Xiaomi 15 Review: The new flagship series with Snapdragon 8 Elite and Leica cameras

Back at the start of February, we reported on the Xiaomi 15 Ultra, the top-tier version of the new 15 family. Meanwhile, those looking for a slightly more affordable flagship option should read on because the Xiaomi 15 might be what they are after.

Information about the Xiaomi 15 initially dropped back before October 2024, whilst domestic reviewers and customers already had videos online handling this new model in October. The global launch event was set for the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today, so hopefully, you caught the livestream earlier and then rushed to Neowin to check out my review.

I will be covering my thoughts on the UK release, but as there is no longer any obvious regional difference for the hardware, everything mentioned here would apply to the rest of the global release, too.

I have been using the Xiaomi 15, which I will just call the '15' from here onwards, for nearly a couple of weeks alongside my Pixel 9 Pro XL, chiefly to compare both performance differences in day-to-day popular app usage (the 15 uses the latest Snapdragon 8 Elite, while my Pixel makes do with Google's Tensor G4) and of course my bread and butter, the cameras, because at a £770 starting price here in the UK, if the camera can't at least match a Google Pixel, then is it even worth considering if you are a content creator? Let's find out.

I was sent the 12GB RAM version sporting 512GB of storage. There is a 16GB/1TB option, too, but it is only available in some other regions.

Fit and finish

Unboxing was nothing too special. The usual Xiaomi niceties, such as a pre-installed screen protector and the inclusion of a high-quality case, mirror my unboxing experience of the Redmi Note 14 Pro+ 5G.

Some regions get the 90W charger in the box, but sadly, Europe is not one of those. Buying the official charger will cost an additional arm and leg, so I recommend buying one of the many 100W+ wall warts from the likes of UGREEN, Anker and so on, as you will get the full 90W the phone is capable of since the USB-PD 3.0 standard is being used here.

For reference, all my wired fast-charging testing was done using a CUKTECH 10, which is a 150W power bank, and the official Xiaomi 50W Wireless Charging Stand Pro.

The finishing on the back panel is especially worth paying attention to. Unlike other phones, this has an almost chalk-like texture to it. It's not as smooth as an iPhone, Galaxy, or Pixel—it has some friction under the fingernail, yet it is still glass.

It does not appear to be pure white under strong lighting, either. Instead, it has a very subtle depth to it, which is hard to capture on camera. This is something I have not seen on another phone before.

The mid-frame is matte finished with a thick-feeling texture in similar vain to the back panel, and the edges of the area of the frame meeting the back panel seamlessly curve and blend to meet each other. Under the fingers, this seam feels like it's one piece and can only be felt with a fingernail running over it.

This is a level of attention to detail that is not often seen, although, to be fair, this is exactly what I expect to see when paying £700+ for a phone.

Features

Unlike the Redmi series, the Xiaomi flagship series this time does not skimp on things like battery capacity or cameras, which were higher-specced in some Asian markets.

The 5,240 mAh battery is bigger than the 5,000 mAh in my Pixel Pro XL and even the Galaxy S25 Ultra. It's pretty amazing that the extra capacity has been crammed into a smaller handset while still retaining all of the expected features expected from a modern flagship phone. On top of that, we have 90W wired charging and 50W wireless.

I think Samsung and Google could take some notes on how not to be stingy whilst they charge more for less in this particular area, as neither has seen any form of an upgrade in battery tech in a very long time.

Battery

Since battery chat is fresh on the mind, I may as well get this section out of the way. I did some extensive testing on battery charging times with the 15 now that I have Xiaomi's 50W Charging Stand Pro:

Although, ironically, I joked about Samsung and Google being stingy above, and here we are with a wireless charging stand that retails at £79 and does not come with a suitable power adapter. I ended up using my own 65W GaN by Anker.

In testing, it got the 15's battery from 9% to 100% in 1 hour and 22 minutes, and that was with frequent checks of the charging rate by waking the screen up, which reduces charging speed or lifting it off the stand to check hotspots and general thermal conditions.

