So if you are shopping around for a flagship phone & maybe you're tired of the Apple’s and Samsung's phones, but you want something of the same or even better quality, well, there you might be interested in something like the Xiaomi 15. This phone is top tier, so there is no doubt about it. And what you might find interesting is that it may even have an edge in some areas & you’ll see what that is if you stick around. The price on the Xiaomi 15 is likely to start at around 999 Euros at launch. And I am making this before the initial announcement, so that could change. I’ll pin some links to the official prices in the comments.

And it’s worth mentioning …The Xiaomi 15 does have some interesting AI features that I think you’ll want to see. And in regards to cameras, they have teamed up once again with Leica. Which is kind of a pretty big deal. And if you stick around the camera section. We’ll play a little game, a blind camera comparison game to see how good your eyes are when it comes to spotting the Xiaomi 15 vs the iPhone 16PM Pro vs Galaxy S25 Ultra. Anyway, let's get into it.

Colours & price

Colour options here are black, white, green & liquid silver. The frame of the Xiaomi 15 is constructed from a high-strength aluminium alloy & it’s nicely rounded at the corners and the edges at the back. The weight is 191g which feels just right for a phone of this size. Something that I really appreciate about this phone is how thin the bezels are at just 1.38mm, and they are even all the way around. The display glass is flat, and according to Xiaomi’s spec sheet, the glass used is their own Xiaomi Shield Glass. The 15 is IP68 water and dust resistant. The buttons are all located on the right side just like the Samsung Galaxy phones.

It does have stereo speakers with the usual speaker grill at the base of the phone and the other built into the ear piece cutout at the top of the glass. It does have a dual sim tray, but no expandable memory slot here though? Storage options are 256GB & 512GB, both are UFS 4.0 and both come with 12GB of DDR 5X as standard. The back panel has a nice matte finish to it. And I like how the metal appears to seamlessly curve and melt into the glass on the camera module. Something that’s nice about this phone's design is that it’s not a fingerprint magnet. And on the topic of fingerprints, it does have a premium in display, a sonic fingerprint reader. This is more secure than optical scanners, it uses sound instead of light. And it’s accurate & nice & fast.

Display

Now let’s talk about the display. It’s actually a custom Xiaomi M9 display, it is a 6’3” AMOLED 120Hz Crystal Res Amoled 68 Billion colours, 440 ppi and up to 3500 units of peak brightness. 94% screen to body ratio. And because it is an LTPO panel it can adjust from 1 to 120Hz which makes it super energy efficient. It does support HDR 10 and 10+ certification & it is officially Dolby Vision certified. And it looks nice, colours are a little less saturated than the likes of the Samsung Galaxy & iPhones, but this can be tweaked to your liking within the Hyper OS software.

Which is better than it's ever been, we’ll come back to that. It’s also got a bunch of TUV Rheinland eye comfort & protection features built in. Which is always nice to see. Overall, it's a very good display. It’s sharp, it’s bright, power efficient, bezels are super slim. It supports the full DCI P3 Colour gamut, the only way it could be better was if it was a 10bit panel, but to be honest, the majority of people wouldn't even notice that.

Battery

Now let’s talk about power real quick.The battery cell size in this tiny phone is bigger than a lot of bigger flagship phones. It's a 5240mah which Xiaomi calls a Xiaomi Surge battery. They say compared to the Xiaomi 14 of last year the battery can run 25% longer.

Charging speed via a wire is up to an impressive 90 watts. Maybe more impressive than that is the wireless charging speed which is up to 50 watts, which is faster than your typical flagships speeds when wired. But, do keep in mind that no Qi magnets are built in here, & you would need a 50Watt compatible charging mat for the best speeds obviously. Reverse wireless charging is possible here.

Performance

So that’s the power, now let’s talk about speed. And when it comes to Android phones, many consider the gold standard chipset to be the Snapdragon chips and early 2025 the best of the best is the Snapdragon 8 Elite. This particular version is an octacore and has 2 prime cores and 6 performance cores. This is how the Xiaomi 15 stacks up against the iPhone and Google Pixel that use competitor chipsets.

What's really impressive about the 8 Elite is how compared to last year's chips, the performance is up over 40% across the board, but at the same time it’s 40 to 50% more power efficient. And there’s a bunch of stats that Qualcomm put out there, but the performance does often depend on the hardware the phone manufacturers fit their devices with. And in this case, Xiaomi has thrown in a new wing type loop heat pipe. This is how that looks after a 20 minute stress test. The reason the heat pipe is important is because the quicker a phone can vent heat the longer it can sustain high performance.

Camera

So if you just used the timestamp to jump straight to this section. Hey, what’s up, hello. Let me introduce you to the Xiaomi 15’s stove. This camera is on fire & there’s some serious hardware packed in here. On the back is a triple camera setup giving you 8 focal lengths. All of the rear cameras have been designed in collaboration with Leica. Their primary lens is titled a Leica Summilux lens and it is an aspherical lens that does have OIS. The sensor used here is a 1/1.31” 50MP Light Fusion 900 sensor, the aperture is F1.6. Can you spot the Xiaomi from this line-up? There are a lot of video options here. You can shoot in 4K Dolby Vision, up to 60fps & you can shoot 8K 30fps.

If you want to see this phone in a camera comparison. Let me know what you think would be a good phone or phones to test it against? The telephoto is also a 50MP 60mm equivalent lens and it also has OIS. But this one uses a Samsung sensor, this one is also what is used for Macro photos. So, it’s what you’d call a tele-macro which I do think is the better approach to macro modes as it doesn’t warp the picture so much as an ultrawide lens does. And the Ultra-wide lens, 14mm, 115 degrees field of view. F2.2 aperture and again it uses a 50MP sensor and this one is a Samsung JN1. The selfie camera has some pretty impressive specs, Its aperture is F2.2 and the sensor is 32MP, which is quite high for a selfie camera. What do you think of its performance here?

Ai

So if you are thinking about upgrading or maybe switching to Xiaomi for the first time. One concern & one question you might have is, how much bloatware is there to uninstall on day one? & How different is the UI compared to what I’m used to? Well, here is all the preinstalled stuff that was on this phone straight out of the box. And you uninstall it. Now. In terms of the UI, Xiaomi’s Hyper OS 2.0 on Android 15. The navigation, notifications and control panel style will feel very familiar to anyone who has used any Android devices in the past. There are quite a few similarities with iOS here. I am a fan of the personalisation options here, I did make a Hyper OS tips guide. I'll link it at the end, if you want to deep dive into all of that stuff.

But there is some new AI stuff here that I really want to show you. If you jump into the settings and go to AI services, you’ll see there are some new tools. It seems like Xiaomi’s own Notes app has levelled up quite a bit. With Summaries, AI layouts and translation features. Xiaomi’s new AI interpreter has also been added so that's nice. You can have a conversation with live translations, and with the text flipped on the top half of the screen, and a circle to search with Gemini is here as well as the voice recorder feature that creates a transcription of what was recorded & this can then be summarised in bullet points for reference.

But one AI feature I wish more phones had is the AI photo expansion feature. This can work really well & it’s great for adapting photo sizes for the specific social media platforms, there’s also an Ai enhance feature for upscaling lower res or noisy photos, and the Ai erase I’m told has also leveled up, you can also remove reflections and change the colour of the sky using Ai.