Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra review: Large, powerful and expensive Review

The Mi 11 Ultra is Xiaomi’s new flagship handset. The telephone has two underlings, the Mi 11 Lite (£399) and the Mi 11 (from £749), which I reviewed in February. I appreciated the Mi 11’s mixture of strong options and eye-catching price, but listed here we have an even more lavish specification, and a steeper price of £1,199. On paper, it sounds like a desire — albeit an high-priced one. Standout Mi 11 Ultra options include things like 120x zoom, 8K video recording, a 5000mAh battery, quickly charging, 5G (by natural means), and a tiny next monitor on the back. 

The specs make a splash on paper, but the very first issue you are going to detect when unboxing the Mi 11 Ultra is its 234g body weight. You may also swiftly clock the enormous lozenge occupying the higher quarter of the backplate, which properties the digital camera array and a tiny next monitor (more on each beneath). 

This huge protruding rear lozenge will make it a minor awkward to keep the telephone, and I located the lip was sizeable more than enough to snag a jacket pocket, so you want to place the handset snugly with further treatment, or intentionally drop it into a pocket upside down. The upside of the digital camera lozenge occupying all the backplate’s width is that the handset won’t wobble when you prod at the monitor with it flat on a desk or table. 

Develop good quality is fantastic. The rigid aluminium casing is strong, Gorilla Glass Victus provides monitor defense, and the ceramic back of my white evaluate device had a chalky colouring alternatively than being starkly excellent white. Contrary to the Mi 11, the Ultra product has an IP rating for dust and water resistance: IP68 signifies that it is ‘dust tight’ and can manage immersion in up to 1.5m of water for up to thirty minutes. 

The backplate is pretty clean, so of study course my ‘sofa test’ was failed spectacularly: the handset slid off the arm of my couch almost at will. But it does seem amazing, and Xiaomi supplies a crystal clear bumper scenario if you want to have a more assured grip on this £1,000-in addition telephone. There is a black edition for those people who discover the white product also stark. 

Side buttons are held to a bare minimum with just the power and quantity rocker on the proper facet. Fingerprint scanning is in-monitor, or you can use facial area login if you want. Both equally labored high-quality. 

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Although it truly is only eight.38mm thick, this is a big telephone, measuring seventy four.6mm vast and 164.3mm tall. The chassis accommodates a 6.81-inch AMOLED monitor with small bezels – the screen to human body ratio is an impressive ninety one.2%. The entrance digital camera sits unobtrusively in a slice-out in the higher remaining corner. 

It was extremely hard for me to arrive at across the monitor one-handed, but then smaller sized screens give me the identical issue so that usability aspect is not in itself a deal breaker. 

The screen’s WQHD+ (1440 x 3200 pixels, 515ppi) resolution is, in reality, more of a deal-maker. Everything I did — reading through emails, social media and website webpages, and seeing video — was extremely easy on the eye. The handset can quickly switch concerning whole resolution and FHD+ (1800 x 2400) to preserve on battery power, you can opt for a 120Hz refresh fee for higher clarity, and the monitor tops out at an extremely vivid 1,700 nits. The Mi 11 Ultra’s monitor has the identical specification as that of the Mi 11. 

The extended edges of the monitor are a little bit curved, and you can make settings in software program to guard versus accidental edge touches if this happens. It is really quite extensive – you can even established a customized body for the monitor edges if a vast touch-free spot is necessary. I located the dynamic, quickly modifying placing was high-quality for me and did not expertise any bothersome accidental monitor presses. 

A fantastic monitor like this deserves good speakers, but unfortunately that is not what you get listed here. There are speaker grilles on the major and base edges and though they put out a lot of quantity, bass tones usually are not good and it truly is significantly also easy to include the speakers when holding the telephone in landscape mode. 

