Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra Review - the best hardware in a Xiaomi phone yet By XDA

Hey guys this is Adam Conway, with CCA TV, and today I'm going to be talking to you about the Xiaomi mi 11 ultra, which sadly, I've had to re-record this review, because there was a software update that came out and fixed pretty much all the negative stuff I had to talk about so rather than trying to re-edit the review and cut out bits and chop and change. I just thought I'd do it again, because this is a flagship phone and, to be honest, I've been using it for two months now, so I just want to give it the full experience the full talk through, because especially this phone now is going to be launching in India very, very soon I figured it may as well be worth deep diving into this redoing, all of it again, knowing that the software issues as well have been fixed. So, let's get into it. The jamming meal of an ultra is Xiaomi's big answer to Samsung and one of the biggest most premium flagships of this year. So far it has everything you could ever want to throw at it in a phone it has flagship. Specs out every single facet of the phone, with, admittedly a price tag to match, but this is the premium Xiaomi phone.

This is the top phone that the company has ever released for the wider market. So we're not talking about the mix alpha, we're not talking about the mix fold, we're talking purely the premium phone, the top end phone. That Xiaomi has released the Xiaomi mi 11 ultra launched earlier this year in China and then a bit later launched in Europe. It has a snapdragon AAA processor, with up to 12 gigabytes of ram and 512 gigabytes of storage, there's also a 50 megapixel massive sensor, primary lens, a 48 megapixel ultra-wide and a 48 megapixel telephoto lens that can zoom up to 120 times, which is a bit creepy, if I'm honest, but it works good for taking photos of the moon and other far away things, even just if you want to see, so there is a utility for it, even if it does seem a bit mental there's, also dual speakers, an infrared sensor and a 5000 William hour battery with 67 watt charging that charges up in roughly 35 minutes from one percent to a hundred percent as well. I'm leaving out the big detail that, on the back of the phone, there is a second screen.

Now, it's not quite as crazy as the mix alpha where it wraps all the way around. It's just a band 4 display that's inside the camera bump, but it shows useful information like battery level. The time if you have notifications or not, and it's a polarizing design. So, if you don't like it you're roughly about fifty percent of the population that sees this phone, I've never really met anybody who is middle of the road on it seems that everybody either loves it or hates it. So that's probably going to be your experience as well, but getting into the actual phone, because you know that's kind of what you're here for uh the Xiaomi mi 11 ultra has a really, really good display with a 120 hertz 1440p AMOLED, 1 billion color, HD or 10 display.

That is a mouthful to say, by the way everything about it is flagship premium. You can watch hdr10 content on Netflix. It works perfectly for all of that. Now that display is a bit of a battery sucker which we'll get into later, alongside that snapdragon 8. But basically this is a through and through flagship display, it's curved on all four sides.

So not only is it curved on the left and right like a lot of flagship phones these days, but the top and the bottom also have a slight curve. Now it looks pretty bad in renders to some people. I was kind of skeptical myself when I saw the renders, but in person it all blends in you, don't notice the fact that at the corners looks slightly uneven due to the different radii of the curves, there's nothing wrong with it in person. When you look at it, you don't notice it. So I've asked people to tell me if they see anything wrong with the display and not one person was able to tell me that it looked uneven, and the corners are weird or anything and in fact the responses tended to be.

Why are you showing me this? I don't see anything wrong with it, so it's your mileage will vary. I feel like renders often exacerbate problems and make them seem to be bigger problems than they actually are. The display also gets to 1700 nits under ideal peak brightness conditions, so that it is one of the brightest displays that I've used outdoors, and I have no issue seeing the display in nearly all situations. The contrast will also bump itself up on a system level so that, when you're in direct light, it can be easier to actually perceive what's on the display, even when it reaches that peak brightness, it manages to tweak it so that it looks even brighter so that you can see it better. Now.

The Qualcomm snapdragon 8 is the flagship processor of the year and, as I've talked about this before it will run everything you throw at it because it is the flagship of the year. So, therefore, if things didn't run on that, they wouldn't run on previous phones, they're games like gentian impact and, obviously emulation, etc. They may get a bit ropey on their highest settings or games. That may not necessarily be as supported in terms of an emulator sense, but by and large this is the best experience you get on an android phone when you've tried to use a performance, intensive applications and games. So Ciara, emulator and dolphin emulator are two emulators that will tend to push a smartphone even with flagship, specs, and I've been playing Mario Kart Wii, animal crossing, Pok?mon, x and y.

