The Xiaomi 15 and 15 Ultra zoom into view

Latest Leica collaboration is the new telephoto king

Xiaomi is kicking off Mobile World Congress the same way it did last year: launching the global version of its annual numbered flagship and unveiling the latest in its Ultra series.

First up, here’s the 15 Ultra, the latest in Xiaomi’s line that has hosted my favourite phone camera — or just straight-up favourite camera — for the last two entries. This is a fairly standard year-on-year update to the excellent 14 Ultra with a new processor (Snapdragon 8 Elite), a bigger battery (5,410mAh) and a brighter screen (3,200 nits peak), plus one major upgrade to the camera system.

The design is similar to the 14 Ultra, but the edges on the back panel have been squared off to better match the glass in front of the screen. The real head-turner is the new “silver chrome” colorway, which evokes vintage rangefinders with its metallic top section and black vegan leather at the bottom when held horizontally. This is such a great look — I think it could’ve gone the wrong way if it was too on the nose, but it’s just abstract enough to work.

While the design pays homage to classic cameras, the Photography Kit grip accessory goes in an unexpected direction. The case and basic design are essentially the same as on the 14 Ultra, but there’s a new bold red-and-black colour scheme and some accessories that make it feel more like the kind of thing you’d see at a custom Leica hobbyist event.

The kit comes with two screw-in soft shutter buttons, which use a regular thread size so you can swap them with your “real” camera. There’s also a screw-on thumb grip that attaches to the front. These are both quite left-field additions but I love that they’re there — they really do improve stability and in-hand feel when you attach both. One downside is that the thumb grip does intrude slightly on the screen and can dig into your hand when you’re using the 15 Ultra normally as a phone. Which you might want to do occasionally.

I am not sure that the black-and-red colour scheme screams “discreet street photography” in the Leica tradition, though you can at least swap out the red lens ring for a black one, and I do prefer the new leather-ish finish to the 14 Ultra’s fabric-ish approach. The kit also comes with a wrist strap and the grip’s battery capacity has been increased to 2,000mAh.

As for the camera system itself, the big upgrade here is an all-new 4.3x f/2.6 periscope telephoto camera that uses Samsung’s 200-megapixel 1/1.4” HP9 sensor. The HP9 has popped up on a couple of Vivo phones previously as their sole 85mm-equivalent telephoto option, but Xiaomi is using it for 100mm-equivalent long reach alongside the previous setup of a 70mm-equivalent 3.2x telemacro-capable lens with a 1/2.51” sensor.

What this means in practice, at least from my experience with an early production version, is that the 15 Ultra is a wildly good zoom camera. Periscope telephoto lenses were a genuine breakthrough for phones, but they’ve always been hampered by smaller sensors or shorter reach. The sheer size of this sensor means you can still get credible 50-megapixel images even when cropping in to 8.6x.

The f/2.6 aperture means you’ll still face some challenges with moving subjects in low light, but otherwise this lens turns in fantastic results in almost any situation. In daylight, you get excellent detail and shallow depth of field without needing to resort to portrait mode. In low light, the sensor is large enough to turn in noise-free results that don’t need night mode. It opens up shooting opportunities that you wouldn’t even attempt with most other phones.

The main camera is mostly unchanged except that it no longer has a variable aperture. This is an odd move if only because it was the main feature of the 14 Ultra’s main camera, so rolling it back after a year is a weird look. But in truth, it wasn’t a feature I ever made much use of. The LYT-900 is still the best phone sensor available, but it’s still just a 1” sensor, so I would almost always want to shoot it with the lens wide open. For the occasional times when I might want to stop down to get more of the subject in focus, there’s always the option of taking a step back and using the 2x crop.

Finally, the ultrawide camera now uses a slightly smaller 1/2.76" Samsung JN5 sensor, which isn’t a huge step down from the 14 Ultra and doesn’t seem to make much difference in practice. It’s a similar setup to the Oppo Find X8 Pro, which was more of a downgrade relative to its predecessor but turned in solid results nonetheless. As ever, ultrawides are the camera for which sensor size is least important, especially when you have a good telephoto that’s capable of macro.

The camera app has also been updated for the 15 Ultra with Leica-approved typography, a redesigned Pro mode and a “Fastshot” feature that speeds up shutter response and simulates rangefinder framelines within the camera live view. This gets even more extra with the grip attached, giving you the option to transform the UI into a virtual Leica M. It is pretty silly, of course, but it’s also a fun way to play with the hardware, similar to the Hasselblad X-Pan mode on Oppo phones.

The smaller Xiaomi 15 is a straightforward update to last year’s 14, which I thought was one of the best compact phones available on release. As with the Ultra, Xiaomi has switched to a Snapdragon 8 Elite processor and a larger silicon-carbide battery, in this case bumping capacity by 14% to 5,280mAh.

The design has received a welcome nip and tuck, further squaring off the edges and simplifying the camera bump. The Xiaomi 15 switches to a matte finish on the frame and the back panel; its predecessor was a huge fingerprint magnet, but I haven’t had any issues even with the black version of the 15. Xiaomi also says it’s beefed up the structure with a 33% stronger frame and ten times better drop resistance from the screen glass.

Xiaomi is still using a flat 6.36” 1-120Hz 2760x1200 OLED display, but the peak brightness has been slightly boosted to 3,200 nits and Xiaomi says the screen-to-body ratio is now 94% thanks to even slimmer bezels, which are now 1.38mm on all four sides. The phone is a fraction of a millimeter shorter and narrower than the Xiaomi 14, though I don’t think you’d notice even if you were looking for it. One helpful addition to the display is an ultrasonic fingerprint sensor, which is faster than the optical sensors Xiaomi has used to date.

The Xiaomi 15’s camera system is mostly unchanged from last year, though the telephoto has moved from a 75mm-equivalent 3.2x to a 60mm-equivalent 2.6x. Both phones use 1/2.76" Samsung sensors, so this isn’t a case of reducing zoom reach for larger sensor size, though the 15 does use the newer JN5 over the 14’s JN1. Instead, Xiaomi claims double the dynamic range from the new setup.

The 15’s ultrawide, meanwhile, uses the same JN1 as last year, and the main camera is still based around a 1/1.31" Light Fusion 900 with an f/1.6 lens. This remains solid hardware for the device segment — the real differentiator is the Leica image processing.

Last year I noted that the Xiaomi 14 subjectively felt like a camera, and the 15’s design tweaks make this even more the case. That said, I’m a little disappointed not to see a dedicated camera button on the 15 — Apple’s Camera Control might have been a bust, but an implementation like the Oppo Find X8 Pro’s would have been a great fit for this phone, since there’s no Photography Kit available. Maybe next year.

All in all, though, the Xiaomi 15 feels like a no-nonsense upgrade that ought to be a strong option for anyone looking for a smaller phone with a great camera in 2025.