This is the Xiaomi 12s ultra it's basically what happens when you try to cram all the most extreme tech that 2022 has to offer into one phone and I've been using it for almost a month.
Now so let's find out if it's enough to dethrone Samsung's s22 ultra which is arguably the king of android right now now the very first thing that occurred to me as I opened up the package for the first time with absolutely no idea of what this was going to look like was wow the 12s ultra is the best design phone Xiaomi has ever made it's a really rounded seamless body that actually feels like it was designed with your hands in mind they finally dropped that line of text that they used to have on the mi 11s which makes the newer phone the cleaner they've swapped out the glossy finish for this matte leather-like one and I think it's perfect I genuinely think this is the one type of finish that can feel both premium and practical it's got a hint of softness zero fingerprints plus it's grippy it feels like the body of a professional camera and speaking of cameras for me this is the biggest design improvement is how Xiaomi has presented them here you know that scattered complexity that top-end phone cameras have started to exude like the vivo x80 pro and even Xiaomi's last old phone where there's just so many distinct elements.
I really think this central uniform circle is the the antidote to that it doesn't make the protrusion any less but it's so much neater and so when compared to Samsung when you factor in that the symmetry of the Xiaomi practically eliminates all table wobbling how its curved corners are less how the texture on its back is less slippery and as a bonus how it's easier to clean the dust build-up around one big ring as opposed to five smaller rings I think Xiaomi's made enough sensible decisions for me to give this design category to them so then you flip the phone around and you're greeted with a familiar sight on At first glance, this is pretty much the cookie-cutter format of how 90 of android phones now look from the front the screen has been updated to fit the 2022 spec it's now based on funnily enough Samsung's e5 panel technology for better battery efficiency and it's also now able to match the s22 ultra's extreme levels of brightness I'm actually in a huge park in the middle of Greenville North Carolina right now and this is still very usable even in like the middle of the hot American summer but it's nothing you haven't seen before and bizarrely since the company's last me 11 ultra the screen bezels have actually gotten thicker and the viewing angles worse.
Which I can't help but be disappointed by and it's enough for me to air towards Samsung on the screen category but then I started properly using the phone and I was just shocked at how fast the 12s is it flies and when you pair that speed with the lively animated mini 13 software skin it's a the visual spectacle I mean don't get me wrong mini is not perfect it's notoriously a little bloated with pre-installed apps and it seems quite aggressive in restricting the use of third-party launchers which are kind of a shame because that freedom is one of my favorite things about android but I like its style I like how it's not as corporate feeling as Samsung's one UI it's a little less utilitarian and it's just more color and more personality it doesn't take itself seriously and for me that's just more fun I spent so much time in the personalization section Make sure my icons are just the size that I like them choosing my favorite fingerprint scanning animation and even how my phone behaves when it receives a notification and this whole software experience is catalyzed by the fact that this Xiaomi is not powered by the same snapdragon 8gen 1 chip that the Samsung is but the new 8 plus gen 1. it's not a complete generational gap in performance between the two but it's enough that I can notice it.
When I'm deep into a prolonged gaming session it does creep out ahead which kind of makes sense because the key thing it was designed to do was to be more efficient to get less hot and therefore be better at sustaining performance over a longer period shout out to the speakers.
By the way loud and crisp and very much on par with Samsung's best and the 12s ultra does also come right out of the box with twice as much storage as Samsung's phone does start at 256 gigs so I'm giving the performance category to the Xiaomi except its fingerprint scanner which is not fast Xiaomi does have this the cool feature whereas you're holding your finger on the fingerprint the scanner you can kind of feel the intensity of the vibration rising up until the point where it kind of clicks in place and the phone unlocks it's very satisfying but the fact that you have to hold your finger there for a noticeable period it is starting to feel a bit slow in 2022 and it's also quite easy to miss the scanner now I do have to caveat this review with something last year I voted me 11 ultras as my phone of the year and that's simply because in my testing period of a couple of months.
It did perform better than any other but in the even longer-term I think this phone has been let down by late and a lack of software updates now whether this is just where Xiaomi's priorities generally lie or whether it's just because this is the device, in particular, didn't sell in huge numbers I don't know. Still, I just got the strong feeling that after the initial honeymoon phase that this wasn't getting the same care that my equivalent Samsung phone was from the same year there were simple features like being able to use the full rear camera feature set while taking selfies by using the second.
The screen on the back of the phone that i was under the impression we're just a very quick update away but still over a year after launch haven't arrived that might change this year but I'm just saying that I haven't seen anything from Xiaomi confirms it and given that Samsung has just recently upped their software update promise to four full years I feel pretty confident saying that you will get better update support right now on a Samsung phone so that's two points to each phone so far this is a proper competition and it's all led us to the battle of the cameras can you tell us my favorite bit so the very first thing you notice about the 12s ultra camera is much like the rest of the software it is rapid it opens in a split second thanks to a new feature that allows the camera to get ready to launch before you've even clicked on it and then the capture time is also dramatically quicker than last year this now sits next to the iPhone as one of the snappiest phone cameras out there which also has the knock-on effect of less motion blur in the end photos and we should probably talk about those end photos because one of the other keys upgrades on this phone is a new one-inch the sensor which makes this the highest-end camera hardware in the the entire crop of current flagships and you know what it delivers.
I've never enjoyed using a phone camera this much I've never been so excited to take a photo with it and then check it to see how cinematic it's turned out to be how crisp it would make the foreground and how naturally blurred out the background and at night time it's been just as fun seeing how dark you can go with the phone still being able to turn that scene into something intelligible this 's not the first phone I've used to have a one-inch sensor but it's the first one I've used also combined it with high-end image processing and also some impressively intelligent focusing on that can detect both eyes and faces and give priority to them and I mean the results speak for themselves,
Samsung tends to sharpen images to a crisp which can sometimes make them look more impressive at first glance but zoom in and more often than not the detail is higher on the Xiaomi plus the sharpening isn't always a good thing like the other day, I tried a snow cone for the first time and the Samsung sharpened the photo so much that up close it looked kind of unappetizing Xiaomi 12s ultras video is a big step up from Samsung, it's slightly better at those high dynamic range scenarios and it is much cleaner looking especially at the night where a phone's ability to fight grain becomes more important than ever plus Xiaomi's done a little bit of magic.
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