Charging at 50W wirelessly resulted in no excess heat on either phone or pad beyond what we already see these days with 15W wireless charging, thanks to the Pro stand's active cooling system that kicks in when a 50W output is initiated. Do note that the stand only outputs 10W and 50W according to the label on the back, so there is only a choice of slow wireless charging or super fast with this. A 65W PD power adapter is needed to get the full 50W; for the 10W output, a 30W PD adapter is required, which will typically be a 45W wall charger.

The 50W is impressive, wireless charging of a 5,240 mAh battery that is faster than wired charging on smaller batteries found on the Galaxy S25 Ultra and Pixel 9 Pro XL flagships.

Keep in mind that in order to get the full 90W wired charging, whatever charger or power bank you use must support the PD 3.1 protocol. If it supports 3.0, you will be restricted to half that charging wattage. If it supports other standards, then slow charging awaits.

The 15's battery will easily last a full day of heavy use. As mentioned in past reviews, battery drain testing isn't really needed anymore, as the vast majority of phones last a full day. All that matters is whether you can do a quick charge before heading out the door. At 50W and 90W, yes is the answer here. Just remember that as you approach 80% charged, the rate drops massively to protect the cell from early death.

The display

The LTPO AMOLED panel brings nothing new to the table for the series. It has a variable refresh rate from 1Hz to 120Hz, and by default, this is what it will use. You can customise the setting to be fixed at either 60Hz or 120Hz; no middle ground, sadly.

Here, I discovered what appears to be a bug in the firmware whereby leaving the refresh rate at its default results in many apps only running at 60Hz, which then makes scrolling in those apps feel slow and jittery. At first, I thought there was a CPU throttling issue, but enabling Developer Mode and then turning on the option to show the refresh rate told me exactly what was going on; here's a video to demonstrate:

I'm surprised the testing team missed this, assuming stuff like this does get tested. It was so obvious something was wrong when I was simply scrolling YouTube, and everything felt sloppy, including touch latency.

When the refresh rate is fixed to 120Hz, the custom apps button is clickable where you can select any app that isn't already using high refresh rate to use 120Hz instead of 60. This screen is not available when using the default adaptive setting.

I checked with my Pixel 9 series doing the same tests and in the default adaptive refresh rate setting every single app runs at 120Hz when scrolling, the same applies to the Galaxy S24 Ultra.

Other than the refresh rate bug, the AMOLED panel is truly stunning. In its most colour-accurate natural mode, and just like with Pixels and Galaxy phones, accuracy is as close as it gets to a calibrated QD-OLED PC monitor, as shown above.

HDR content worked fine, too, with all of the usual streaming services displaying HDR without issue, as well as camera recordings, which I tested briefly. It's not just HDR10+ we have here either; Dolby Vision is included, too.

As for viewing angles, once the screen protector is removed, clarity is restored as, just like on the Redmi Note series, the factory screen protector plays games with viewing angles, which results in impacted clarity. Check out how clear and crisp this display looks when the b-roll at a suitably high quality is recorded:

Benchmarks

It almost feels silly to do these nowadays as the vast majority of phones mid-range and up get stellar results in general usage anyway, and a benchmark feels unnecessary, especially with a flagship. The Snapdragon 8 Elite is no slouch, and its implementation in the 15 shows it performs within the eye-line of competing handsets also using the same SoC.

For reference, the Galaxy S25 Ultra, also using the same SoC, scores ~3,250 and ~10,227, respectively, for single and multi-core figures.

General OS usability

Regardless of flagship specs, performance when using the phone can still be impacted by a poorly optimised OS. The 15 uses HyperOS 2.0, Xiaomi's latest release running on Android 15. I found the general performance and smoothness to be fine, although a few frame stutters here and there when scrolling were observed.

It may or may not have something to do with the sheer volume of pre-installed rubbish Xiaomi still puts onto its phones. The Redmi and POCO models have this too. Thankfully, most can be uninstalled, but a handful remain and cannot be disabled either, such as Google 1 and YouTube Music.

