Despite making some of the best camera phones over the last several years, Vivo still might not be a name familiar to many in the Western hemisphere. Vivo’s previous top-end phones have rarely made it outside of Asia, with the brand focusing on more budget devices in Europe. However, that is on its way to improving with the Vivo X300 Ultra, which will be launching in select European markets.

And the X300 Ultra arrives as another serious best camera phone contender. It brings a top-end 35mm main camera, a 14mm ultrawide, an 85mm telephoto, 8K video, 4K up to 120p, 10-bit Log recording, Dolby Vision, powerful stabilization, and optional 200mm and 400mm telephoto adapters that make the whole setup feel closer to a camera system.

That does not mean it is an easy recommendation. The price is high, and the full setup only gets more expensive once the optional accessories are added. But in stills, it is one of the most enjoyable camera phones I have used this year, and when it comes to video, it might be the first Android phone I have tested that feels like a genuinely convincing iPhone rival.

Specifications

Price & Availability

Despite this being the widest release yet for a Vivo Ultra phone, that still doesn't include the US or the UK; however, European buyers can get their hands on the phone. The kicker is that it is almost certainly too expensive to really recommend. The phone is launching for €1,999, which is a huge premium over devices like the excellent Xiaomi 17 Ultra and Oppo Find X9 Ultra.

It’s not like the price is completely unjustified. The 35mm main camera, 85mm telephoto, and 14mm ultrawide are all serious modules that produce fantastic photos and the best video I have seen from a phone.

But as good a phone as the Vivo X300 Ultra is, I am just not sure I can justify paying the same as a decent camera system, which, try as it might, the X300 Ultra does not outcompete. Optional accessories like the photography case and telephoto lenses that make this phone a truly great alternative to cameras push the full creator setup considerably higher.

Design

The Vivo X300 Ultra is a good-looking, if very minimalist, phone. I tested the black version, and while it is clean and understated, it is also a little too simple for a flagship Ultra phone. Other colors and finishes, particularly the green and white options, look more interesting, but even then, I am not convinced the X300 Ultra has the kind of design identity that immediately screams “top-tier camera phone.”

Overall, the design feels a little uninspired. But that is not to say it feels uninteresting – it does not. The phone has a very premium finish, feels really nice and solid in the hand, it has IP68 and IP69 dust and water resistance, and a large 6.82-inch flat display, but visually it does not feel as special as its camera hardware deserves.

The camera bump is very large, around the same diameter as the Oppo Find X9 Ultra and Xiaomi 17 Ultra, but it is noticeably deeper. The phone is slightly top-heavy with that big camera bump, but it is still relatively well balanced. A minor complaint, but the hard edge and overall size of the camera island also meant it caught slightly on my jeans pocket. A more tapered edge would help it slide in and out more easily.

Vivo has not added a dedicated camera button, which I don’t mind at all, as I rarely, if ever, use them. I think they often exist more for chasing Apple than for practical shooting. You can double-tap volume down to open the camera, which is enough for me. I would, however, have liked a separate action button for a quick setting such as alerts, translate, or flashlight, as we have seen on Apple, Oppo, and Honor phones recently.

The display is a beautiful display; it’s a 6.82-inch 2K Zeiss Master Color Display that sports a 144Hz refresh rate, Dolby Vision, HDR10+, SGS Low Blue Light certification, and TÜV Rheinland flicker-free certification. It is a large, sharp, smooth screen, and Vivo’s eye comfort features are welcome for long editing or shooting sessions.

Accessories

The real design interest comes from the optional camera kit. I am really not a fan of the shiny silver finish. It is certainly eye-catching, but I would much rather it were more discreet while I am shooting. The disappointment is that the case itself feels a bit plastic and cheap, especially compared with Oppo’s new Find X9 Ultra camera case. There was also some minor wobble on the case’s ring mounts and handgrip, which adds to the slightly less premium feeling. At this kind of level, I would like a little more polish.

So Oppo and Xiaomi’s cases might look and feel better, but I think Vivo’s is the most functional. The diamond-pattern grip is nice and grippy, and the deep handle makes the phone feel far more like a real camera. The manual controls are also genuinely useful, with zoom, flash, exposure compensation, record, and a two-stage shutter button all available.

I tested both the second-generation 200mm and new 400 lenses; both the teleconverter lenses themselves feel much more premium than the case they slot into, with solid metal bodies and mounts. I do wish, like the case, they came in black option as well as the silver. They are large, especially the 400mm equivalent lens, but still nowhere near the size of a real 400mm camera lens and smaller than Oppo’s new 300mm accessory.

The 67mm filter attachment is a major plus; it makes the X300 Ultra much easier to take seriously as a video phone, because ND filters are essential for controlling shutter speed in bright conditions with camera lenses fixed apertures. Vivo has also partnered with SmallRig to produce a Pro Video Rig Kit with control buttons, a grip handle, a back plate, a cooling fan, cold shoe mounts, and 1/4-inch mounting – although I unfortunately don't have this to test out.

Camera Performance

The Vivo X300 Ultra’s camera system is unusual because it does not follow the standard phone camera formula. Instead of a very wide main camera around 23mm or 24mm, Vivo has gone for a 35mm main camera. I actually like 35mm as a native focal length. It can be a little harder to work with in tight spaces, and it is a big jump from the 14mm ultrawide, but it gives photos a more natural and pleasing perspective.

The 35mm lens is dubbed by the marketing department as the “Zeiss Documentary Camera”. With 1-inch sensors in phones seemingly falling out of fashion again, it uses a 200MP Sony LYTIA 901 sensor, with a still pretty large 1/1.12-inch format paired with an f/1.85 aperture. The lens also gets a Zeiss T* coating to reduce ghosting and flare.

In practice, the main camera quality is very good. Sharpness is strong, there is lots of detail, and the 50mm and 70mm equivalent crop options hold up really well, with no perceptible loss in quality to my eye anyway. I like the look of Vivo’s images in the Zeiss natural color mode; lighting is well balanced with colors looking true-to-life. If you are looking for a little more pop, then there is also a vivid mode (which is actually the default camera style), as well as numerous other styles to stylise images or attempt to mimic film with some mixed results.

However, Vivo’s processing is still a little too sharp and HDR for my taste. Vivo does include a Raw Lighting setting, which, when switched on, should reduce some of the sharpening, HDR, and other processing that makes phone images look, well, processed. Raw lighting does make a welcome difference; I do prefer the overall feel of images with this setting on, although it doesn’t magically make images look any less like they are shot on a phone. I think Xiaomi's Leica Authentic profile or Oppo's Hasselblad Master Mode both do a better job of making photos look a little more camera-like.

Night photos are very good. The X300 Ultra retains lots of detail and rarely needs to kick into long exposure mode to produce a usable result. That said, night images can show slight oversharpening, and Vivo’s processing tries a little too hard to brighten the scene rather than allowing natural depth in the shadows. I often found myself dragging exposure compensation down to make my photos a little more atmospheric.

I am never really a fan of an ultrawide camera, but the 14mm ultrawide is one of the best I have used on any phone. This is made all the more important as the jump from 14mm to 35mm is significant, and on a weaker ultrawide, that would leave a real gap. Here, the 50MP sensor gives enough quality that you can crop into ultrawide images somewhat without losing too much detail – although don’t expect miracles.

The lens also controls aberrations and color casts really well, which is also not usually a strength of most ultrawides, and it is one of the cleanest I have seen on a phone. Vivo says the ultrawide uses Zeiss T* coating, Multi-ALD low-reflection coating, and Super Blue Glass.

The 85mm telephoto lens is outstanding, and despite the 35mm giving it a very good run, it's the standout stills camera for me. It features a 200MP sensor, with a 1/1.4-inch size, APO optics, and what Vivo says (and I’m inclined to agree with) is gimbal-grade stabilization. All this translates into images that are sharp and detailed, with great lighting and color.

Macro is excellent too. Vivo uses the 3x lens for macro rather than the ultrawide, which gives the right perspective for close-up work. The blur looks pretty genuine, more like a proper camera than the distorted ultrawide macro modes used by some rivals.

Portrait mode is one of the best on any phone right now; it did really well cutting out subjects, although it still had some minor issues with flyaway hair. The results looked natural, and what I liked most was that Vivo softened the edges in a way that made the transition to the background look more like natural falloff rather than a computational cutout that can make the subject look composited onto the background.

Zooming in, the 170mm crops are excellent and look optically close to lossless. Beyond 170mm, the X300 Ultra relies on in-sensor cropping and then generative AI to boost longer-range images. Vivo’s SuperZoom is among the best in the business; up to around 600mm images without too much complication are sharp and natural-looking, although lots of detail does start to look squiggly. After this, you can see the effects of AI kicking in with a more smoothened texture and loss of fine detail. It is very good, although it is still outclassed by the optical power of the Oppo Find X9 Ultra’s 10x lens.

Where the Vivo fights back is with its teleconverter accessories; it's not the only brand to be pushing these add-on lenses, but as one of the first to really go hard on these accessories, it has the most developed system. Oppo’s new telephoto lenses is good, but the brand has yet to settle on a mount that works across phone models, and in the camera, the telephoto can’t be used in all modes, which are two frustrating limitations that thankfully the Vivo doesn’t share.

The 200mm (2.35x) and 400mm (4.7x) equivalent lenses are excellent. The optics from both are outstanding, and they make the X300 Ultra feel much more like a modular camera system than a normal phone. You can go to 800mm using in-sensor cropping, and the results are still impressive, although there is some minor sharpening detail visible in textures such as fur and hair. Stabilization with the telephoto adapters is excellent. I do not have the steadiest hands, but even at 800mm, I was getting sharp and shake-free photos.

The camera app is one of my favorites, although it might be a little overwhelming to some. There are a lot of modes, and some of them have varying levels of usefulness, but most are tucked away in the “more” menu (or can at least be moved there to clean up the clutter).

I really like how many shortcuts Vivo lets you keep on the screen, with four icons at the top and three on the side for quick settings. You can also have none if you prefer a clean viewfinder screen. The AI will occasionally pop up with suggestions to change modes, which can be useful, though it also adds to the sense that there are perhaps too many options.

