The Chinese company Xiaomi has a lot going on at its Mobile World Congress booth in Barcelona. There’s the Xiaomi SU7 electric car, there’s smartwatches galore and there’s even a pack of robot dogs doing backflips in sync. But it’s the new Xiaomi 14 Ultra phone that truly caught my eye. (OK, the robot dogs were a close second.)
The Xiaomi 14 Ultra, which had previously launched in China prior to MWC, has a list of features that reads like a short fantasy novel written by a phone enthusiast, especially for creative types like photographers. It supports 80-watt wireless charging. The main camera has a large, 1-inch image sensor (which is closer to 0.6 inches diagonally). The wide-angle lens on the main camera has a variable aperture to make it more versatile in a wider range of environments.
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The more I learned about the device, the more I longed to see some of those features end up on the next iPhone, aka the rumored iPhone 16. Apple has probably already locked in the iPhone 16’s design and hardware features, but that doesn’t mean we can’t muse about how nice it would be to see some of the Xiaomi 14 Ultra’s features built in to it.
An iPhone 16 Ultra with two telephoto cameras
At first glance, I couldn’t help but notice the giant circular camera bump on the back of the Xiaomi 14 Ultra. It looks a little like a bejeweled hockey puck that was cut in half. In this Devil’s Tower-like extension are four cameras: a wide and an ultrawide, and two telephotos.
One of the telephoto cameras has a full-frame equivalent length of 75mm (3.2x) and the other 120mm (5x). Xiaomi isn’t the first phone company to double up on zooming this way, Samsung’s Galaxy S24 Ultra has separate 3x and 5x telephoto lenses, and like the Xiaomi 14 Ultra, Samsung’s top-of-the-line phone also has four rear cameras. In fact, the S24 Ultra’s 3x lens outperformed the iPhone 15 Pro Max in our camera comparison…
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