Two web browsers, Mi Browser and Chrome, are also installed, leading to further clutter. Chrome can be disabled but not uninstalled.

Skinned versions of Android always tend to bring some cool features that are missing on stock Android or even Pixel OS. Xiaomi's HyperOS offers plenty of customisation features for those who like to tweak, though you do have to find them as they are all over the OS.

One of my favourites is shown above. Lots of apps installed, and find it a chore to scroll? Just use the slider scroll bar which highlights apps starting with the letter, neat.

I also like that under Developer options there are more Bluetooth CODEC options available, I believe this is thanks to the 15 being a phone supporting Snapdragon Sound, which requires CODEC compatibility with the suite of variants under the Qualcomm umbrella.

Aside from the focus on AI features, which I am sure most of you are sick to death of hearing about, the rest of HyperOS is pretty slick. If you've used any modern smartphone from the usual big names, then the look and feel will be familiar, and no new adjustments, other than where some settings are located, are needed.

We have reached a point where the OS features and hardware specs have reached a point resulting in excellence in features and performance.

Camera

When I first heard from Xiaomi about being sent the new 15, I thought it would be the Ultra variant, which appears to be a photography dream, so I was a bit saddened to see only the 15! Such is life... I gave the 15's camera a good run since Xiaomi still markets the Leica optics and grading styles on this model, so I was eager to see what they are all about.

I need to quote the Xiaomi marketing directly here because I think what follows is important:

"Xiaomi 15 is equipped with a cutting-edge Leica Summilux optical lens featuring a large f/1.62 aperture and a 7P aspherical high-transmittance lens, allowing users to instantly capture life's moments with stunning clarity. Paired with Xiaomi's Light Fusion 900 image sensor, Xiaomi 15 delivers a professional-grade photography experience across three versatile focal lengths - 23mm, 28mm, and 35mm. Leveraging its 1/1.31-inch ultra large sensor and impressive dynamic brightness of 13.5EV, Xiaomi 15 produces realistically vibrant, precise, and detailed portrait shots with ease." - Xiaomi UK

Whilst the optics in the 15 may well be Leica engineered, my findings as a freelance professional photographer of nearly 20-years is that the software processing lets the otherwise impressive hardware down.

I can see that the resolving power of the Leica lenses is present in both photos and videos, but the lack of quality in the software processing during and after an image is captured results in images that fall far behind phones using standard optics.

My personal phone is the Pixel 9 Pro XL; it takes photos that employ superb HDR+ capture, resulting in even JPEG files that I can run through my custom Lightroom Mobile colour grading presets and get photos that don't look a million miles away from my Canon 5D Mark 4's images when sharing stuff on social media. It doesn't matter that it is the Pro XL version either because the entire Pixel 9 family capture the same look and quality from the main camera.

With the Xiaomi 15, though, this is not possible, and it is immediately clear that several core components of what makes a camera great are missing, or if they exist, are incorrectly implemented.

Take a look at the above example: the focus point was manually set to the 0 key on the numpad for both. Notice the keycap surface detail that is resolved by the Pixel 9 main camera. The 15's main shooter seems to have subtly lost that detail, and the HDR system has failed to balance the final image effectively.

Night mode also sees similar deficiencies. Both captured the scene above for 3 seconds, yet the metering system on the 15 has made a mess of the final image in this instance.

I think I have an idea of what is going on, and this has nothing to do with the Leica-style effect you choose on the first run of the camera app (it can be changed in settings later, anyway). For all my testing, I used the natural mode as vibrant was too... well, vibrant.

The GIF above shows the HDR indicator on the top right of the screen unable to decide what it wants to do. It changes from white to red to show its active state. The only options when tapping the text are to leave HDR on auto or turn it off with no way to turn it on full-time. This ultimately results in the camera not being able to exposure stack instantly like other phones do, especially the Pixel's speedy HDR+ processing.