Video

Video performance is where the X300 Ultra really comes into its own. This is the best Android phone I have used for video, and it is finally a real challenger to the iPhone’s dominance. Video is clean and crisp, dynamic range is excellent, and footage from the sensors looks genuinely professional. You do not get the same depth as a larger-sensor camera, of course, but results can still look cinematic.

The Pro Video mode is packed with useful tools, including LUTs, full manual controls, audio levels, waveforms, and histograms. You can even use Pro Video mode with the telephoto adapters. The X300 Ultra is capable of 4K 120p 10-bit Log video across the rear cameras, as well as APV 422 encoding, ACES workflow support, and custom 3D LUT monitoring. The one caveat from my use is that LUTs are preview only in-camera, with no option to burn them directly into final footage, so this needs to be done in post.

Stabilization for video is outstanding. The X300 Ultra has additional modes with horizon lock and an ultra-steady mode, and both are very effective. It gets closer to gimbal-level stabilization and is on par with a lot of action camera stabilization I have used for heavy action. Panning is smooth, without the jerkiness you get from systems trying too hard to fight the movement, and static handheld shots are rock steady.

There are also a couple of minor modes and options I want to shout out. The built-in teleprompter is a great addition, and I wish more phones did this. I also really like how easy it is to see and swap which microphone you are using to record; not every brand makes this clear, and it can be a huge annoyance.

Phone Performance

The X300 Ultra uses the latest and greatest Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, supported by Vivo’s Pro Imaging Chip VS1+. The VS1+ imaging chip is designed to handle image pre-processing, raw processing, noise, sharpness, dynamic range, and faster image output.

In my own testing, the X300 Ultra scored 3632 single-core and 10619 multi-core in Geekbench, with 3DMark scores of 6620–4299, which puts it among the best Android flagships right now.

More importantly, it feels extremely fast in real use. The Snapdragon processor flies through day-to-day tasks, but more relevant is that it is excellent for video editing and photo editing. I noticed no meaningful slowdowns when scrubbing through video or exporting 4K footage.

OriginOS 6 is slick, enjoyable to use, and easy to navigate – and a bonus for MacBook owners who use Android; it is also now compatible with AirDrop. OriginOS still has a bit of its own identity, but the big negative, though, is bloatware. There was a lot installed out of the box, and while I can forgive that on budget phones, it cheapens the experience on something this premium.

The AI Suite is very comprehensive, with AI retouch, expand, re-color, eraser, and UHD tools. Most do a good job. The eraser is particularly good at recognizing people, and for quick edits, it is genuinely useful. There are still some obviously AI-looking artifacts, especially when using Gen Expand, where the generated content does not quite match the resolution of the cameras. In a way, it’s a compliment to the imaging hardware that the cameras are so good that the AI fill has a hard time keeping up.

Battery life is excellent. The 6600mAh BlueVolt battery got me through around a day and a half with normal use, although heavy video shooting cut into that quite a lot. Vivo says the battery supports 100W wired FlashCharge and 40W wireless charging, and that the phone includes bypass charging with smart temperature control for intensive use. In my charging test, the phone reached 37% in 15 minutes and 61% in 60 minutes using PD charging.

Final Verdict

The Vivo X300 Ultra is not the most ultra-looking phone, but it is one of the most compelling ultra phones I have used. Vivo has built something that ticks nearly every box on my wishlist. The main camera is excellent, the ultrawide is one of the best around, the 85mm telephoto is outstanding, and the teleconverter system gives it a practical reach that most phones cannot touch.

What really separates it, though, is video. The X300 Ultra is not just good “for an Android phone”; it is a genuine contender for best video on any phone full stop. The stabilization, Pro Video mode, LUT support, 4K 120p options, teleprompter mode, and accessory compatibility make it a phone designed for pro video workflows. As a video-first phone, the X300 Ultra is exceptional and the strongest contender to an iPhone for serious video creators.

There are still a few frustrations. I think Vivo’s image processing still leans slightly too sharp and bright, the design is generic, the camera bump is huge, the bloatware is unwelcome, and the shiny silver camera kit isn’t to my tastes – but mostly the lack of availability and exceptionally high price make it so difficult to recommend when options like the Oppo Find X9 Ultra and Xiaomi 17 Ultra are so so good.

Alternatives

There are countless impressive phones at almost every price point, but in 2025, the Xiaomi 15T Pro managed to stand out from the pack. It offered features that were almost unheard of in the sub-flagship/upper mid-range category, like an excellent 5x telephoto camera, 4K120 recording, and Log at up to 4K60.

Now, after only about 8 months, its successor has landed. I had such a good time with the previous model, I had my hopes up, but at least on the surface, the Xiaomi 17T Pro doesn't look much different.

However, dig a little deeper and you'll find that this phone has a much bigger battery, faster charging, and a newer, quicker processor - as well as some new software features. Is that enough to remain one of the best camera phones in 2026? I've been using it for the past week to find out.

Specifications

Price

The Xiaomi 17T Pro is launching in Europe and the UK, at the time of writing I only have the Euro price, which will be €899 for the 12GB RAM and 512GB storage configuration. Which is €100 more than last year, but with global supply chain shortages, it is hardly a surprise. I'd expect similar price rises in the UK.

That said, the Xiaomi 17T Pro still manages to undercut many flagship rivals, with near enough flagship specs that most people won't even notice what you're missing out on on top end devices.

Design & Handling

As I hinted at earlier, the Xiaomi 17T Pro looks very similar to the 15T Pro. It's the same size and shape, and the only major difference is the lack of a bevelled edge around the camera island. This time around, though, we get some slightly flashier colours.

The phone is available in Black, Deep Violet, and Deep Blue options, and I have the latter in for review. It's a really nice shade of navy blue that looks almost metallic. It's very similar to the finish on the blue Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7, and I was a big fan of that one, too.

The 17T Pro looks and feels like a top-tier flagship, with colour-matched aluminium sides and a matte glass-fibre back that doesn't attract fingerprints and smudges. It's weighty and dense, and the boxy corners give off an iPhone-like vibe.

It's a pretty big phone, not too dissimilar to the iPhone 17 Pro Max or Google Pixel 10 Pro XL. It's nothing unusual if you're used to carrying a flagship handset, but if you have smaller hands, it could feel a bit unwieldy.

The Xiaomi 17T Pro comes with a basic matte-black TPU case in the box, so you can keep it protected from the get-go, and it also has a plastic screen protector installed as standard. It's also IP68 certified, so it'll handle a heavy rain shower or a dunk in fresh water without issue.

The screen is completely flat, and it has slim symmetrical bezels on all sides. The specs are identical to last year's model, but that was already an impressive screen, so I have no real complaints about it.

It's an OLED panel with a zippy 144Hz refresh rate, but it's not LTPO, so it'll only dip down to 30Hz to conserve battery life rather than 1Hz. On the other hand, I was impressed that it can dim as low as 1 nit, which makes a big difference when you need to check your phone in the middle of the night.

If you're concerned about eye health, you're going to love this display. It supports DC dimming and carries TUV Rheinland certifications for Low Blue Light, Flicker Free, Circadian Friendliness, and Intelligent Eye Care. In theory, it'll keep your eyes feeling fresh for longer, but I'm not particularly sensitive to such things, so I can't say I noticed a massive difference.

Camera Performance

The camera hardware on the Xiaomi 17T Pro matches that of the 15T Pro. This means you get a 50MP f/1.67 main camera with a 1/1.3-inch sensor, a 50MP f/3.0 5x telephoto, and a slightly less impressive 12MP f/2.2 ultrawide. Around the front, there's a 32MP punch-hole selfie camera.

It's a very impressive camera system overall, but it shares the same shortcomings as the previous generation, so I'll get those out of the way first. The ultrawide lacks autofocus, so it's no use for close-up shots, and the smaller low-resolution sensor isn't very good when the light gets low. The selfie camera also lacks autofocus, and while it's decent, it's not likely to wow you.

When it comes to the main and telephoto cameras, though, it's a different story. The 1/1.3-inch main sensor is the largest you'll find in this price category, and it even matches the base model flagship, the Xiaomi 17. It's excellent in all lighting conditions, and it can produce some lovely natural bokeh when you get a little closer.

The 5x telephoto is also a rarity, with most rivals opting for a 3x lens. This longer focal length helps with long-range zoom and creates a lot of compression, which looks stunning in close-up shots.

I wouldn't say it has macro capabilities, but it can get a lot closer than you might expect; it's able to focus just 30 cm away from the lens. And if you combine that with some digital zoom, you can get in pretty tight. If you want to do this, though, you'll need to turn off the automatic lens switching in the camera settings, as Xiaomi is a little over-enthusiastic about switching back to the main lens.

This phone benefits from Xiaomi's partnership with Leica, which means you get a lot of the same awesome picture profiles as the 17 Ultra. As ever, the film simulations and bokeh styles in portrait mode make taking Instagrammable pics as easy as can be.

What's new with this model is a feature called Leica Live Moment, which basically works like Apple's Live Photos. The difference is that it supports all the picture styles, you can use it in portrait mode, and there are some exclusive Leica watermarks to go along with it.

I'm not a massive fan of this shooting style; I prefer my photos to be photos and my videos to be videos. However, I do see the appeal. The best part is that you can go through the short video clip and choose a different frame if you didn't click at the opportune time, but you also get the ability to share short looping or boomerang-style clips.

Honestly, there's not much new stuff to get excited about here, but regardless, the Xiaomi 17T Pro still stands out as having one of the most impressive camera systems in its class. I was impressed with the results in almost every situation.

Arguably, it's the video features that really set this phone apart. It can shoot in Log at up to 4K60 on the main and telephoto cameras, or 4K30 on the ultrawide. You can even import and apply your own LUTs.

It can also shoot 8K30 and 4K120, but only on the main lens, and not in Log. This is an impressive array of pro video features for a phone of this class, and it easily outshines similarly priced rivals like the Honor 600 Pro and Vivo X300 FE.

Phone Performance

The Xiaomi 17T Pro is powered by the MediaTek Dimensity 9500, the same flagship chip that's found in phones like the Oppo Find X9 Pro. It comes with 12GB of RAM and either 512GB or 1TB of storage. The 9500 doesn't quite match Qualcomm's latest in raw gaming performance, but it's still super powerful, and likely more than most people will ever need.

