Following Xiaomi's announcement in May 2022 of its partnership with Leica, renders of the first co-developed smartphone have now surfaced. Xiaomi is one of the biggest smartphone brands and its phones are sold across the globe. Like its Chinese counterpart, Oppo, Xiaomi is also known for its innovations. Several of its smartphones have support for 120W fast charging, and in 2021, it demoed a 200W fast wired charging technology and 120W fast wireless charging.
In December 2021, Xiaomi announced a new battery technology that will allow lithium batteries to pack 10 percent more capacity without increasing in size. Xiaomi says the special battery will go into production in the second half of 2022. Xiaomi has also entered the electric car space and plans to release its first car in the first half of 2024.
Expected to launch as the Xiaomi 12 Ultra, the phone is a more premium version of the Xiaomi 12 Pro. The renders published by Steve Hemmerstoffer (aka OnLeaks) in collaboration with Zouton, show it will have a strikingly different design from its predecessor, the Xiaomi 11 Ultra. Like other premium flagships, the display is curved at the sides and there is a centered punch hole for the front-facing camera. However, the rear is where it differs from other phones. There is no secondary display this year but the gigantic circular camera housing, which has four cameras and a bunch of sensors, takes up more than a third of the entire back. Leica's famous logo is also visible at the bottom corner.
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While the back is ceramic, the phone will have an aluminum frame, according to the source. Xiaomi is not new to using ceramic in place of glass for its high-end phones, and it is nice to know it hasn't abandoned this tradition. The images also show the phone will have stereo speakers with a grille at the top and bottom. The display is said to be a 6.6-inch QHD+ AMOLED panel with a 120Hz refresh rate and HDR10+ support. That screen size means it will be smaller than the Xiaomi 12 Pro whose screen measures 6.7-inches. Considering Ultra models are usually larger, or at least the same size as the pro model, it is worth taking these details with a heavy dose of salt. In addition, the phone is said to have a 20MP selfie camera, and judging from the lack of a visible fingerprint scanner, there should be one under the display. The phone is likely to be powered by the new Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 paired with LPDDR5 RAM and up to 512GB of UFS 3.1 storage.
The rear cameras are reported to include a 50MP main camera, a 48MP ultrawide angle camera, and a 48MP periscope telephoto camera. The fourth camera is unknown but considering it has a rectangular lens, it may be a second telephoto camera. For context, the Xiaomi 12 Pro has a 50MP main camera, a 50MP telephoto camera, a 50MP ultrawide angle camera, and a 32MP front-facing camera. When the Xiaomi 12 Ultra launches, it should run Android 12 out of the box with Xiaomi's heavily-customized MIUI skin on top. While the phone is expected to get a global release, it most likely won't make it to the US, considering Xiaomi doesn't sell its phones in the country.
Source: OnLeaks/Twitter, Zouton