The next monitor on the back of this telephone is a 1.1-inch rectangle to the proper of the digital camera lenses that can screen a selection of details: day, time and battery stage, a message (the default is a motivational phrase) or an graphic. The monitor goes off soon after a maximum of thirty seconds, and a tap brings it back to existence. 

If you might be working with the rear cameras to consider selfies, the next monitor acts as a mini-viewfinder, but you want to be very near to it to see anything useful. The next monitor is an idea with opportunity, but it won’t at this time give more than enough utility to be especially useful. 

The Mi 11 Ultra is a flagship handset, so there’s no stinting on internal specs. It is really run by Qualcomm’s major-end Snapdragon 888 5G chipset with 12GB of RAM in aid, and the telephone unquestionably flew via the Geekbench 5 CPU benchmark, returning scores of 1134 (single core) and 3718 (multi core). Among other Snapdragon 888 handsets we have examined, the considerably less expensive Mi 11 with 8GB of RAM was only a little bit driving with 1129 and 3704 respectively, though the Oppo Uncover X3 Pro trailed each Xiaomi handsets with scores of 927 and 3302, in spite of obtaining 12GB of RAM. 

There are two SIM slots in the caddy on the underside of the chassis (this is a 5G handset, of study course). There is 256GB of internal storage, with 21GB employed out of the box leaving 235GB free. Android 11 and Xiaomi’s MIUI 12 overlay consider up some of this consumed space. There are a lot of 3rd-social gathering apps, which can be uninstalled, and some Xiaomi apps — such as many that copy Android functions — which won’t be able to be. As standard with Xiaomi, the handset is brimming with downloadable themes obtainable via an application. 

The Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra has three rear cameras, headed up by a 50MP f/2. vast-angle digital camera with OIS. It is really joined by a 48MP f/four.1 telephoto digital camera with 5x optical, 10x hybrid and 120x digital zoom, and OIS, in addition a 48MP f/2.2 extremely-vast-angle (128°) digital camera. All three rear cameras will seize 8K video at 24 frames for each next (fps), with HDR ten aid on the principal digital camera. The entrance-going through digital camera is a 20MP f/2.2 device. 

General level-and-shoot photography is pretty fantastic, as you would assume with these specs, but zooming is an additional matter. The 5x optical zoom is high-quality, but with each and every phase closer to 120x shots became more and more grainy. I won’t be able to feel when I might want to use this ‘super-zoom’ facility in everyday existence. That said, the Mi 11 Ultra at this time heads up the DXOMARK smartphone digital camera rankings, ahead of Huawei’s Mate forty Pro+.

With the Mi 11 Ultra at its maximum 120Hz monitor refresh fee for the duration of battery screening, the handset’s 5000mAh battery managed 12 hrs fourteen minutes under the PCMark for Android Perform 2. battery exam. It also shed just sixteen% of a whole demand seeing three hrs of YouTube video at whole monitor. A day’s use ought to be achievable, but bear in brain that the huge 6.81-inch monitor is excellent for gaming and video viewing, and normal use of such demanding workloads may suggest the battery wants replenishing for the duration of the day.  

‘Turbo’ charging, each wired and wi-fi, is accessible at 67W, delivering 100% in 36 minutes in accordance to Xiaomi. However, I was presented neither with a Uk plug to exam the out-of-box wired charging expertise, or with a wi-fi charger. 

Conclusions 

The Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra is anything of a conundrum. As a major-tier handset it should to knock the rest of Xiaomi’s selection into a cocked hat, but in conditions of benefit for cash the Mi 11 is a greater telephone. Both equally handsets share the identical (fantastic) monitor and (major-stop) processor. 

The next monitor on the back of the Mi 11 Ultra seems unnecessary, and though the cameras do a fantastic job in typical, the 120x digital zoom seems like a headline function that won’t be widely employed in the actual world. Earlier I said that, on paper, this handset seems like a desire — albeit an high-priced one. Sadly, in spite of its higher-stop specs and fantastic create good quality, the Mi 11 Ultra won’t quite live up to anticipations.

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