I played a few hours of NTE, a beautiful-looking open-world title that makes even the most powerful phones struggle. I wasn't able to max out the settings, but on the balanced preset, I got a solid 60 fps throughout.

The frame of the phone gets quite warm after a while, but that's not a bad thing, as it means the cooling system is doing its job effectively. If you use the included case or a grip-style controller, it'll keep the heat away from your palms. But even without that, it never gets too uncomfortable.

Of course, outside of gaming, the performance is top-notch, and the phone feels quick even under heavy multitasking.

The software is Hyper OS 3, Xiaomi's custom version of Android 16. There aren't too many surprises here; it has essentially the same look and features as Xiaomi's flagship phones and most Poco phones, too.

There's an obvious Apple influence with some of the styling choices. For example, Xiaomi has its own version of Dynamic Island, some lock screen themes have oversized clocks and depth effects, and the quick settings shade looks very familiar, too. Personally, I'm alright with that; it looks good, and all the features work as they should.

There's also plenty of AI features to play about with, and Google's Gemini and Circle to Search are enabled as standard.

Overall, I had a good time with Hyper OS 3. The only thing that detracts from the experience is that there's a bit of bloatware to clean up when you first set up the phone. It's not a crazy amount, it'll only take a few minutes to uninstall the unwanted apps, but it's a hassle that you might not have to endure on similarly priced mobiles.

The super-sized battery is one of the defining features of the Xiaomi 17T Pro. It has a 7000 mAh pack, the largest in any Xiaomi phone to date, and as you'd expect, the battery life is very impressive. With my typical use, the phone would easily get me through the day, and usually a second morning before I was reaching for the charger.

It's not a bad showing, but the Honor 600 Pro has a significantly smaller battery, and it lasted me longer than this. Perhaps Xiaomi needs to do some more software optimisation. In all fairness, most of my testing was done well ahead of the launch, so there's plenty of opportunity for it to improve further.

As it stands, it's very easy to live with, and part of the reason for that is the extremely quick charging. You get a 100W wall adapter included in the box, and it takes the phone from completely dead to well over 50% charged in half an hour. It also supports wireless charging at up to 50W, but you'll need a suitably powerful official Xiaomi charger to reach that speed.

Verdict

The Xiaomi 17T Pro is a great all-rounder. The cameras are excellent, it's powerful, it looks and feels premium, and it comes at a lower cost than most flagship devices. The only problem is that it's very similar to last year's 15T Pro.

If you own the older model, there's not really any reason to upgrade, unless your battery keeps dying prematurely. And if you're a savvy shopper, opting for the older model, or the frequently discounted base model Xiaomi 17, might make more sense.

That said, if you're looking for a phone in this price range, the Xiaomi 17T Pro still stands out as one of the best options. It has a more versatile camera system and better video features than its closest competitors, the Honor 600 Pro or Vivo X300 FE, and it rivals them in performance, too.

So, while it might not be the most exciting update, the Xiaomi 17T Pro remains competitive in 2026. I had a great time using it, especially the 5x telephoto, which continues to surprise me with its excellent results.

Alternatives

Last year's Vivo X200 FE left me wanting more. It wasn't a bad phone, and it could take great photos, but it didn't feel like a proper flagship, despite being on the higher end of the pricing scale.

Now, the Vivo X300 FE has arrived, and it's looking much more tempting. This model gets a healthy upgrade to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 chip, adds fast wireless charging support, and even supports Vivo's excellent external teleconverter lens.

It's a smaller handset, similar in size to the Galaxy S26 and iPhone 17 base models, but it doesn't skimp on the specs, with a bright display and a massive battery inside. If you're not keen on carrying a mammoth Ultra flagship, but you still want some of that Vivo magic, this could be a good bet.

Specifications

Price & Availability

The Vivo X300 FE came as a bit of a surprise, launching alongside the X300 Ultra in global markets. As usual, European availability is a little limited, and this one isn't coming to the UK or the US.

Vivo tells us it will be available soon in Spain, Austria, Hungary, and Poland. As well as Asian markets, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, India, and Pakistan.

At the time of writing, Vivo hasn't been able to share the European pricing, but some sources say it'll be equivalent to around $730 when it finally lands on shelves next month.

Design

The design of the Vivo X300 FE reminds me of the iPhone Air, with its elongated camera bar shoved all the way to the top of the frame. However, don't be fooled, this isn't a particularly slim phone. At 8.2mm thick, it's decidedly average.

What is impressively slim is the camera bump. It only protrudes from the rear panel by a few millimetres, and since it's up at the top, it's well out of the way when you're holding it. It also feels surprisingly well-balanced, despite this configuration. I can imagine this setup working well with a MagSafe-compatible case.

I have the Mist Purple version in for testing, which has a very pale lilac rear panel and silver siderails. There's also a white model, complete with a shimmering finish, and darker black and green versions, if you'd prefer something a little more professional-looking.

The phone comes with a basic silicon case in the box, with an opaque matte finish that's color-matched to the phone. I also got a charger and a charging cable with my sample, although I'd imagine that will vary from region to region.

The phone has the usual volume rocker and power button combo on the right-hand side, and there are no additional buttons. Vivo has been a little inconsistent in its approach. The X200 Ultra had a Camera Control-clone, the X300 Pro had an Action Button-clone, while the latest Ultra and FE have neither.

The phone benefits from IP68 and IP69 water and dust resistance. This means it's protected against full submersion, as well as blasts from jets of hot water. So, if you drop your X300 FE at a car wash, it just might live to tell the tale.

One of the defining features of this phone is its size. If you prefer a smaller handset, you're sure to enjoy this. It has a 6.3-inch screen, basically the same size as the base model Galaxy S26, iPhone 17, and Xiaomi 17. It feels much more comfortable in your pocket, and it's much easier to reach the top of the display if you have smaller hands.

Speaking of the display, it's quite impressive. It can reach up to 5000 nits of brightness output in certain conditions, and I never had trouble seeing when out in the spring sunshine. It also has a smooth 120Hz refresh rate, and it's an LTPO panel, which means it can dip down to 1Hz to conserve battery when displaying a static image.

The colours look vivid and accurate, and fairly slim, symmetrical bezels complete the flagship screen experience. I can't help but wish the selfie camera cutout was a little smaller, but hey, it's a lot less intrusive than Apple's pill-shaped void.

Camera Performance

The camera stack on the Vivo X300 FE is largely unchanged from last year. There's still a 50MP main camera with a 1/1.56-inch sensor, a 50MP 3x telephoto camera (1/1.95-inch), and a rather disappointing 8MP ultrawide with a tiny 1/4-inch sensor.

The only real upgrade is that the main camera now has a slightly wider aperture; it's f/1.57, up from f/1.9, which might help slightly in low light conditions.

Of course, another big change is that the phone is compatible with Vivo's 200mm external teleconverter lens, but unfortunately, I wasn't able to test that. I did have a look through the options in the camera app, and just like its bigger siblings, the teleconverter works across all modes. So, you'll be able to shoot RAW, high-res, or even use portrait mode filters with the external optics.

If you're not so keen on carrying external lenses, the video shooting upgrades might get you more excited. You can now capture up to 8K 30 fps or 4K 120 fps on the main lens. Meanwhile, the telephoto and selfie cameras max out at 4K 60 fps, and the ultrawide is stuck at 1080p 30 fps. I love to see 4K120 becoming more prevalent on affordable devices; it makes such a huge difference for slow motion.

The camera app is largely the same as it is on Vivo's pricier handsets. This means you get the same awesome filters and picture styles, including Zeiss-approved color tuning and bokeh simulations. You can really elevate your photos by playing around with these options. I have become particularly fond of the "Humanistic" street photography mode, which makes the UI look more like a vintage camera, and lets you adjust the film simulations and save them as presets.

You also get a lot of professional settings, including the ability to manually control things like ISO and shutter speed, as well as the option to shoot in RAW. One big difference between this phone and the rest of the X300 lineup, though, is that there's no Log option in video, which I found very disappointing. Vivo has a really good Log profile, and I can't think of a reason why it would be excluded here.

Photo performance is very good on the whole, but this phone has the same limitations as its predecessor. The ultrawide just isn't very good; it really falls apart at night, and it doesn't have autofocus, so it's not very versatile.

The telephoto looks great, but the design of the optics means it doesn't have great macro capabilities. Of course, that's not a massive issue in itself, but with the rest of the X300 lineup excelling in telemacro shooting, this one stands out as a weak performer.

The selfie camera, on the other hand, is a highlight. It has autofocus, so shots always look super sharp, and the ample 50MP resolution means you can take very high-quality images when the light is on your side.

The main camera also offers very strong performance in all lighting conditions. The relatively large sensor and wide aperture mean it's by far the best lens in low light, and Vivo's excellent image processing makes portraits look stunning.

The Vivo X200 FE featured the Aura-light bi-color ring flash that's present on most Vivo V-series phones, but with this model, you get a more traditional single color LED flash. It might not be as flattering for videos, but it works really well for photography. The flash adapts to the focal length you're shooting at, so you'll get a more concentrated flash when using the telephoto, and a wider, more diffused flash for main camera close-ups.

Phone Performance

The Vivo X300 FE is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 5, which is not to be confused with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 found in the X300 Ultra. It's a powerful chip, and a healthy upgrade over last year's Dimensity 9300+, but it's not on the same level as the top flagship devices. It's paired with 12GB of RAM and either 256GB or 512GB of storage.

In use, the phone feels flagship-level. It's super speedy, and no matter what I was trying to do, the phone kept up and remained snappy throughout. It's only in benchmark scores, and while playing demanding games, the performance discrepancy becomes apparent. Hardcore gamers may want to look elsewhere, but for everyone else, this handset is more than capable.

The chipset is helped along by Origin OS 6, Vivo's customised version of Android 16. It has a focus on smoothness and efficiency, and it shows. The animations are always smooth and speedy, which makes for a delightful day-to-day experience.

