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The Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra. Uh, does it have a screen in the camera hump?
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Yes. That’s a screen.
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Here the screen shows the camera interface. It just seems to mirror the screen on the front.
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I chose to believe that Xiaomi’s designers were staring directly at the Nokia 808 when designing the Mi 11 Ultra.
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It comes in black and white.
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That camera bump looks really big.
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Cutting through the front camera would be interesting, but this device still has one.
Xiaomi is gearing up to launch the Mi 11 Ultra as its next flagship smartphone, and one of the more interesting design elements is a small postage-stamp-sized display in … er, the camera bump? Filipino YouTuber Tech Buff brings us an exclusive leak of the device, which has some pixels where there are normally no pixels. When you sit there asking “why?” the answer is “attention”. The answer is always “attention”. We’re writing about it now, so it totally works!
Tech Buff eventually removed the video, but XDA Developers has mirrored the video on YouTube.
We don’t have any official specs, launch date or marketing information yet, but the phone appears to be a pretty standard 2021 flagship with a Snapdragon 888 SoC. The back features what must be the biggest camera bump in the world, with two large lenses, a “120x” periscope camera (that’s not the actual optical zoom) and an LED flash. Besides all that normal camera stuff, there is one small small display, which appears to have the same aspect ratio as the front screen and always just seems to mirror the front screen. The video shows the rear screen keeping up with the front screen as the user navigates through a few apps. Hopefully you can disable it for privacy as well.
Again, without marketing materials to consult, it is difficult to know exactly what the benefit of the additional screen is. It could work as a viewfinder when taking a selfie with the rear camera, but it’s hard to imagine using it for much more: it’s just so ridiculously small. The phone has a front camera, so you can take selfies the old-fashioned way too.
By pressing a screen into the camera bump, the Mi 11 Ultra has one of the biggest camera bumps ever. The camera bump is clearly super high and stretches the entire width of the phone. An advantage of this is that it means that the phone is actually stable on a table. Phones with high camera bumps often rock back and forth if you try to use them on a desk, but this looks like it will be solid.
The white version of the Mi 11 Ultra with a full-width black camera bump is a death signal for the Nokia 808. That phone, from 2012, used its gigantic camera bump for a gigantic camera hardware, and can therefore still withstand modern flagship smartphone cameras. Continuing with these giant camera bumps, I would like someone to copy the 808 strategy instead of … whatever this is.