- It wasn't that long ago that a Xiaomi phone was off my list for potential daily drivers, just for being a Xiaomi phone. The cameras weren't very good. The skins were ugly and unintuitive, and you could pretty much kiss
your Android updates goodbye. But a lot of that has changed. And the Mi 11 Ultra looks
like a serious contender for daily driver. I gotta say, right off the hop I love this little dig at Huawei. You see that? Mi 11 Ultra with easy access to the Google apps you use most. (laughing) You can tell who their
primary competitor is, right? Look at that, look how hard that was. A type-C to three and a half mil adapter. Rest of the industry, take notes. Maybe don't take notes on the pretty unexceptional included case. This is something that's always
a challenge with anything but basically an Apple or Samsung phone. Unless the first party
accessories are excellent. You're pretty much stuck
with kind of junky options, but the phone itself, this is where things
get really interesting. This thing is freaking top spec. We're talking Snapdragon
888 up to 12 gigs of Ram, up to 256 gigs of storage and good Lord. That is not a camera bump. That is a camera mountain. It's at the point where it's not, this isn't even a camera bump anymore. It's like having another smaller phone attached to the back of your phone. I mean, look at this
phone, it's got a camera, it's got a full, you know, glass front. It's got a screen, that's right. There's a little, 250 nit. I think it's like a 1.1
inch screen on the back. And it serves a couple of functions. You can use it as a
preview for your selfies. So, we're gonna check
that out in a moment, as well as as an always on display to just give you notifications I guess, if you're the kind of monster that lays your phone face down on the desk because you're not familiar
with the basic concept that little micro grains of crap that sit on the top of things are what scratch your freaking screen. Oh, conveniently Xiaomi has included a built-in screen protector
that contours reasonably well to the curved glass. And I didn't want it dark too
many marks for the camera bump because the included camera
is really impressive. Okay, we've got three lenses on the back. We've got a Telephoto
that does 5X Optical Zoom. That's a 48 megapixel camera. We've got an ultra wide,
that's also 48 megapixels, and a 50 megapixel mainstream shooter. I mean, it's thick enough that I could see this getting
caught on your pocket, Like let's do. I mean, it's been a while
since I've done a pocket test, but Andy, you ready for a pocket test? Okay, let's do a pocket test here. It's not that smooth, you know,
getting it out easy though. Okay, let's say I was
more of a camera down kind of gentlemen. Okay, that definitely goes in easier. Okay, what if I was a left hmm. See as long as I'm coming around, Oh, that's still a little, oh boy. I'm thinking, especially the
ladies with tighter pockets we might have to get a lady. Special agent Janice
is here to investigate, the usability of this phone. So, here, do you notice anything? - It's heavy, and it has
this extra thickness. - It does, it has, I think extra thickness is
a good way to describe it. - I can try my back pocket. That's pretty typical,
just like sticking out. - Yeah, but did it go in easily? - No, well, coming out actually was worse, 'cause of the way the seam is. - Oh cause of the way the seam works. - When I took it out it
definitely caught on the, going in is fine, coming
out is slightly weird. I don't feel like it's
gonna rip my pockets off. - Got it, okay, all right, thank you. - No problem.
- Thank you very much. Thanks technology. Oh my goodness, holy crap, the balance of this phone, it is very, top heavy. Like does that look like
about 50% Andy or halfway? Let's take a short break
from the chunkiness though. And talk about charging for a moment. It's got a 5,000 milliampere battery, includes a 67 Watts charger. Apparently it even supports
67 Watts wirelessly. I'm more of a slow charging kind of guy, but your mileage may vary on that. Okay, there's no putting this off then, normally I'd want to spend time now, talking about the 120 Hertz display. Oh, oh, oh. So smooth, oh, okay. That is really smooth. Okay, it runs at 3,200 by 1400 resolution. So, super high res. But we've got to go
straight to the camera, because if you're gonna
have, this gigantic, fricking hill on it, it better have a really
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though, that's free. We're gonna have it linked down below. (phone camera shuttering) That was a long shutter delay, tastefully small hole punch though. Not a good thing, it's not actually thing. There it is. It's may, there, pickaboo. Okay, let's switch over to the 5X. Okay. That is a sharp Telephoto and actually pretty pleasing
natural voca to it as well. How about the ultra wide? Now you can really see the studio there. Interestingly Andy's life comes back into his skin a little bit more with the ultra wide. Thing you gotta remember guys, is that your different lenses are completely different
imaging pipelines, so you can get very, very
different color reproduction from one to the next. So here's our Telephoto. Here's our regular, and
here's our ultra wide. So you can really see that the reds are more rich
in red on this ultra wide. This is our Desk Pad lttstore.com. They are a little bit more muted, on both of these other ones. Man, that's a cool design lttstore.com. Creepy one. (Andy laughing) One cool feature, is it