It's also super customisable and has tonnes of gorgeous-looking themes to choose from. There's definitely an Apple influence on the aesthetics, which is very obvious when you see the lock screens with super-sized clocks and Vivo's Dynamic Island impersonation. But they look great, and they're functionally quite useful, so I'm not complaining.

Vivo has extended the software support terms; it's now offering 5 years of major Android OS updates and 7 years of security patches for this model. They're not industry-leading figures, but they're respectable and mean that the X300 FE will remain useful until at least 2033.

The X300 FE has a 6500 mAh battery, which is the same capacity as last year's model, and oddly, larger than the X300 Pro and Ultra (at least in Europe). I would have loved to see an upgrade in capacity, but honestly, the FE doesn't really need it, because the battery life has been excellent throughout my testing.

Despite plenty of screen-on time and camera use, the X300 FE easily lasts me around a day and a half per charge. If I'm more careful, two days on a charge is a possibility, too.

To make matters even better, the X300 FE charges very rapidly. It supports up to 90W speeds with a wire, which will take the phone from dead to 100% charged in just over half an hour. It also adds wireless charging for the first time and boasts up to 40W speeds using Vivo's official wireless pad.

Final Verdict

The Vivo X300 FE is a compact handset with a charming design that's sure to appeal to anyone looking for a smaller phone with quality snappers. I have really enjoyed using it, and while the cameras aren't quite on par with the rest of the X300 lineup, they're still impressive - and I often preferred shots from the X300 FE over similar snaps from the S26 base model.

As for whether it's worth buying, it all depends on the pricing. The cost of Vivo's global models often varies significantly between regions, and my opinion rests on how big the price gap is between this and the standard X300.

The X300 is almost exactly the same size as the FE, but the cameras are much more versatile, and the video capabilities are a big step-up, too. If it won't cost you much more, then it's the obvious choice. However, if the X300 FE is significantly cheaper, then it's a great option, just don't expect too much of the ultrawide camera.

Alternatives

Earlier this year at MWC, Honor announced its 200MP AI-powered robot cinema phone. While on the face of it, the Robot Phone resembles almost any other flagship phone designed in recent memory. It’s super thin, has gorgeous rounded corners, and boasts incredibly thin bezels for an edge-to-edge display experience. But it’s none of this that sets the Robot Phone apart from the competition.

It’s actually the strange gimbal camera which protrudes from the top of the phone which is guaranteed to turn heads, but not necessarily for the right reasons. This four-degrees-of-freedom (4DoF) gimbal system is driven by a highly miniaturized internal micro-motor and folks away into the rear panel.

To fit the machinery into a tight 7mm internal chassis, Honor has engineered a micro-motor that is 70% smaller than standard industry components. The mechanical arm is constructed using high-performance titanium and steel alloys, utilizing the same simulation tools and structural materials developed for the company’s Magic V6 foldable hinge.

While the phone effectively addresses the consumer demand for stabilized, high-quality social video, the industry is not so sure this is the answer. As strong as the mechanical arm is, it’s always going to be vulnerable to getting knocked and damaged. It's also unlikely to ever outperform the best smartphone gimbals. And would you ever want this thing in your pocket?

Could the ARRI partnership be the difference?

As well as a feat of engineering, the Robot Phone marks the debut of a collaboration between Honor and ARRI, the Academy Award-winning industry leader in professional cinematography equipment. For the first time, core elements of ARRI’s renowned image science are integrated directly into a consumer smartphone, aiming to deliver natural color reproduction and cinema-grade highlight roll-off.

This partnership will undoubtedly turn heads. ARRI has a proven track record, and the thought of being able to harness their technology within a smartphone gimbal means it won't be discounted out of hand. Users will love the natural reproduction of skin tones as well as the gentle highlight roll-off for bright areas. This will all be made possible by the 200MP sensor, which is tuned to preserve a natural sense of dimension and depth of field.

When is it coming?

Honor has officially confirmed that the Robot Phone will launch in Q3 of 2026, which means anytime between July and September. Like many of Honor's high-concept tech devices, it will launch in China first. After its initial Chinese release, Honor will decide whether there's market demand to go for a global release.

You might also like...

Check out more of the best camera phones or the best Android phones for photography in our guides.

Sony has announced the Xperia 1 VIII, its latest flagship smartphone, and once again, the emphasis is firmly on photography with hardware upgrades for the cameras and an interesting, perhaps controversial, new AI Camera Assistant feature that thinks it can make you a better, or at least, less involved, photographer.

Let's start with that new AI Camera Assistant, powered by Sony’s Xperia Intelligence. When you open the camera, it can analyze a scene and suggest one-click creative options, including color tones, lens choices, and bokeh effects. Sony says the recommendations are based on its Creative Look system, drawing on imaging ideas developed through its Alpha camera line, with the aim of helping you get more creative results without having to actually manually do any settings or editing.

I get that some people just want photos without the photography – and this is perfect for that, but firstly, I’m just not sure those people are buying an Xperia phone, which are generally renowned for their often quite geeky cameras. But also, it is a strange move from the world’s largest photography company to want to encourage people to do less actual photography. I know no one is forcing you to use these AI features, but it just feels like another little step in AI devaluing the skills of photographers.

But onto the phone hardware, and the telephoto camera has had a significant update, dropping the interesting, but expansive, 85-170mm mechanically zooming lens for a fixed 70mm equivalent focal length. The Xperia 1 VIII telephoto uses a new 1/1.56-inch sensor, which Sony says is around four times larger than the sensor used in the Xperia 1 VII – although not quite as large as many rival Ultra phones. But it should be a step forward for better long-range shooting in lower light, where telephoto cameras on phones often struggle most.

Sony says all three rear cameras, covering 16mm, 24mm, and 70mm focal lengths, deliver low-light performance comparable to a full-frame sensor in terms of noise reduction and dynamic range – on which I eagerly await our review (coming soon). The phone also applies RAW multi-frame processing across all lenses, combining HDR expansion with noise reduction to preserve detail in both highlights and shadows.

Style-wise, the Xperia 1 VIII also has had a significant redesign – introducing a new “ORE” design, inspired by natural textures and gemstones. It will be available in Graphite Black, Iolite Silver, Garnet Red, and a limited Native Gold, with tactile surface textures intended to improve grip. Sony’s dedicated camera shutter button remains, as does the 3.5mm headphone jack – a rarity on modern flagship phones.

Otherwise, the phone is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 platform, with Sony claiming a 20% performance boost over the previous model. Sony rates battery life at up to two days and four years of battery health. There is also a Bravia-branded screen and Sony Walkman audio.

The Xperia 1 VIII is available to pre-order now, priced at £1,399 / €1,499 for the 256GB model, and during the pre-order period, Sony is bundling its WH-1000XM6 headphones.

A 1TB Native Gold version will be sold exclusively through Sony online stores in select countries for £1,849 / €1,999.

Honor's number-series phones attempt to find the balance between flagship performance and affordable pricing, nestling themselves in between upper mid-range phones and lower-tier flagships. We were quite impressed with last year's 400 Pro, and now, its successor has arrived.

The Honor 600 Pro has adopted a very different look, and it's not hard to figure out where the inspiration came from. It also sports a more premium finish, with matte aluminium side rails, rather than a plastic frame.

There's a healthy upgrade to a more powerful chip, a bigger battery, and a brighter, flatter display, with slimmer bezels. When it comes to the cameras, though, the changes are quite subtle. Is this phone worth considering? Or can you save yourself some money and grab last year's instead? Let's find out.

Specifications

Price & Availability

The Honor 600 Pro is only available in one configuration in the UK, with 12GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. It carries an MSRP of £899, which puts it in competition with the likes of the Xiaomi 17, Google Pixel 10, and Samsung Galaxy S26.

However, there's a promotion running to celebrate the launch, which knocks a whopping £200 off the asking price. With that discount applied, the phone is competing against the likes of the Xiaomi 15T Pro and base model Pixel 10.

As usual, it won't be launching in the US, but availability is broad elsewhere. It's available to order now via Honor's official store and through third-party retailers like Amazon.

Design

Honor has taken the design of the 600 Pro in a very different direction. While the previous generation featured soft curves on all sides, the latest model has a flat front and rear, with boxy, squared-off side rails.

The camera bump also looks very different, and now spans the top of the phone, mimicking the iPhone 17 Pro's style. Something is off about this version, though. The dimensions make it look a little squished, and the elongated ultrawide lens looks weird, too.

The Pro model comes in Golden White (pictured) or Black, while the standard model adds a very iPhone-like Orange. The colour choices are nice enough, but the similarities with Apple's latest are just a touch too far, in my opinion. Honor shouldn't feel like it needs to copy Apple to get attention, and yet, at a glance, 99% of people will see this phone as a cheap iPhone knockoff, which is a real shame.

Otherwise, the build is decidedly more premium than last year. Honor has ditched the plastic frame, and you now get matte aluminium sides that are immune to fingerprint smudges. I can't quite tell what the rear panel is made from, but it also has a smudge-free matte finish, and the camera platform has a more glossy translucent finish carved from the same material.

The Honor 600 Pro has the usual power button and volume rocker on the right-hand side, but this model also gets Honor's "AI-button", a lot like the one we saw on the Magic 8 Pro a few months back. However, while it might look the same at a glance, this one isn't quite so advanced.

The AI Button on the 600 Pro is just a button; it's not sensitive to swiping like the Magic 8 Pro's button or Apple's Camera Control. You can use it to take a photo, but it's not a two-stage button, so there's no half-press to focus. Still, I like buttons, and this is a handy way to open your favorite app or snap a quick photo, so I appreciate the inclusion.

The phone now boasts IP69K dust and water resistance, on top of the IP69 rating from last year. The ratings essentially mean the same thing, but the "K" testing is even more stringent. In real life, it means this phone will probably survive an accidental trip through the dishwasher. SGS also rated it 5-stars for drop and crush resistance, so it should be able to take a beating.

Display

As mentioned, the screen is now flat, with no micro curves at the edges, and the bezels are much slimmer, too. Honor claims they're less than a millimetre thick, and they're symmetrical the whole way around, which makes for a super premium look. The cutout for the selfie camera is also much smaller, now a typical circular punch hole, rather than a pill shape.

