somehow really good.
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