Mi 11 Ultra hands-on: Xiaomi's superphone has plenty to brag about

Are two screens better than one? Xiaomi hopes to prove so with the mi 11 Ultra. It's the Chinese company's latest super phone that rounds out its flagship mi 11 lineup. [MUSIC] Hi everyone. I'm Serena and I've been using the meal of an ultra for a couple of days now. So I'm gonna give you my early take on one of shammies Most expensive phones some housekeeping for those tuning in to my videos for the first time for the sake of transparency and wanted to share that. Xiaomi actually sends me its latest devices usually before or after the launch, but don't worry that won't affect. Opinions on the device. This is the first time Xiaomi is releasing a meal of an ultra phone overseas and a version with 12 gigs of RAM and 256 gigs storage is slated to be released in Europe if it hasn't already for 1119 euros. I believe there's an India launch coming up on April 23. For the ultra variant launch, there might be slightly different to better suit the country. Unfortunately for those in the US, Xiaomi has no plans for a release stateside. So let's not waste any more time and dive right in. Design wise I'd say it's business on the front and a party on the back. Basically the meal of an ultra features the design trappings of a standard Android flagship in 2021. From the front at least. It has a hole punch notch housing a selfie camera, a gently curved display and ports or buttons in their usual locations. Once you flip it around, though, you see this second display living in a supersized camera bump,that takes up roughly a quarter of the meal of an ultras rear. And it eclipses the massive bumps seen on 2020s Galaxy S 20 Ultra. The rear display is a 1.1 inch am OLED touchscreen, with 123 by 294 resolution, so it's not very sharp. But is the second display useful? Well kind of When it's face down, or if you double tap it can do things like tell you the time show you what song you're listening to, or display notification alerts from, say WhatsApp for instance. The best use for the rear display however is to preview selfies, meaning you have the privilege of using the three higher resolution cameras on the back To help you nail those selfies or group photos, so you can take an ultra wide shot normal ones for really zoomed in ones if you want to do that. At the same time, however, I can't say I'm convinced the second Display feature will stick around. It has its limitations in its current form. For example, it's challenging to see any detail when snapping selfies since you're depending on a tiny display, but it does function as rough guide, and you can't really take video using the selfie viewfinder and portrait mode cannot be used at all. Although I didn't wind up using the rear screen on the back that much. I certainly had a lot of fun with it. [MUSIC] No. If I had to nitpick the me 11 ultra would lose points for not entirely living up to what Shammy says it can do. Show me bills at second screen as an alternative, always on display, but it can't actually do that. In fact, the longest it can stay on is 30 seconds. Admittedly, when I use it as a viewfinder, I didn't run into that issue. But I think the second display is really just the icing on the cake. The meal of an ultra holds its own without it. It has a six and a half inch OLED panel with wide Quad HD plus resolution. So that's 3200 by 1440 pixels. It runs on Qualcomm's fastest Snapdragon triple eight processor. And has a loud set of stereo speakers co developed by Harman Kardon and did I mention it has 67 watt wireless charging and 10 watt reverse wireless charging to Xiaomi usually gets a small ding in our coverage for leaving out the IP rating for water and dust resistance But that's no longer the case as an IP 68 rating on the meal of an ultra means it's water resistant. One thing absent in the meal of an ultra is a memory card slot for expandable storage. The party on the back of the meal of an ultra continues with a stellar camera module composed of three rear lenses. 15 megapixel main lens with a one by 1.12 inch sensor 48 megapixel ultra wide with 128 degree field of view and a 48 megapixel telephoto lens. The sensor on the main camera Samsung's Gen two is currently the largest ever on a smartphone and I think the field of view is also the widest available. By the way it shoots 8k video on All three cameras to know what the camera system like the one I just described taking vibrant and detailed photos was effortless. Photos had lovely depth of field, especially with subjects taken closer up. Zoom was impressive too, thanks to the periscope style telephoto lens, which can do 10 times optical zoom and 120 times digital zoom, Which based on the water spec at least means it's better than the 100 times zoom of the Galaxy S 21 Ultra. But unfortunately, I didn't have a galaxy device on hand to stack the two up against each other just to make sure either way A pictures taken with 120 times zoom were a jumble of pixels and entirely unusable. No surprise there but you can get away with respectable photos up until 15 times zoom maybe 20 times on a clear day, but after that it gets. Gets pretty blurry. As for night mode I took these photos in a dim bedroom. This photo was taken on default settings and the other one with dedicated night mode on. You can see it lights the image up a lot and remove quite a bit of the shadow from the plant. And here's another example plants again, any guesses which one has night mode on Now the meal of an ultra is a meticulously designed device and it's clear that Xiaomi paid attention to auxiliary features that don't touch attention on other devices. For instance, flashlights powerful rays being bright and far thanks to the triple LED lights using the V 11 Ultra and managed to make it through an otherwise dark night with limited visibility. Now I've harped about the Mi 11 excellent stereo speakers. So if you wanna read about the quality, take a look at my review of the Mi 11. The regular one on the CNET website, the meal of an ultra as I mentioned earlier using the same speaker system co developed by Harman Kardon. As has been the case with the Mi 11 Xiaomi included Theories that main rivals Apple and Samsung have removed from their boxes. There's a bundled charger at 67 watts a plastic case and a USBC cable inside the meal of an ultra black box. Overall I think Xiaomi has outdone itself with Mi 11 Ultra and I can say Xiaomi has once again leveled up its flagship game by stacking A fabulous array of features that left me stunned. And in Europe at least the price is below the Samsung Galaxy S 21 Ultra. So that wraps up my preliminary impressions on the Mi 11 Ultra, but check back on the CNET website in a couple of days or so because I'm gonna be adding my full review or a lot more inside. In fact, there's some chatter that Xiaomi is pushing for more functionality on this rear display. But I'd love to hear from you. What do you think about this phone? Do you think this camera bump is way too big? Or what about the second display? Is it you know, do you like it or is it too gimmicky? Do share in the comments section below, but if you enjoyed this video, it'd be awesome if you can like and subscribe for more But let's leave it there for now but I just want to say thanks for watching and I'll catch you next time.