Honor claims an astonishing 8000 nits peak brightness for this panel, but I'd take that number with a grain of salt. All that matters is that it can get very bright, and it's easy to see in bright sunlight. Otherwise, you get all the usual flagship display perks, including a smooth 120Hz refresh rate, deep inky blacks, and rich vibrant colours. It just looks great.

Camera Performance

The Honor 600 Pro has a very similar camera setup to its predecessor. You still get an impressive 200MP main camera with a 1/1.4-inch sensor, and a slightly less impressive 12MP ultrawide camera. This time, though, the 3x telephoto has been replaced with a 3.5x, so you get slightly more optical reach.

All three of the rear lenses have autofocus, but only the ultrawide has macro capabilities. It's not my favourite setup, I much prefer using the telephoto for macro shots, but in fairness, you can still get decent close-ups with that lens if you digitally crop to 7x or higher.

As for the selfie camera, it has the same specs as the previous generation. It takes very decent snaps, and Honor's skin tones have improved a lot, but it still lacks autofocus. So you'll need to stand in the sweet spot to get the best snaps, and group photos might not look as crisp.

I haven't been the biggest fan of Honor's image processing in years past, but something has changed recently. The Honor Magic 8 Pro felt like a turning point, with more accurate colours and less extreme sharpening.

I'm happy to report that those positive changes have all made their way to the 600 series, too, and I really enjoy the default look of the images. There are also loads of filters and film simulations to play with, and they make it easy to give your photos a more stylised look. My only gripe is that beautification is enabled by default, so you have to remember to turn that off if you don't want your portraits looking unnaturally smooth.

The excellent Studio Harcourt-backed portrait mode effects also make an appearance here, and I still love the look - especially the moody black and white option.

Overall, I have been quite impressed with the Honor 600 Pro's photographic abilities. Photos look excellent in the daylight, and while this phone might not quite match the Magic 8 Pro for low-light snaps, it still does well, especially with the main camera.

It's really only the ultrawide that lags behind the other lenses. It's not awful, but the smaller, lower-resolution sensor doesn't resolve nearly as much detail as the other cameras. It's especially noticeable in darker scenes.

When it comes to video capture, the Honor 600 Pro can shoot at up to 4K 60fps on the main camera and telephoto, and 4K 30fps on the others. I was a little disappointed in the lack of 4K 120fps recording, as we're starting to see that more from rivals like the Vivo X300 FE and Xiaomi 15T Pro. There's also no Log profile, despite the phone having a Pro Video option.

That said, videos taken with this phone look pretty great. The stabilisation is decent, and autofocus is reliable. So, as long as you keep your expectations in check, you're in for a good time.

Phone Performance

Following in the footsteps of the Honor 400 Pro, rather than using a current-gen mid-range chip, the Honor 600 Pro opts for last year's flagship instead. It's powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite, and while it might not be the latest and greatest, it's still overkill for the majority of users.

This time, it's paired with 12GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, along with Honor's largest vapor chamber to date. In tandem, these components provide an excellent experience for power users. No matter if you're editing large 4K video files, multitasking, or playing games at the highest graphical settings, the Honor 600 Pro can handle it all.

After using it for the past week, I have no complaints about the performance. It feels super quick, no matter what you're doing with it, and it handled a Wuthering Waves session at max settings without any issue. It does heat up when you're pushing it that hard, but it doesn't become uncomfortable to hold, which is all you can really ask for.

The 600 Pro runs Honor's latest software, Magic OS 10, which is a very heavily customised version of Android 16. Matching the outside of the phone, there's a lot of Apple influence in the software, too. Some elements have Liquid Glass-like styling, there's a Dynamic Island clone, and the default layout is very similar to iOS.

Where Magic OS differentiates itself is with the customisation. If you browse through the theme options, you can make the system look completely different. So, if you're not feeling the default aesthetics, you can change them completely with a few taps.

There are also boatloads of AI features to play with, including all the usual writing assistance, translation, and transcription tools. One of the most interesting additions is Image to Video 2.0. This tool is powered by Google, and it's debuting on the Honor 600 series before anywhere else.

It's similar to the Image to Video feature that debuted with last year's Honor 400 series phones, but this updated version supports multiple images, custom prompts, and also generates audio. The app gives you a selection of starting points, but there's also a freestyle option where you can enter whatever prompt you want.

It's definitely more of a novelty feature than something that you'd use for content creation, but it's a lot of fun. The output can be very unpredictable, and my friends and I had a great laugh generating bizarre videos of each other.

The problem is that this isn't really an Honor feature, so while it may be available on the 600-series first, it'll likely come to other phones in the near future. And even more importantly, it's not free. I don't have exact details on pricing, but Honor will give you 10 free uses per day for the first 3 months, then you'll need to pay Google for any additional slop generation.

The Honor 600 Pro has a sizable 6400 mAh battery inside, and the battery life has been pretty fantastic throughout my testing. I can easily go a day and a half between charges, and if I'm careful, it's possible to squeeze two days from a charge.

It also charges very quickly. It supports up to 80W speeds with a wire, and 50W wirelessly. There's no charger in the box, though.

Overall, my experience with the Honor 600 Pro has been quite positive. The OS has some really handy features, and the performance from the 8 Elite chip is as impressive as ever. The only real downsides are that there's a lot of bloatware preinstalled when you first set the phone up, and the battery optimisation has a habit of killing your background apps. But both can be remedied with a bit of tinkering.

Final Verdict

The Honor 600 Pro is a great all-rounder that's equally adept at gaming, productivity, and image creation. I'm not a big fan of the looks, but it feels premium and well-built, and it comes with a gorgeous display, a sizable battery, and speedy charging.

Whether I can recommend getting one all comes down to the pricing. At the full-price MSRP of £899, the competition is stiff. You can currently get the Xiaomi 17 for less than that, and it's a better phone in almost every way.

However, at the discounted launch price of £699, the Honor 600 Pro is a great deal, with better specifications than competitors like the Pixel 10. In that case, it's a much more compelling option.

Alternatives

I’m a little obsessed with smartphone camera kits. I’ve tried everything from Xiaomi’s ergonomic grips to Vivo’s teleconverters and Oppo’s own take on the concept.

I’m a firm believer in these kits, as although the setup can be cumbersome, I’ve taken shots that I wouldn’t have been able to without these accessories. And most importantly, they let me leave my heavy full-frame setup at home more often, and my spine is very thankful for that.

Clearly, camera-focused Chinese phone manufacturers feel the same way, as more and more of these devices keep popping up. Until now, Honor had neglected to jump on the trend, but that changes with the new Honor Magic8 Pro Professional Imaging Kit developed in collaboration with Telesin.

I’ve been testing this kit for the past couple of weeks, and it’s another impressive showing that blends elements of all the other camera kits that came before it. So, let’s take a closer look.

What’s in the box?

Honor’s photography kit comprises three main parts. There’s a phone case, a magnetic grip with tactile controls, and a teleconverter lens with a bayonet mounting system. You also get a 67mm filter adapter, along with both a neck and wrist strap.

As mentioned, there are parts of this kit that remind me of the other brand’s efforts. For instance, the bayonet lens mounting system is almost identical to Vivo’s, as is the neck strap, while the magnetic grip is quite similar to Oppo’s system. But that’s not to say there’s nothing new here.

The phone case has a thermally conductive material on the inside, and it looks like there’s a small heat sink in the middle of the magnetic ring. Telesin offers additional accessories that work with this magnetic mount, too, like a fill light and an active cooling fan for long shoots.

The case and grip are mostly made from plastic, but they feel very high-quality. Meanwhile, the lens and its mount are entirely metal, and they seem like they’ll stand the test of time.

The grip

The grip handle adds familiar DSLR-style controls to the Honor Magic 8 Pro, and attaches via super-strong MagSafe-compatible magnets. It’s a small detail, but I really like that the grip has these magnets on both sides, so if you want to use a MagSafe tripod, for example, you can attach it without needing to remove the grip first.

There are a couple of other advantages to this design when compared to a USB-C grip like you’ll find in Vivo and Xiaomi’s equivalent kits, too. Firstly, it can be rotated, so if you’re shooting vertically, you can still have an ergonomic grip with easily reachable controls.

Secondly, this design doesn’t block the USB-C port on the phone. Other kits offer a USB-C passthrough for charging, but they don’t usually support data transfer. So, for instance, if you want to use a wireless microphone receiver or an SSD, you can do so with this grip, and you wouldn’t be able to do so with others.

Of course, there are downsides, too. This grip doesn’t charge your phone, and you’ll need to remember to charge it from time to time, as it’s basically a fancy Bluetooth remote.

As for the controls, there’s a two-stage shutter button (half press to focus), a video button, a zoom rocker, a power button, and a very satisfying ratcheting control wheel. Unfortunately, though, there doesn’t seem to be a way to reprogram these controls; they’ll just work in their default configuration.

It’s not a huge problem, but it’s a slight annoyance. For instance, the control wheel switches camera mode (from photo to video and so on), which is fine, but I’d much rather have it control my EV compensation. All the other grips I have tried give you more options.

The teleconverter

The teleconverter looks and feels very similar to Vivo and Oppo's efforts. I have no way of actually knowing, but I wouldn't be shocked if these were all made in the same factory. To be clear, that's a good thing. These lenses are all extremely high quality, with a weighty metal build and glass optical elements.

The bayonet mount looks very similar, too, but it's not cross-compatible with the Vivo and Oppo kits, in case you were curious. It comes supplied with a rubber rear cap and a metal top cap to keep the glass protected.

The metal lens cap is another premium touch, but mine is extremely loose, and it falls off if you look at it the wrong way. It's an easy fix with some foam tape, but I shouldn't have to be DIY-ing a solution. Keep in mind, though, that this is a sample size of one, and other units might have a better fit.

This lens gives you a 2.35x magnification, and it works with the phone's built-in telephoto, just like the other examples. When attached, it gives you an FOV equivalent to around 200mm, in full-frame terms. But, of course, you can digitally zoom much further than that.

Compared to digitally zooming with the built-in lens, the teleconverter makes an immediate difference to the level of detail. It looks best at 200mm, but you can go all the way to around 1600mm and still get pretty usable results.

