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The Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra. Uh, is there a screen on the camera’s relief?
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Yes. It is a screen.
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Here, the screen shows the camera interface. It just seems to mirror the front screen.
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I choose to believe that Xiaomi designers were looking directly at the Nokia 808 while designing the Mi 11 Ultra.
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It comes in black and white.
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The overhang of the camera looks very high.
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Cutting the front camera would be interesting, but this device still has one.
Xiaomi is getting ready to launch the Mi 11 Ultra as its next flagship smartphone, and one of the most interesting design touches is a tiny screen the size of a postage stamp on … uh, the camera crash? The Filipino YouTuber Tech Buff brings us an exclusive leak from the device, which has some pixels where there are normally no pixels. If you are sitting there asking “why?” the answer is “attention”. The answer is always “attention”. We are writing about it now, so it is fully working!
Tech Buff ended up taking the video down, but XDA Developers has a mirror of the video on YouTube.
We don’t have official specifications, a release date or marketing information yet, but the phone appears to be a pretty standard 2021 flagship with a Snapdragon 888 SoC. The rear features what must be the biggest camera jump in the world, with two large lenses, a “120x” periscopic camera (this is not the actual optical zoom rating) and an LED flash. Next to all normal cameras is a small screen, which appears to have the same aspect ratio as the front screen and seems to simply mirror the front screen all the time. The video shows the rear screen following the front screen while the user navigates through some applications. Fortunately, you can also turn it off, for privacy reasons.
Again, without marketing materials to consult, it is difficult to know exactly what the extra screen is for. It could function as a viewfinder when taking a selfie with the rear camera, but it’s hard to imagine using it for much more than that – it’s so ridiculously small. The phone has a front camera, so you can also take selfies the old way.
Pressing a screen on the camera’s relief means that the Mi 11 Ultra has one of the biggest camera impacts of all time. The overhang of the camera is clearly super high and spans the entire width of the phone. One benefit of this is that it means that the phone will be really stable on a table. High camera phones usually swing back and forth when you try to use them on a table, but it looks like it will be rock solid.
The white version of the Mi 11 Ultra with a full-width black camera collision is a dead touch for the Nokia 808. This phone, from 2012, used its giant camera collision for giant camera hardwareand, as a result, can still resist modern smartphone cameras. If we’re going to use these giant cameras, I would like someone to copy the 808 strategy instead of … whatever it is.