The end result is a photo that has highlight areas blown out (example above) and shadow areas that can sometimes be too dark. The Leica-style effects are let down due to this and saved images end up looking like generic point-and-shoot captures more often than I would have desired.

The camera bump is similar to the Pixel 9's, though the 15 rounds off the edges and then softly curves the back panel to meet the lens. Due to both phones having a wide camera bump, this can act as a finger-shelf, giving additional stability when using the phone.

The MasterCinema mode for video recording is also quite limited, it cannot be turned on when at 4K 60 fps, only a max of 30 fps is supported here, you also cannot switch lenses when using this mode, only digital crop zoom which looks poor.

Speaking of 60fps, here is some low-light 4K 60 fps footage side by side with the Pixel 9, both using the main camera in 1x mode:

You can see it does a good job with detail and motion smoothness, though the electronic image stabilisation (EIS) does jitter specular highlights more often than the EIS on Pixel and Samsung devices during sideways panning.

Here are all the camera settings:

To me, it all feels like the Leica name has been capitalised upon, but not much has been done to actually implement the inner workings of the software to marry up with the hardware, which then produces epic photography.

It's a shame because the 15 has been out in other markets for a few months, and it does not appear that much has been updated in the camera department.

Additional features

Strangely, the 15 comes with an infrared remote control app, but there is no visible IR emitter on the phone, and I could not actually get it to work with anything.

It could be installed under the large camera bump at the back, though scrutinising it under high magnification does not show any indication of this. The little dot/hole on the left side above is one of the quad microphones.

The 15 employs Xiaomi's IceLoop cooling system, I tested this out by recording a single 4K 60 fps video whilst indoors for over an hour before a message popped up saying the handset was getting too hot and closed the camera app.

This cooling system also plays its part when charging, resulting in a phone that does not get hot to the touch when charging, even at 90W.

Conclusion

The Xiaomi 15 is a great phone in many areas, especially as a flagship smartphone that is hand-friendly in a sea of huge screens. Sadly, it isn't a phone I would pick if camera quality were in my top 3 desirables when looking at a new phone in this price range; it is Pixel money without the Pixel camera quality.

I am pleased to see that 50W/90W charging has found its way into the UK market release instead of being limited like in the past with other handsets, though you do need to buy the chargers since nothing comes in the box for this, and the 50W wireless stand is very expensive for offering only two output rates, 10W and 50W, so phones that support say 20W, will only be charging at 10W.

Outside of the camera performance, fit and finish deserve a mention, as the 15 looks and feels like it costs what it does. I especially like the chalky textured back panel that feels so much nicer than my Pixel and Galaxy phones.

Xiaomi pointed out during the Redmi Note 14 event in London that it plans to comply with EU mandates to provide 5 years of OS updates in Europe. The UK is included in that even though we are not part of the EU, though just like with the Redmi models, this Xiaomi 15 is running an old version of the Android security patch dating back to November 2024:

Samsung sometimes releases monthly security updates before Google does for Pixel devices, so there really should be no excuse as to why the latest flagship model release launches with security patching that is 4 months out of date.

Update: Within hours of the global launch event, it seems Xiaomi has rolled out an OTA update to the 15 series as well as the new Pad 7 tablets which contains Android security patch level dated February 2025. There are no new features with this update, it fixes some flickering icons and adds the latest patching level from Google.

Just like with the camera, the hardware here is excellent, but the software leaves more to be desired, especially when the marketing ads set an expectation, but the reality ends up telling a different story.

As it stands, the Xiaomi 15 from my experience is just good, it could have been excellent, but the limitations in various areas may be an annoyance for many. It's great as a smartphone with great performance if we ignore the dodgy refresh rate bug and a couple of other minor quirks.

Stay tuned for the Xiaomi Pad 7 review soon.

Areas that I have not covered yet but only need a brief mention, microphone and speaker quality is perfectly fine, the right speaker can feel a little too biased at times, so it seems the earpiece grille might be restricting some of the sound output.

The Xiaomi 15 series launches globally today; by the time you read this, Xiaomi's product page with purchase details should be live on mi.com/uk.