As I found with the other teleconverters, though, it's not long-range zooming that makes these lenses so appealing. If you shoot medium close-ups, the compression created by this longer lens produces stunning results with a shallow depth of field. These photos look like they were shot with a larger mirrorless camera, not a phone, and, in my opinion, that's the best thing about these external lens kits.

It's also great in low-light conditions. When you shoot at 200mm, you're using the whole 1/1.4-inch sensor, rather than cropping in on it. This means photos and videos are brighter, with less noise and motion blur.

Of course, this lens is just as useful for video shooting, and I was immediately impressed with the stabilisation when doing so. Autofocus is decent, too, but it does better with human subjects than birds. Still, it's nothing that tapping the screen can't fix, and there's a manual focus option if you want further control.

The software

If you try to use the teleconverter lens without first setting up the software, you'll be greeted with an upside-down image that's very shaky. To fix it, you'll need to dive into the settings menu on the camera app, find the Accessories section, and toggle on the Teleconverter option.

Once that's done, there will be a new Teleconverter mode available in the quick settings (swipe up in either Photo or Video mode).

You get a decent amount of options here, including a dedicated Stage mode for concert photography, as well as a selection of filters to use. In video, you can capture at up to 4K120, but the stabilisation isn't so good on that setting, so if you want to keep things looking smooth, you'll need to stick to 4K60 and below.

It's similar to the way Oppo's camera app handles the teleconverter, and it comes with the same downsides. There's no way to shoot in RAW or high-res mode, and there's no Log profile available for video shooting, either. Vivo is a step ahead here; the teleconverter for the X300 Pro is accessible in every camera mode.

Final thoughts

I have been impressed with every teleconverter kit I have tried so far, and the Honor Magic 8 Pro kit is no different. It has a very similar level of optical quality (despite lacking the Hasselblad/Zeiss branding) and produces very similar results.

This Telesin kit has some distinct advantages, too. It's the only solution that factors in thermal performance, with its conductive layer on the phone case, and the ability to rotate the grip and keep the USB-C port accessible gives it a leg up over Vivo's options.

If you own the Honor Magic 8 Pro, and you want to take your phone photography to the next level, this is a great purchase. However, getting your hands on this kit could prove tricky. Currently, it's available to buy in China, Malaysia, Singapore, the UAE, and Bangladesh. When I asked about a European release, I was told it was unconfirmed.

This means that for now, the only way a lot of our readers can get one is by importing. It's a bit of a pain, but on the plus side, I have the UK model Magic 8 Pro, and the software supports this accessory just fine. So, the only hurdle is physically getting one.

You might also like...

Interested in mobile photography? Check out more of the best camera phones, or best Android phones for photography in our guides.

Has the launch of the Samsung Galaxy S26 and its siblings reignited the debate over the "death of truth" in photography?

Computational photography has been the standard for well over a decade, but the S26’s new suite of features joins other phone manufacturers in shifting the needle uncomfortably towards artificial photography, where the phone essentially "imagines" details that were never there.

It all begins with the new ProScaler feature that predicts detail rather than capturing it. We’re all guilty of using software to edit our photos and introduce detail, but we’ve always got the original photo, and we can make informed and, at times, moral decisions about the changes we’re making.

ProScaler is different from this because it not only takes the human out of the decision but also uses AI to deliver you the image that it thinks you want. Take the example of zooming 100x on a building. The sensor might only be able to see a grey smudge, but ProScaler can recognize the object as bricks. It then proceeds to overlay a high-resolution brick texture, but with no guarantees that it is identical to what was present in reality.

Are we taking photos anymore or just capturing a prompt image for AI to then do its work? That’s an interesting thought that I don’t think many people are considering. It might only be small changes to photos at the moment, but it may well become so ubiquitous that the very idea of photo capture becomes redefined.

AI interference continues with the AI ISP feature. This real-time reality correction tool is applied at the level of the image signal processor and applies generative tweaks the moment you press the shutter. This means the processor is moving beyond mere brightness adjustments towards the modification of skin tones, smoothing of textures, and even altering light sources in real-time – all in an attempt to make a “perfect” image.

Is anyone else feeling uncomfortable? By adjusting photos at the point of capture, Samsung is moving dangerously close to assuming the position of truth teller in our lives. I don’t like the idea of it prioritizing aesthetic appeal over factual accuracy or messing with my images before I even see them. It’s one thing for a photo editor to edit a photo; it’s another thing altogether to hand that process over to AI, especially if you don't even have access to the 'original'.

Thankfully, at this moment in time, bypassing these features is as simple as switching to either Pro Mode or Expert RAW. Doing this means the phone will bypass the heavy AI ISP pipeline and ProScaler upscaling, giving you a raw data file (DNG) that represents what the sensor actually saw. It’s not as convenient as snapping simple images, but as far as I’m aware, it’s the only way to kill it off.

For now, truth-seeking photographers might just about have a handle on controlling the output that comes from their smartphones, but for how long? What if we use a phone to capture an image that doesn’t align with the values of the company that manufactured it? Are they going to start stepping in then?

Whatever the future holds, I’ll be trying to find ways to minimize AI interference. Call me a dinosaur, but I think the capturing of truth isn’t something we should easily let go of.

You may also like

Browse the best photo editing software or the best computer mouse for photo editing.

Building on its Best in Show award at the Global Mobile Awards 2026, the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra has now been honored as the Best Photo Smartphone at the Technical Image Press Association (TIPA) World Awards.

The TIPA World Awards 2026 recognize the best new photo and imaging products each year, celebrating innovation in technology, design, and user experience across the industry. The awards are widely regarded as one of the most respected honors in the imaging world.

The winners are decided at TIPA's General Assembly, where leading photography publications – including Digital Camera World – vote on the most impressive launches. Out of 40 categories, Samsung's flagship was named the top camera phone for photography.

200MP image power: the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra

The TIPA highlighted that the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra is a standout example.

"The Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra features one of the most advanced smartphone camera systems available today, with a quad-camera setup, a 200MP main sensor and powerful zoom capabilities. Those ultra-high 200MP resolution images result from utilizing the “wide camera” f/1.4 sensor.

"In all, the S26 Ultra camera sets the new standard in zoom capability and range, low light and night shots, and high-detail photos, making it a good choice within the smartphone field."

Samsung's flagship features a 200MP main, 50MP ultra-wide, 10MP 3x telephoto, and 50MP 5x periscope lens – and excels in zoom versatility. While competitors like Oppo and Vivo may edge ahead in pure image processing, Samsung offers one of the most complete and consistent camera experiences in an Android flagship.

That said, improvements over the previous generation are incremental, and Samsung's image processing can sometimes appear slightly over-enhanced. Even so, the Galaxy S26 Ultra remains a top-tier choice for users who want a powerful, all-in-one smartphone camera system.

You might like...

Browse the best camera phones, the best lenses for iPhone and Android camera phones, and the best smartphone gimbals for iPhones and Android phones.

Looking for competitions to enter? Here are 10 global photo contests now open for entries from April to December.

While Leica has been co-branding Xiaomi phones for some time, its own Leitzphone line has historically been a niche Japan-only curiosity. However, this latest model changes that, becoming the first globally available Leitzphone, or to give it its full title: Leica Leitzphone powered by Xiaomi. Coming from Xiaomi and Leica's longstanding partnership, it pairs Xiaomi’s latest flagship hardware from the Xiaomi 17 Ultra with a more overtly Leica design and user experience.

So what exactly is different from the Xiaomi 17 Ultra I previously reviewed? While the Xiaomi is a Xiaomi flagship with Leica-tuned cameras, the Leitzphone is positioned much more as a Leica-designed phone, with Leica cameras, that runs on Xiaomi hardware. It's a little confusing, but in practical terms, that means the same core internals, screen, battery, and camera hardware, but the Leitzphone has a redesigned exterior, a new rotatable camera control ring, Leica-specific software touches, and a far more obvious Leica identity.

The Xiaomi 17 Ultra was already one of the closest things I’ve used to a genuine compact camera replacement. So the real question with the Leitzphone is not whether the camera hardware is good; I already know it is. The question is whether Leica’s changes make this feel more enjoyable or more desirable to justify the steeper price.

Specifications

Price & Availability

This is where the Leica Leitzphone most clearly separates itself from the Xiaomi 17 Ultra. Leica is selling it globally in a single 16GB/1TB configuration for £1,700 / €1,999 / AU$2,299, which is a fair jump over the Xiaomi’s pricing (£1,299/€1,499 for 16GB+512GB, or £1,499/€1,699 for 16GB+1TB).

Leica is effectively asking you to pay a premium not for radically different hardware, but for design, branding, software, and a some Leica-inspired camera filters. The Xiaomi 17 Ultra already felt premium at its asking price, and the Leitzphone goes beyond that. If you are choosing with your head, the Xiaomi remains the sensible buy, but if you are swayed by the Leica design or that red dot, then the Leitzphone is the only choice.

Design

The main differences between the Leica Leitzphone and the Xiaomi 17 Ultra are concentrated in the exterior design. Leica has given the phone a black fibreglass rear, a knurled metal frame, and its own pared-back Leica styling. The phone also adds a rotatable camera control ring and a more Leica-specific user interface with bespoke looks, sounds, and filters. Beyond that, much of the underlying experience, including the screen, dimensions, and weight, remains very similar.

The Leica Leitzphone is a very handsome device. Leica has leaned into its usual design language of restraint, and the result is a phone that feels very Leica – much more so than the sparkly green Xiaomi I've been sporting for the last few months. The black finish is understated, the textures are premium, and the overall aesthetic feels much closer to a Leica camera than a typical phone. And, perhaps most importantly, the Leitzphone gains the iconic red dot.

The fibreglass rear panel gives the Leitzphone a slightly softer feel in the hand, although the downside is it's an absolute fingerprint magnet. While the knurled metal rail around the outside feels really nice in the hand, it adds a level of grip that I now miss with other phones. Combined, there is a real attempt here to make the phone feel camera-adjacent, not just visually but physically too, and it pays off.

That camera-like idea is reinforced by the rotating camera ring, which Leica has used to bring a little more mechanical interaction into the shooting experience, letting you adjust zoom, exposure settings, and Leica Looks. But, while I appreciate the ambition here, in practice, I found the ring to be more irritating than useful.

