Xiaomi 14 Ultra Review: Ditch Your DSLR

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Every now and then something special comes along. In the crowded phone market, it’s a rare thing. 

Enter the Xiaomi 14 Ultra. Xiaomi has finally launched its Ultra flagship smartphone outside of its home market. If you’re in the market for the absolute best phone experience, you might have found it here.

You will need to be all in on the photography though, and if you are, this is an enthusiast’s dream. Especially when you add in the optional Photography Kit which, no lie, means this phone can rival compact mirrorless DSLRs. 

Costing a whopping £1,299, it’s not a phone you’ll be buying on a whim. But if you can afford it, this phone has just about every bell and whistle you can imagine, from insane photography skills to a gorgeous screen to super-fast charging. 

It’s not perfect, no phone is, but Xiaomi will have the likes of Apple, Samsung and Google quaking in their respective boots after this. 

See what the Xiaomi 14 Ultra is going up against in our best smartphones guide.

Design & Build

• Vegan leather and Xiaomi Shield glass
• Two colours
• IP68

If you think this phone looks like a camera, it’s not a coincidence. Xiaomi has crafted it to resemble traditional cameras in various ways, from the circular camera module to the textured cover. I think it looks great. 

There’s no getting around it, the Xiaomi 14 Ultra is a big phone. It’s to be expected with that Ultra moniker, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. 

Much of the bulk is found on the back, as the camera module is a huge, almost ice hockey puck-like, addition. It adds weight and makes the phone a little top-heavy but as mentioned, it’s all for a good reason. 

On the plus side, it does provide somewhere for your finger to naturally rest and support the phone. 

If you think this phone looks like a camera, it’s not a coincidence

The overall footprint of the handset is similar to big-screen rivals. However, it’s slightly smaller (161.4 x 75.3 x 9.2 mm) and lighter (from 219.8g) than the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra. 

Xiaomi offers the 14 Ultra in two colours, simply black or white, and both feature a ‘nano-tech’ vegan leather rear cover which looks and feels really nice. How it holds up a year or two down the line is another matter, but it’s likely you’ll use a case at some point anyway. 

Unusually, the firm provides a hard plastic case in the box rather than a flimsy silicone one. This is fine but I’d rather use the phone without, or make use of the case that comes as part of the Photography Kit – more on that later. 

Case or not, the phone is well-made and durable, featuring an IP68 rating meaning it’s pretty much fully dust and water resistant. As all flagships north of £1,000 should be. 

The one-piece frame is a new ‘6M42’ integrated high-strength aluminium, and the front is Xiaomi’s own Shield Glass which “incorporates all-new materials, forming a interlocking structure through high-temperature sintering”. 

Combined with the vegan leather back, they form the Xiaomi Guardian Structure. A fun marketing name but the phone does feel very strong to be fair. 

As for the glass, it’s hard to say without long-term testing and that’s partly as Xiaomi applies a screen protector at the factory. This has become quite scratched during my few weeks with the phone so might not be on for much longer. 

Screen & Speakers

• 6.7-inch AMOLED
• 1-120Hz
• The best of curved and flat worlds
• Impressive audio

The 14 Ultra offers the best of both worlds, with the glass beautifully curved on all sides but the stunning display underneath being flat

Much of the specifics about the 14 Ultra’s display is about what you’d expect for a flagship of this price. However, there’s a combination of design elements which make it unusual. 

Xiaomi touts an ‘all around liquid display’, but it’s not as simple as the display physically being curved at the edges. That approach is a bit divisive as although it looks and feels nice, you get a bit of image distortion and the downside of accidental input. 

The 14 Ultra offers the best of both worlds, with the glass beautifully curved on all sides but the stunning display underneath being flat. 

It’s a mammoth 6.73-inch (slightly smaller than the S24 Ultra’s 6.8-inch) panel with a long list of top specs, including AMOLED tech with a high pixel density of 522ppi, plus support for Dolby Vision and HDR10+. 

LPTO technology means the refresh rate can dynamically adjust from 120Hz down to just 1Hz so you can get smooth performance when the high refresh rate is needed, but save power when it isn’t.

It’s also very bright, with a typical high brightness of 1000 nits and a theoretical peak brightness of 3000 nits. In a real-world measurement with auto brightness switched off and sunlight mode on, I measured it at an impressive 736 nits and found it easy to use in all situations. 

The embedded fingerprint scanner is very good indeed, and I like that it sits higher up than the Xiaomi 14 making it more natural and comfortable for me to use.  

There’s no headphone jack, which I always find a shame on a phone of this size, but it’s not a big deal when wireless headphones are so prevalent. The 14 Ultra is impressively packed with high-end audio codecs including AAC, AptX Adaptive, LDAC and LHDC 5.0, so Hi-Res Audio isn’t far away with the right streaming service and headphones. 

Its stereo speakers are good quality and have plenty of velocity, along with a spacious and detailed soundscape. You will be suitably immersed in audio when listening to music, gaming, watching videos and more. 

