This phone is all about the camera, but is that enough?

Xiaomi is aiming to play at the high end with this phone, which stands out for its camera but lacks software finesse

- Shouvik Das

The highly commoditized smartphone market in India rarely gets devices that stand out. Truth be told, it's difficult to call any smartphone 'different' in today's market, but if they can be different, the Xiaomi 15 Ultra is likely as far as it can get. Most buyers shelling out a lakh for a phone would simply buy Apple's iPhones. If they do pick an Android phone, it is likely to be Samsung's Galaxy S or Z (foldable) series devices, or the newest Google Pixel.

Xiaomi has always been seen in India as a value-first pick. For the longest time, it was a near-default pick for a smartphone purchase at under ₹25,000. That gave it considerable brand weightage in India and clear recall among consumers, just not in the premium segment.

To change this, Xiaomi has thrown the proverbial kitchen sink at its latest flagship, the Xiaomi 15 Ultra. It has the latest 3-nanometer Snapdragon 8 Elite processor—the best on offer in smartphones today in terms of gaming, artificial intelligence (AI) tasks and everything else. It uses the latest quality of memory and storage chips, which is to persuade a user that as far as the quality of hardware goes, there's nothing lacking in Xiaomi, when compared with Samsung and Google.

The differentiators, then? Camera and software. In these two departments, the Xiaomi 15 Ultra is undoubtedly different from the rest of the pack. While one is a good thing, the other is not necessarily so.