The ring just turns far too easily. I would knock it when shooting and zoom in or out, sometimes far enough to jump between cameras. The camera ring can also open the camera with a twist, followed by a quick reverse twist, but with how easily the ring turns, I just kept accidentally opening the camera app while just handling the phone.

Even when I was intentionally trying to use the ring, it felt too unwieldy to do it with one hand, and like I might drop the phone. But too awkward having to use the phone with two hands. Ten out of ten for invention, but the execution needs more work.

The camera bump is also pretty substantial. The Leitzphone is built around some serious camera hardware, and that means it comes with the kind of size you would expect from a device with a huge 1-inch main sensor and a mechanical zoom module. But if you want one of the best camera phones available, some physical bulk comes with the territory. However, the phone still manages to stay relatively lightweight at 223g, which is in line with a lot of other flagships with far less ambitious camera hardware inside.

The display is the same 6.9-inch OLED screen used on the Xiaomi 17 Ultra, which is just about as large as I can manage with one hand. It's a really nice panel. It's bright, sharp, colorful, and exactly what I would want on a flagship phone aimed at photographers and video creators. Images look punchy and detailed, the high refresh rate keeps everything feeling smooth, and there is plenty of brightness for outdoor shooting and playback.

Camera Performance

Like the Xiaomi 17 Ultra, the 50MP 1-inch Light Fusion 1050L main camera remains the hero, and it is still one of the best phone cameras I have used for producing images that feel photographic rather than overly processed, with a depth here that most phone cameras still struggle to match. Sharpness is outstanding, and even using in-sensor cropping for a 2x (46mm equivalent) image, I can’t spot any visible loss of detail.

The Leitzphone is also debuting new LOFIC tech, which expands dynamic range by storing greater charge directly at the pixel level, which essentially means the camera can capture more detail in the high and lows as well as at night – and it really works.

The dynamic range on the main camera is fantastic; skies that could easily be blown out kept their color and definition, and there was a lot of detail held in the shadows. I am continually impressed by the way Leica/Xiaomi has managed the HDR. It's not extreme, and there is also no tacky HDR effect where it looks like the software has just dragged the highlights and shadows sliders; the results look natural and like you might get from a larger sensor digital camera.

The downside? The main camera has noticeably better control over highlights and colors than the other two sensors. Introducing LOFIC on just the main camera has proved to be a bit of a double-edged sword, as on one hand it shows what a powerful development LOFIC actually is, but on the other hand introduces some less-than-ideal inconsistencies between cameras, as the other two cameras just can't match the impressive results, as you can see below. But it makes me very excited to see this technology employed on more of the sensors in future models.

However, with all that said, in isolation, the 200MP 75-100mm periscope telephoto is actually incredibly good. At 75-100mm, the optical zoom is a very useful length for portraits, and the large 1/1.4-inch sensor, along with Leica’s processing, gives it a level of subject isolation that looks, again, like a larger camera and lens. Image quality is superb, and even in low light, the large sensor captures a lot of detail. But as mentioned, if you want the absolute best dynamic range or night shots possible, I'd try to stick to the main lens if possible.

The Leitzphone also introduces a mechanical zoom that physically moves between 75mm and 100mm, the same as a camera lens. However, as clever and technically impressive as this I didn't really find it revolutionary.

The idea of physically moving through 75mm to 100mm in a phone is very cool, and it is technically a better solution than in-sensor cropping, as you use the entire 200MP sensor throughout the whole zoom range. But in practice, it is still a relatively modest zoom range, and I struggled to really notice day-to-day that 25mm made any difference in how I could shoot.

It is nice to have, but it is not a reason to buy the phone on its own. But I admire the ambition, and I do hope Leica and Xiaomi stick with the idea and can extend the range next time around.

The mechanical lens also makes close-up shooting more impaired than the previous model, as it can't focus nearly as close. The Leitzphone can capture very attractive closeish-focus images when you work within the telephoto’s sweet spot, where you can get striking shots with plenty of depth and character, but it's not quite a macro specialist. The ultrawide lens can also shoot macro images, although the perspective is far from ideal for flattering shots.

Superzoom is very impressive, largely because Leica has such a strong base to work from, with the large 200MP telephoto sensor, which means cropped zoom shots hold together well until around 400mm-equivalent.

After that, AI steps in to clean up the images. The AI is decent up until around 60x, although once you push further, the usual smartphone issues do appear, with fine detail starting to look overprocessed and the image losing some natural texture, and the phone inventing some minor details like getting the numbers on the clock all wrong on the example below. But for fun rather than photography, the AI superzoom is incredibly useful.

But what really makes the Leitzphone’s cameras stand out is their photographic character. A lot of that comes from the Leica color profiles, which give JPEGs a more photographic feel straight out of the camera rather than the flat, overly clean look so many phones default to.

You can choose between Leica Vibrant and Leica Authentic. Vibrant is the more conventional option, with punchier color and a brighter, more immediate rendering of the scene. However, Authentic is the one I keep coming back to. Color is a little more restrained, with a more muted saturation, and it adds a subtle vignette and a slightly moodier contrast that gives images a more cinematic feel.

The Leitzphone also adds two more with profiles made to match the classic Leica M9 and M3 cameras – both of which produce really beautiful photos, almost enough to convince you that these photos weren’t taken on a phone.

Alongside those profiles, there are a lot of filters, with Leica’s black-and-white and film-inspired looks genuinely some of the best I have used on a phone. I have used plenty of filters and color modes on phone cameras over the years, but Leica’s still feel among the most convincing.

If all you want is a neutral point-and-shoot result, an iPhone or Pixel may still be the more obvious choice. But for photographers who care about mood, tone, and a stronger visual identity in their images, the Leitzphone offers something more distinctive than almost anything else on the market.

Phone Performance

Because the Leitzphone shares its core platform with the Xiaomi 17 Ultra, which I rated so highly, performance is predictably excellent. The flagship Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, paired here with 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage, has more than enough power for any photography-centric workflow you are likely to throw at it, from shooting and editing images to handling demanding video capture and rendering.

The battery is also unchanged with a 6,000mAh cell. In use, though, I still wouldn’t call battery life class-leading. It is good and comfortably usable for a day away from a charger, but I wasn't getting nearly enough life out of it as I do from many rivals like the Oppo Find X9 Pro or the OnePlus 15, with their colossal batteries.

Thankfully, the Leitzphone charges incredibly quickly. There is 90W wired plus 50W wireless charging – if you have a Xiaomi Hypercharge compatible charger – although PD charging is also surprisingly quick. I went from empty to around 40% in 15 minutes, and around 70% in half an hour.

Support for Content Credentials is interesting, with so many AI photo-editing tools built into the phone. It's not unexpected, as Leica is a major proponent of the Content Authenticity Initiative and has pioneered Content Credentials in camera, like the Leica M11-P.

However, Leica says the phone can embed cryptographically secured metadata via a dedicated security chip in line with C2PA standards, echoing what it has already done with the Leica M11-P. That will not matter to everyone, but for editorial, documentary, and authenticity-conscious users its essential for proving your images are accurate and untouched by AI.

The general Android experience is still underpinned by Xiaomi's operating system, but Leica has skinned parts of the experience with new fonts, app icons, and widgets. On the surface, it feels distinct enough from Xiaomi's OS, but under the hood, it is not entirely separate from it.

If you look beyond the Leica polish, then this is the same experience as any Xiaomi phone. That said, HyperOS is very good, although it still has limiting frustrations with things like UI scaling and app management compared to slicker OS like Oppo's ColorOS or Google's Pixel OS.

Final Verdict

Strip away the Leica design and, yes, this is still the Xiaomi 17 Ultra I already rated so highly. But Leica has done enough here to change the feel of the device. The fibreglass body, knurled frame, rotating camera ring, Leica-inspired interface, and excellent Leica Looks give it a stronger sense of Leica identity and make it feel more like a photographic tool than just another camera-centric Android flagship.

The 1-inch main camera is superb, and still clearly the star of the show, especially thanks to the way LOFIC helps it handle highlights and color in difficult lighting. The telephoto is ambitious and very good, but it has a few inconsistencies with the main camera, and the 75-100mm mechanical zoom remains impressive as an engineering feat, but 25mm is limited in practice.

The real sticking point is price. Leica has taken the brilliant Xiaomi phone and definitely made it look more desirable, but also more expensive. For most people, the Xiaomi 17 Ultra will be the more rational buy. But rationality has never been the whole point of Leica.

Alternatives

Oppo’s Ultra phones have been on a steady march toward replacing a camera for a while now. I will often grab my Find X8 Ultra on the way out of the house instead of my Fujifilm X100VI.

Ultras aren't your everyday flagships. From the outset, Oppo's Ultra series has been clearly aimed at photographers, videographers, and enthusiasts who care more about optics, character, and control. Yes, a novice can still take beautiful images with these phones, but it's a phone designed for someone who will really appreciate what the cameras can do.

The Find X9 Ultra is the latest in the line, arriving not only looking like the compact camera version of the Hasselblad X2D II, but with a new-generation Hasselblad Master Camera system inside.

That means a 200MP main camera, a 200MP 3x telephoto, a 50MP 10x optical camera, pro-level video recording features, an optional camera grip, and a 300mm teleconverter to make this the most ambitious camera phone I have ever used. And, after using it, I think that ambition has paid off – Oppo has just built the best camera phone you can buy right now.

Specifications

Price & Availability

The Oppo Find X9 Ultra is launching in the UK for £1,449 for the 12GB+512GB version, with the 16GB+1TB exclusive to China alongside the Arctic White colorway. Currently there is no confirmed price for the Hasselblad Explorer Kit with the telephoto adapter.

Design

The Find X9 Ultra is one of the coolest-looking phones I’ve used in a long time. In Europe, the phone comes in two colors, although the hero is Tundra Umber, which is the version I have. It looks like a mini Hasselblad X2D camera, and I absolutely love it.

Oppo has really nailed the details, from the vegan leather two-tone back that feels soft and warm in the hand, to the horizontally aligned Oppo and Hasselblad branding. The camera housing has a knurled ring that echoes a lens focus ring, and the orange accent on the camera button adds just enough playful contrast without ruining the look. Overall finish is just really premium, and it's a phone I genuinely enjoy picking up and using.