All of those work perfectly on it with minimal hitches, which is not something I've particularly been able to say about previous devices. For example, the Simpsons hit-and-run runs nearly flawlessly, and I've been monitoring that game's performance in particular in dolphin emulator, and seeing how much better it gets with every snapdragon iteration and seeing the performance improvements that are introduced. The meal 11 ultra is yet again another device that you can point to show the iterative improvements of performance from Qualcomm chips each and every year. It is a good step up over last year's chips and the performance is excellent in all aspects of the phone. Now, sadly, the triple h seems to heat up a little before the mini 12.5 update the heating wasn't too bad, but me and my 12.5 introduced a lot of problems to my phone anyway, that I'll be getting into and one of them was overheating. I don't know if this is a triple an issue I feel like.

It is because the OnePlus 9 pro has similar problems, and I've heard similar from other AAA devices as well. They have heating issues uh largely in thanks to that triple eight. So that's something to keep in mind if you're looking to pick up a new phone that this may be a problem on the m11 ultra that it heats up and potentially drains the battery too. If we're going to talk about software, I may as well just do it now because up to me UI 12.5, everything was perfect. This was, I was quick to say that this could well have been one of the best phones of the year if it consistently remained excellent and there were no more devices on the market that came out.

That would topple it, but turns out the only thing that could beat Xiaomi was Xiaomi themselves. The mini 12.5 update was enough to make me need to factory reset my phone because of the number of problems that I had and that's not something I've ever had to do with a phone before unless I was using like a custom, ROM or something. I've never had the factory reset a phone after a software update, but I had to here. Notifications were bugged, it was overheating. The touchscreen wasn't properly working all of these issues and more that I can't even think of were affecting the phone to such a detrimental aspect that I had to factory reset it and while most of the issues were admittedly fixed when I did so the touchscreen issues persisted where when I would touch the screen, it was if the sensitivity wasn't high enough, it just didn't register my swipes half the time and would register them.

As touches and update came out to address this, when I contacted Xiaomi, I was told that this was an issue that they were acknowledging, and they were fixing on a number of devices and that updates were going to be rolling out. I then received an update for the meal 11 ultra about a week after that contact and as far as I can tell, the issue is fixed. It still once or twice as cropped up, but it's nowhere happening all the time. I've been using the phone for a while now, and it's not really happening anymore, which is good because it made the phone unusable to the point that I hated using my phone mini.12.5 did add a bunch of useful features and I like mini's features in general. So when this update came out, it really disappointed me and nearly made me wary of future updates, because if the company's flagship smartphone can have a problem introduced like that that stays around for over a month, I would worry about what will happen down the line.

When say a, 11 12 ultra comes out, and the 11 ultra is no longer at the forefront of Xiaomi's mind and is now an older phone. That is a burden to maintain, rather than something that the company can point to as a flagship. So I would worry in regard to that, but I'm hoping that this is merely just a blip because most of the time, Xiaomi's updates have been good over the years and while I'm wary, I'm not necessarily sending the warning alarm to say that this will be a problem going forward just to close off the software section as well. The fingerprint sensor is kind of bad. The fingerprint sensor itself has a lot of issues but half the time.

It seems to just not necessarily pick up on my thumb. I don't know if that's a problem with the software or if it's the fingerprint sensor that they've used, but I found that it has improved a little in the latest update that I got that also fixed the touchscreen issues, so your mileage may vary I've heard from other reviewers as well that it's perfectly fine for them, uh after re-enrolling their thumb, which it is mostly fine for me, but it's still missing out on ones that I feel like it should be picking up. So I don't really know what the story is there, but the face unlock is quick and fast, though, admittedly, if you're going around wearing a mask um, if you're not going to be relying on face unlock and if it did unlock your phone, while you were wearing a mask, then that would also likely be a problem now onto the camera, because at the time of release this was the largest camera sensor on a smartphone. It's not anymore. The sharp aquas or seven which we covered on the channel has overtaken it in terms of large sensor sizes, but it is one of the largest sensor sizes and a large sensor allows more light capture and also allows for a more natural depth of field both effect when you're taking photos.

So I actually did a comparison test on my personal Twitter account asking people to tell the difference are to choose the photo that they like more between a DSLR and the me11 ultra. I covered that on the channel here as well today, but the interesting thing about that test was, I didn't, tell people which was the DSLR and which was May 11 ultra and in nearly all cases the male 11 ultra one. I made a point of talking about this because I talked about social media, ready photos versus DSLR photos, but my point was that this phone in terms of depth of field was actually pretty good enough to convince people that what they were potentially looking at was a DSLR and not the male 11 ultra. It's nowhere near the quality that a DSLR can put out in all other aspects, but in terms of media, ready photos that are saturated and have a good contrast, etcetera, etcetera. The meal has an ultra did pretty well, and it's not really too surprising to see that people preferred it over DSLR, particularly when those DSLR photos were unprocessed.

