Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra long-term review

The best display around

For me, a phone has to do three things well - display, cameras, and battery life. As that first one goes, you can't do better with any other phone. The Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra has a 6.81-inch 1440x3200px AMOLED that variably refreshes up to 120Hz, supports HDR10+, and gets as bright as 940 nits.

The display is very capable, regardless of the use case. Scrolling through the OS is very smooth, and watching videos looks awesome. The auto-brightness feature is very stable. The display is never too dim for the environment, and I rarely need to micromanage it during usage.

What makes the display even more of a joy to use are the thin bezels. They are thinner than on competing phones like the Galaxy S21 Ultra. The Mi 11 Ultra's display offers a screen-to-body ratio of 91.4% if that metric means anything to you.

MIUI is fluid, customizable, and helpful

At the time of writing this long-term review, the Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra is at stable MIUI 12.5.10, based on Android 11. Xiaomi is testing Android 12 as we speak, so the Mi 11 Ultra could be on the receiving end of it by New Year.

MIUI takes some getting used to. I wasn't in love with its icon design from the get-go, nor its default state of doing things. By default, the OS lacks an app drawer and puts all apps on the homescreen. I'm not a fan of this, so I chose to have an app drawer for all the straggler software on my phone. I also had to switch to swipe navigation, as the three-button navigation system that comes as default should have been.

As for the icons, I did a deep dive into the Themes app to find an icon pack I liked. It took a bit of trial and error, but I ended up with a circular set I enjoy using. To make the Mi 11 Ultra more hospitable to my tastes, I made the icons a bit bigger too. Now I have a phone that I like looking at, both from the outside and in.

I'm an iOS veteran and I came to the Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra from the Galaxy S21 Ultra. I found OneUI a bit choppy compared to iOS - there is a very slight pause after every swipe, which doesn't happen on iOS. We're talking milliseconds here, barely noticeable, in fact not noticeable after an hour and only if you have the two OSes side by side - but there is a slight delay on OneUI compared to iOS.

MIUI behaves much like iOS in that it delivers animations and actions smoothly and doesn't need that millisecond to catch its breath afterward. For example - you open up the Settings menu, swipe back to the Homescreen, swipe back to the Settings, and immediately begin scrolling the listed items - no delays - it's all responsive and feels instantaneous.

MIUI's haptics are excellent. There are tiny vibration nudges here and there that give the OS a physical level that others, like OneUI, lack.

Performance is excellent. Apps load instantly, tasks are immediate - it's a joy to use this phone. But, the Snapdragon 888 inside gets noticeably warm when you've used the phone for a while. This is especially true when you use the camera, especially during a hot summer day. This makes the phone less enjoyable to use.

MIUI has some helpful settings. One great example of this is how it handles Data Roaming scenarios - you can enable data roaming for all apps, or you can have it on for a handful of them, preselected by you - this is handy if you have a limited amount of data available.

But MIUI can also be a hindrance. The Mi 11 Ultra would disconnect my Galaxy Watch3 every day, and it wouldn't reconnect again. I fixed this through lots of back and forths, but it involved more than disabling MIUI's battery optimizations. This brings us to the chapter below.

Battery life is unimpressive, charging makes up for it

Coming from a Galaxy S21 Ultra with a 5,000mAh battery to the Mi 11 Ultra with the same sized battery made me optimistic that I should expect similar performance. But I didn't get it.

A quick look at our detailed battery testing shows a respectable 95-hour Endurance rating to the tune of 15 hours of video playback and 11 hours of browsing. But in my very personalized testing, the Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra was underwhelming.

It does fine on days where I get out of bed, go to work, use the phone for about an hour, go home where I use it for three to four hours, and go to bed when it sits on a charger all night. But for vacation days where I start using it from the morning till late evening, snapping an unreasonable amount of photos and relying on it for navigation, the Mi 11 Ultra shuts down before I do.

I average about 3 and a half hours of screen time per day, and the Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra can handle it if I don't take a lot of photos or do more than an hour of GPS navigation. Most days, I got along with what a single charge could provide, while others, I needed a top-up.

To its credit, the Mi 11 Ultra's crazy-fast charging makes up for this. It gets from 0% to 100% in 37 minutes and even faster when I need to top it up from 40%.

The phone gets very warm while quick-charging and takes a while to cool down afterward, which makes it uncomfortable.

Fingerprint scanner

The optical fingerprint scanner on the Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra is very accurate but not the fastest. Like other Xiaomi scanners, it takes a bit longer than a Realme or OnePlus instant optical sensor or the ultrasonic sensor on the Galaxy S21 Ultra. That 'a bit' is measured in milliseconds and isn't a big deal - you'll be fine with this scanner.