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I’ve spent the past few days in sunny(ish) Barcelona checking out the latest and most interesting tech products at the MWC expo. Xiaomi was one of the first to hold an event, unveiling its latest smartphone lineup: the Xiaomi 17 series. But there were some surprises to be had, too.
Having spent years partnering with Xiaomi for its flagship phone cameras, the photography gurus at Leica have finally taken matters into their own hands. Kind of. The Leica Leitzphone Powered by Xiaomi (to give it its full name) is something of an Uno reverse, with Xiaomi co-engineering a Leica product for a change.
The hardware is, for all intents and purposes, no different to the Xiaomi 17 Ultra. Here they are side by side:
The design is a little different but the dimensions are identical, measuring 78 x 8.3 x 163mm (WDH) and the Leitzphone weighs just a couple of grams more, at 223g. The processor is the same top-of-the-line Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, backed by 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage space. The battery is a 6,000mAh cell that supports 90W wired charging and 50W wireless, and the display is a 6.9in AMOLED panel with a 2,608 x 1,200 resolution and a 120Hz LTPO refresh rate.
Equally, the cameras are the same as the Xiaomi 17 Ultra (unsurprising, given that those shooters already had Leica’s fingerprints all over them): there’s a 50-megapixel (f/2.2) selfie camera atop the display and over on the rear we have a 50-megapixel (f/1.7) main camera, a 50-megapixel (f/2.2) ultrawide and a 200-megapixel (f/2.4-3.0) periscope telephoto lens that offers a manual zoom with an optical range between 3.2x and 4.3x.
Here, on the rear of the phone, we find the major new twist – and yes, I’m being very playful with that word. We’ve seen phones with large central camera housings many times before, with brands using the aesthetic to evoke the look of SLR cameras, but the Leica Leitzphone takes the homage one step further – and I’m amazed that I’ve not seen this before.
The stylish metal ring around the camera housing can be rotated – twisted, if you will – just like the lens of a traditional camera, allowing you to zoom in and out in a style more reminiscent of “proper” photography. If that doesn’t work for you, the lens twist can also be assigned to adjusting focus or bokeh strength, too.
It’s a fun little gimmick that does indeed make snapping photos feel more intentional than doing it all digitally on your phone screen. This is helped in no small part by the wonderfully satisfying haptics that click along with each rotation of the camera circle.
The rest of the design is quite sharp, too. There’s only one colourway, with a rich black fiberglass rear and shiny steel accents, with the red Leica dot sat prominently in the top-left corner to add a splash of colour.
The software is built on Xiaomi’s HyperOS, so all of my usual gripes with that platform remain, but otherwise it looks interesting enough, with a widget-based aesthetic that doesn’t feel a million miles away from what you get on a Nothing phone.
Less appealing is the price tag. Fair enough, we’ve got the cool rotating camera ring and 1TB of storage. But even still, £1,699 is quite the asking price. That’s £200 more than the equivalent Xiaomi 17 Ultra – which again, is only different in that it lacks the rotating camera ring and the Leica logo.
So not the best value proposition then, but I can’t overstate how fun it is to zoom in by rotating the camera wheel. Is it worth £1,699? The answer to that is between you and your deity of choice. If you end up on a yes, though, check out my Xiaomi 17 Ultra review to see what kind of hardware excellence you can expect.