They were taken straight from the camera and posted online. I didn't take them into Lightroom or raw therapy, or anything like that, which really is something you want to be doing. If you're using a DSLR, you don't want to be using nine times out of ten the straight photos out of the camera. You want to be processing them yourself, which, if you think about it, the mi 11 ultra and any other smartphone that you use is actually taking that raw data and processing it for you, I'm going to show you just a bunch of photos from the 11 ultra, because I found that it is a very good smartphone and the photos that it takes are perfect. It's nowhere near even a pixel 5 I find in most stills, but in any other aspect it's good.

It takes blurry photos of moving objects which, like a lot of phones, it has good video performance at the very least, and the colors and the contrast and HDR are all good when you're taking photos. The pixel 5 takes better photos, but the mi 11 ultra is up there as one of the better camera phones that I've used and that are currently on the market. The camera itself is also more versatile on the pixel 5, because you have that 120x zoom telephoto, and you have that massive camera sensor as well, for a natural depth of field. On the miscellaneous front, the dual speakers sound fantastic. The front-facing camera is a 20-megapixel shooter, that's decent! Like it's fine, it's grand the battery life is middling, it's middle of the road.

I got about four to five hour screen on time, which is not bad but not great uh, particularly because before this phone I came from a pixel 5, which had much better battery life, and this is again with the triple eight. There seems to be overheating and battery life issues, etc. , etc. So it's about as good as it gets was particularly with a 5000 William hour battery and at the very least, with 67 watt charging, where the phone actually doesn't even heat up that much. You can charge it up quickly so that you don't need to worry about the battery life as much there's NFC infrared for controlling, like TVs and speakers, and all sorts of things with a remote on your phone, which is pretty cool and the dual speakers sound very good, very loud, a little of bass to them, actually, which is surprising, considering it's a smartphone and as I've mentioned, that rear display is cool.

But I'm not sure if it's usefulness, um taking photos with your back camera, you can use it as a mini screen to see a feed of your cameras that you're using which is useful. I've used it for the ultra-wide to take photos with friends when I'm out, because it's better than selfie camera, but otherwise I feel like it's underutilized now. Having said that, I don't know how better you could utilize it you. There are music controls that come up when you're listening to music, but I find myself more often than not accidentally tapping the music controls by accident when the phone is in my pocket, or even if I'm just listening to music and holding my phone the kind of weird way. Sometimes I found I accidentally hit the top of the phone with the music controls, and I skipped my song, or I pause or play or whatever, because it's basically just a GUI for headphone controls, there's nothing too unique or special.

You can do you can't seek in a track. You can't like switch playlists or anything like that. There's no integration, it's just next song previous song pause and play, there's also reverse wireless charging and the front of the phone is corning gorilla, glass Vitus, which is the company's latest gorilla glass. That is pretty much the entire spec sheet, and that is all of my thoughts on the 11 ultra. The problem with the male 11 ultra is really its software and mini is not necessarily to blame here, as it is more so the fact that I got an update that was so bad that made me wary of future updates on this phone.

If it is no longer going to be an issue, or you were willing to bite the bullet on it potentially being one, the m11 ultra is a top smartphone of 2021. If you are wary of updates, I would be very careful. You can unlock the bootloader on it. You can install a custom ROM if you want, but I understand that for most people you just want an out-of-the-box experience that works, which the mi 11 ultra and its current state absolutely does. But it may not necessarily do so in the future, given that in the past it didn't for a period of time either.

It is a superfast super flagship phone that is clearly aimed to take on Samsung and take the flagship throne of 2021, whether it does that or not is a different thing, and I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on the mi 11 ultra, because I know me, UI, in particular, is extremely polarizing to the point that no matter the hardware in a smartphone, some people will just not use a phone that has mini, which I think is a shame, but people are entitled to their own opinions. So I get that, and I know that some people would prefer something like maybe a Google Pixel or an OnePlus phone, because the UI changes are not as deep or as jarring as mini may be, but that's it for this one. This has been Adam Conway with ATV. Thank you so much for watching and if you have any thoughts, uh feel free to leave them below in the comments uh. As always, I will be commenting and if anybody has any questions that may not have been covered in the video feel free to just reply to my comment asking- and I will get back to you as soon as I can to answer your question.

So thank you for watching be sure to like the video and subscribe to the channel. If you enjoyed thanks for watching you.

Source : XDA