It tends to be that the best Android phones out there, or at least the most interesting ones, don’t seem to be available in the US. Case in point: Xiaomi, a Chinese company, is about to launch a phone that’s basically a dedicated camera attached to a screen.

Xiaomi has begun teasing the launch of the Xiaomi 15 Ultra, its latest bleeding-edge flagship. The company tends to throw everything and the kitchen sink at this specific range of smartphones, and the camera is also a big focus, but it looks like this year around it’s the biggest priority—so much so, that the phone itself looks like a camera. The phone has a black and silver trim that’s reminiscent of some dedicated digital cameras, and the camera itself is huge—the circle camera module takes up pretty much the whole upper half of the phone and protrudes a lot.

It doesn’t have any physical zoom or anything of the like, but it does have a four-camera array that’s also Leica-branded. You might remember Leica for previously partnering with Huawei for its cameras, and it currently has a partnership going on with Xiaomi for its higher-end phones. We don’t know the actual specs of the camera, as that will likely be reserved for the full announcement on March 2nd. But the cameras on previous Xiaomi entries tend to be pretty good, especially for the Ultra phones, so the bar is pretty high. It’s rumored that we might have a 200MP periscope camera with different 50MP sensors for wide, ultrawide, and telephoto, so at the very least, it will be pretty versatile.

It’s not clear yet if this camera-like look will be accompanied by things such as a dedicated shutter button, which would presumably elevate the camera-like feel—it doesn’t look that way in the one render shared by the company, but we could definitely be wrong.

Other rumored specifications include a Snapdragon 8 Elite, just like other 2025 flagship Android phones, coupled with a 5,500 mAh battery and a 6.73-inch screen. Xiaomi is no stranger to releasing phones like this—the company’s first “Ultra” entry was the Xiaomi Mi 10 Ultra, released all the way back in 2020 in a similar timeframe as the Galaxy S20 Ultra. It follows a similar philosophy, with top-notch hardware and, more importantly, top-notch camera hardware.

Xiaomi phones are not usually looked at too much when people think of Android phones with good cameras, but the cameras in these phones tend to be pretty good. Of course, a good camera is not always necessarily the best-specced one, and we’ll know whether the camera on this phone is any good once it actually comes out. You won’t get to use it even if it is, however, because Xiaomi doesn’t launch its phones in the US and this will not see the light of day in a US retailer.

The design of this phone is actually reminiscent of another trend several years ago—camera phones. There was a short-lived trend several years ago of some phones like the Samsung Galaxy Camera or the Samsung Galaxy S5 Zoom, as well as the Motorola Moto Z phones with camera Moto Mods, coming with complete, dedicated camera hardware that can potentially get you better pictures than the camera on your phone. Of course, since then our phones’ cameras have gotten several orders of magnitude better, so there hasn’t been much of a need for this. Still, if you miss that look, this phone would be the perfect option for you.

Again, this phone will not be available in the US, but if you really want one, you might be able to import it through a retailer such as AliExpress when it comes out. We can’t make any promises on carrier support, though.

Source: Xiaomi via 9to5Google