Specs & Performance 

• Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset
• Whopping 16GB of RAM
• Only 512GB storage in UK

Matching many other 2024 flagships, the Xiaomi 14 Ultra features with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset in the engine room.  

You get a whopping 16GB of RAM (more than the S24 Ultra or Pixel 8 Pro). Just note that, in the UK at least, there’s only one storage capacity at 512GB. 

Performance, unsurprisingly, is extremely quick and the 14 Ultra can handle whatever you throw at it with relative ease. Whether it’s opening apps, photo editing, streaming video or gaming. 

Top games such as Genshin Impact are buttery smooth and you can play with high settings, no problem. A beefier cooling system than the regular Xiaomi 14 – a ‘Dual-Channel IceLoop System’ – helps keep the internal temperature down and it seems to work well. 

The 14 Ultra can handle whatever you throw at it with relative ease

You can see how it benchmarks compared with key rivals below: 

Xiaomi 14 Ultra benchmarks

In terms of other specs, the 14 Ultra is packed with plenty of bells and whistles including 5G support, Wi-Fi 7 (in select markets including the UK), dual nano-SIM support (no eSIM), Bluetooth 5.4 with dual connections, NFC and even an IR blaster. 

The latter is super handy even just for adjusting the volume of or switching the TV on and off when your toddler has misplaced the dedicated remote. 

Cameras & Video

• Incredible quad camera system
• Co-developed with Leica
• Optional Photography Kit is awesome

When it comes to the cameras, the Xiaomi 14 Ultra is definitely a case of all killer no filler

As you may have gathered by this point in the review, photography is the main event on the 14 Ultra. You don’t (or shouldn’t) have a camera bump this big without having something to show for it. 

And there’s lots to show here, with no fewer than four rear cameras co-developed with Leica. When it comes to the cameras, the Xiaomi 14 Ultra is definitely a case of all killer no filler.

All four lenses are 50Mp, so it’s a similar affair to the regular 14 here but delve into the specs and the Ultra has more to offer than just an extra lens. 

The main camera is a photography nerd’s dream come true with optical image stabilisation (OIS), a huge 1-inch sensor and even variable step-less aperture between f/1.63/2.0/2.8/4.0 – to give you the headline details. 

Elsewhere there’s an ultrawide, a floating telescope at 3.2x and a periscope camera for 5x optical zoom. They are all based on the Sony IMX858 sensor and only the ultrawide doesn’t have OIS. 

If you like to deal in focal lengths, this gives you the equivalent of 12-, 23-, 75- and 120mm which is a formidable array to play with, and those lengths are mentioned throughout the camera app so you know which you are using. 

Talking of the app, Xiaomi has done a great job with this considering how many modes and settings there are available. It’s neat, intuitive, and you can just point and shoot or spend hours fine-tuning (including choosing the aperture on the main camera and saving custom presets) depending on your preference. 

As I found with the regular 14, the quality on offer here is absolutely stunning. The way the phone captures light is often astonishing, and viewers of the results wouldn’t believe they came from a phone rather than a fully-fledged DLSR camera.

If you’re not sure which camera to use, the phone may switch automatically (macro shots for example), but I often preferred the results by making my own choice. Quality is so high across the board that you may not even be able to tell which camera has been used for a shot, beyond the obvious difference between an ultrawide and 5x optical zoom. 

The way the phone captures light is often astonishing, and viewers of the results wouldn’t believe they came from a phone rather than a fully-fledged DLSR camera

You can almost completely do away with portrait and night modes as there’s plenty of natural bokeh and the main sensor can absorb light like some kind of magical sponge. 

As usual, the main camera is the best, but the two telephoto lenses keep up impressively well with excellent detail, colour, exposure and white balance. You can zoom digitally beyond the 5x optical available up to a ridiculous 120x, but that’s extremely hard to use handheld and quality takes a big dip after around 30x. 

Meanwhile, the ultrawide does a good job of fitting a lot more in at high quality without much distortion in the corners at all. 

I’ve preferred to shoot in the Leica Authentic colour profile which is close to real life, but you can switch to Leica Vibrant in the top corner if you want more punchy saturated colours akin to Samsung’s phones.

Moving to the selfie camera and this is the same 32Mp (f/2.0) camera as the regular 14. It’s excellent in terms of quality and can automatically switch between 0.8- and 1x depending on what you’re trying to fit into the frame.  

It’s got plenty of features, including portrait mode with depth control, and can shoot video in up to 4K. At the rear, you can go all the way to 8K/30fps if you like, though 4K with 60fps (up to 120fps) is preferable for most situations. If you want to use Xiaomi’s steady video or steady video pro modes, you’ll have to drop to 1080p but with OIS on the main camera, I didn’t find this necessary. 

Overall, this is the best smartphone money can buy right now for photography and I haven’t even mentioned the Photography Kit which takes it to another level.