supports recording video in up to 8K which frankly, a 24 FPS which frankly nobody should do. - [Andy] Dude, oh, what is that? - It's 8K on a mobile phone. Like there's no point. They just don't have the sensor size to record 8K, To record 8K. Wow those speakers sound pretty good. You know, that's a funny thing, they've got dual stereo
speakers tuned by Harman Kardon. But Harman Kardon got bought
by Samsung like ages ago. Like how weird is that, going to a company that's owned by one of your primary competitors? For help tuning your speakers
on your phone, right? You know what? There is jutter cause it's 24 FPS but the preview is way worse
than the actual recording. Right, of course. One of the features that I've
been really supportive of, even though there's never been a device that's implemented it, that I've been willing to
actually use, is having a display on the back of the phone, so that you don't really
need a selfie camera, right? Because if you could just use your primary shooter every single time, why would you need like
a mediocre selfie camera? This one right here is 20 megapixels which is like, fine, I guess, I could take me some selfies, you know, just like that. But what if I didn't have to do that? What if instead I could
use the rear camera with their like selfie assist thing? Okay, how do I do this though? Oh, hello, how are we doing here? Why the hell would I wanna
take a picture like this? But I guess, oh boy, am I in a video recording mode? What am I looking at? I guess you could just see
the composition of it and all. Hmm, okay that looks
it's always on display. This has to be like a super simple thing that I'm just totally missing. Rear display, for crying out loud. It was right there the whole time. Okay, let's take the
greatest selfie of all time. Now you can't really see very well what you're taking a picture of, but there's no doubt that the
image quality of this selfie vastly exceeds what you can get with the actual selfie camera. I mean, look at this. I clearly need to pluck my eyebrows. I got a serious wicked mono brow going on. Let's see if the selfie
camera can catch it. (selfie camera shuttering) Yeah, it's got it, but
it's definitely blurrier. You see that? Very noticeable. So if you're not that into grooming, then I guess you'd probably
prefer doing things real. Oh, I never went through
the IO and all that. So USB-C port for charging, got one of your speakers right here, got your dual SIM slot, over in the side you got a
whole whack load and nothing over on this side,
you've got look at that, another speaker an IR blaster, freaking love it, especially now that Logitech Harmony remotes
aren't going to be a thing. I guess we're down to using
phones as universal remotes. Volume rocker and of course lock button. That's another interesting feature. So it's got Bluetooth 5.2, which comes with additional bandwidth as well as some really cool functionality, including the ability to have a single source
go-to multiple devices. Now I wanna talk a bit
more about this display, 900 nits maximum brightness
under normal conditions 1700 nits peak brightness in HDR and support for both HDR
10 plus and Dolby Vision, which is pretty unreal. And we're going to have
to give it a minute to not be at a craptastic bit right here. Why you do this? I'm trying to look at a pretty display and you're ruining it Netflix. Okay, that way it's
picking up a little bit. That looks way better. Not bad, okay, I wanna
crank these speakers though. So far, very promising. (video clip playing on phone) That's too much. (video clip playing on phone) Pretty good. (chuckles) Pretty good good job Samsung. (Andy laughing) Couple other housekeeping items then not only is it a
high refresh rate display it supports adaptive sync. So, 30, 60, 90, and 120 Hertz. So it can drop down if needed. It's got IP 68 water resistance and the Gorilla glass on the front, which is their Victus glass. And then on the back, of course, ceramic. So, should be fairly drop
and scratch resistant. But of course I'll leave
it to the bold experts to tell us exactly how it holds up. As far as that goes. I think that's pretty much
it for my take, it's heavy, it's not particularly
well-balanced, but it is certainly, for a weapon snappy, the
screen and speakers are great. And the camera's looking
pretty good so far with a little bit of work
required in my opinion, on the color science. But other than that, I'm pretty darn impressed by this thing. So subscribe to Short
Circuit and see more videos kind of like this or
different ones I don't know.
LTT aside I’m surprised Samsung is willing to bet on 1 inch sensor for phones.
Apart from not really having the cash to splurge on a phone right now, that weight distribution would really get on my nerves with a device that big.
Why even bother putting the name of the product in the title anymore or absolutely anything to indicate what it might be about, even Buzzfeed titles are less clickbait than LTT.
The "kiss your Android updates goodbye" line is a little irritating and sounds ignorant or at least uninformed given Xiaomi's track record with updates.
They have supported their high end and mid range devices (everything running on a Snapdragon SoC essentially) longer than most OEMs for the better part of the last decade, with 4+ years of MIUI updates (though not necessarily core Android updates) not being a rarity even in their mid-range models. For a long time they were ahead of Samsung when it came to long-term software support.
There certainly are plenty of software-related things one could and still very much can complain about with Xiaomi (overall code quality, ads, irritating MIUI modifications etc.). But long term update support simply isn't and wasn't really one of them.
These phones still work horribly in the US