I am much less convinced by Canyon Orange. It does look better in person than in the press shots, but next to Tundra Umber, it loses all the understated Hasselblad chic. It is bold, bright, and far more attention-grabbing, which I'm sure some people will like, but for me, only one of these colorways really looks like a photography tool.

In the hand, this is a big, hefty flagship at 235-236g, which is around 30g heavier than a Samsung S26 Ultra, but if you want this sort of camera capabilities, you roll with the punches.

Like most modern flagships, the X9 Ultra has IP66, IP68, and IP69 ratings for dust and water resistance, plus Armour Shield drop-protection architecture. Despite a few minor drops and being thrown in and out of bags while I'm travelling, I've found that after a couple of weeks, there's no obvious wear, especially on the soft leather back. There is also a factory-applied screen protector, love them or hate them, but this has already taken the hit on a few minor scratches, so I'm grateful for it.

The usual power and volume buttons are present, alongside Oppo’s customizable action button, which replaced the old alert slider a few generations ago and can be assigned to functions like alerts, flashlight, Do Not Disturb, AI features, and more.

There is also Oppo’s dedicated camera button, finished in orange on the Tundra model, and I like the visual pop. The camera button supports swiping to zoom, and a half-press for focus and exposure lock, but I still found myself preferring the on-screen controls most of the time, as, for me, they are just far faster and easier to use, as I find camera buttons so fiddly. It also does not work in Portrait mode, which is my default orientation.

The Find X9 Ultra is also launching alongside an optional Hasselblad Earth Explorer Kit – also inspired by the Hasselblad X2D – and no, there is no orange version, thank god. The case adds a small grip, a two-stage shutter button, a zoom rocker, and interchangeable rings for 67mm filters or Oppo’s 300mm teleconverter.

It feels really well-made and really premium, and it really does make the whole package feel more like a compact camera. It's the best-looking and feeling camera photography kit I have used, and it puts Vivo's slightly plastic-y kit to shame. The design matches the phone itself, with the same vegan leather across the back, while the adapter rings are all solid metal, which feel very sturdy.

The zoom rocker works well, and the shutter button is excellent, but I still wish Oppo had either added an exposure compensation dial or let me remap the zoom control for exposure compensation, which, for me, feels far more useful in fast shooting. Oppo might have the prettiest photography case, but Xiaomi's and Vivo's are still the more practical.

There is also an optional 300mm teleconverter. It is a big lens, it's all-metal with 16 glass elements in 11 groups, including four ED elements, and it mounts to the optional camera case. Frustratingly, the lens mount is different from the teleconverter for the Find X9 Pro, so the two lenses/phones are not interchangeable. I really hope that, going forward, Oppo has thought about a standardized lens mount, as buying a new lens for each new phone is going to get expensive and wasteful.

The lens is not discreet in the slightest, still, I actually prefer the design here to some rival approaches because the all-black finish is a little more discreet than the shinier silver alternatives we are now seeing elsewhere. But the lens is big and bulky enough that once you have it attached, the phone basically becomes a real camera rather than anything you would casually slip into a pocket.

The display is another stunning panel. It has a 6.82-inch QHD+ LTPO AMOLED panel with a 1-144Hz refresh rate, 510ppi, up to 1800 nits full-screen brightness, and 3600 nits peak HDR brightness.

In use, it is superb, with sharp details and clear text, and the refresh rate also keeps everything smooth when switching in and out of apps or scrubbing video. Colors are fantastic – bright and rich. Oppo gives some control over screen colors with Standard, Natural, and Vivid modes, and I found Natural the most pleasing for accurate photo and video work, though I still wish Oppo offered a little more granular control over saturation, as I think my perfect level is somewhere between Natural and Vivid.

I didn't struggle to use the screen outdoors, even in bright sunshine. The feature I find more useful is that it can also drop to 1 nit for comfortable nighttime viewing, helping with late-night eye strain, or without disturbing others in the room. Oppo has also added 2160Hz PWM dimming for better eye health, plus circular polarization for better visibility with polarized sunglasses.

Camera Performance

The Find X9 Ultra’s camera setup is kind of outrageous. Five cameras and no filler. Too many phones still have one genuinely great camera, and then some others to tick boxes.

You get a 50MP ultrawide with a 1/1.95-inch sensor, a 200MP 1/1.12-inch main camera, a 200MP 3x telephoto with a 1/1.28-inch sensor, a 50MP 10x telephoto, and a new True Color camera for more accurate color information. Oppo calls this the Hasselblad Master Camera System, and the focal length coverage stretches from 14mm to 230mm optically, while sensor crops extend that even further to a whopping 460mm equivalent. And for once, I didn’t really care which lens I was using, rather than sticking stubbornly to the main sensor.

Main camera

The main camera is built around a 200MP Sony LYT-901 sensor measuring 1/1.12-inch, which is the largest 200MP sensor yet used in a phone. It’s a size reduction from the 50MP 1-inch sensor in the previous Ultra, but it is now a higher resolution for combining pixels, and paired with a wider f/1.5 aperture, Oppo claims gives it the same light intake. The main sensor also benefits from Oppo’s Real-Time Triple Exposure HDR processing, which combines several photos into one to improve dynamic range.

In use, it is a very very good main camera. Detail is excellent, dynamic range is strong, and colors in the standard mode are generally very accurate. I suspect some users may think the default color is a little understated, but for my taste, it is pretty spot on.

The default processing in regular photo mode can push sharpening a bit too far, and in some scenes, the HDR had a slightly overdone look. It is not bad by any stretch, and it will probably please plenty of people who just want “perfect-looking” images straight from the camera, but it is not my preferred rendering style. Coming off the back of testing the Xiaomi 17 Ultra, I think Xiaomi’s LOFIC sensor tech just produces some cleaner HDR that looks more natural rather than processed.

That said, Oppo’s answer to this issue is also one of the best reasons to buy the phone at all: Hasselblad Master mode. I absolutely love it. This strips away a lot of the more obvious phone-style processing and gives you images with more natural sharpness, more believable shadow handling, and a more camera-like overall feel. I found it especially effective at night, where the standard mode can lean too hard on processing, while Master mode gives you deeper shadows and more natural highlights.

3x telephoto

If I had to pick just one camera on the X9 Ultra, it would be the 3x telephoto. It's a 200MP periscope camera with a 70mm equivalent focal length, a huge 1/1.28-inch sensor, and an f/2.2 aperture. In other words, it is absurdly over-specced by the standards of most phone telephotos, with a bigger sensor than other flagships’ main camera.

Image quality at 70mm is absolutely superb. Photos are super sharp, and there is good falloff around the subject, and images have a genuinely photographic quality to them that makes them feel closer to a proper camera than most phone telephoto shots do. This is the lens I kept gravitating back to because it looks so good, and because 70mm is such a useful focal length for portraits, detail shots, travel scenes, and more compressed street images.

It also crops brilliantly. Because of the 200MP resolution, Oppo can offer a 6x in-sensor crop that still produces 50MP images with what it describes as optical quality. In good light, I found there was no perceptible dip in quality. Once you get into darker conditions, the crop starts to look a little grainier, with some detail becoming slightly oversharpened. But even then, it remains incredibly usable, and I was genuinely shocked by how much detail I could pull from very low light at a relatively long focal length. For me, this is easily one of the best telephoto cameras I have used on any phone.

Macro

Macro performance is superb; you can get in as close as 15cm. The camera isn't quite enough to pull out microscopic details; you'll still need a proper macro lens and some focus stacking, but for most things you'll want to shoot day to day, you can get some excellent macro shots.

10x telephoto

As the world’s first 50MP 10x camera, it's by far the most interesting camera of the X9 Ultra because it is just such an ambitious focal length to squeeze into this size, while still giving it a decent-sized sensor. It is a 50MP 230mm-equivalent telephoto with an f/3.5 aperture, a 1/2.75-inch sensor, and sensor-shift stabilization.

And there is an obvious jump in quality compared to normal digital zoom, and even once you start cropping further, at 460mm equivalent focal lengths, I was getting such remarkable results. I am also so impressed by how capable this camera is in lower light. It’s not the largest sensor in the system, but it held up much better than I anticipated.

The 10x just wipes the floor with some other mainstream zooms. Take a look below at the Oppo versus the Google Pixel 10 Pro XL, which really shows the limits of computational photography versus good hardware.

Ultrawide

The ultrawide is probably the least special camera in the lineup, but that says more about the strength of the other lenses than any weaknesses. It uses a 50MP sensor with autofocus, and in good light, it is very good indeed. It captures a strong amount of detail, colors remain nicely in line with the rest of the system, and it performs better at night than I expected. That said, it is still the camera where I saw the most noise, the most oversharpening, and the longest exposures compared to the others.

Master Mode

Hasselblad Master mode is easily my favorite feature on the phone. Beyond the more natural default rendering, Oppo has also expanded it with a selection of new filters, which it has referred to as film simulations. They are not really simulations in the Fujifilm sense, as they are not based on Fujifilm’s library of film emulations as a starting point to build on. They are closer to a photo LUT, but they do offer a level of deeper customization or tonal control I love. I particularly like Oppo’s take on Portra. It is not going to fool anybody into thinking they are looking at film, but it gives images a pleasant warmth and softness in the shadows that makes for very nice results.

I still think Oppo could go further. There is no way to shoot a stylized JPG and keep a RAW backup at the same time; you have to shoot in RAW and then convert it to a JPG after, which just adds an unnecessary step to the process, and is annoying if I want a fast, stylized shot for social media but also a clean file to work on later. There also seems to be a slight film grain applied to some of Oppo’s presets, but I can’t find anywhere in the custom settings to do this. Maybe I am just seeing the film grain when it’s not there, but I’d love to see the app update to add this, as it's a key element of emulating film photos.

Finally, this goes for all photo modes, but as Master Mode is the most “Pro” mode, I would love finer control over the autofocus reticle, as it’s just one size, which is reasonably big, so quite often when trying to focus through a crowded scene, the autofocus couldn’t pick out the exact thing I was tapping on. You can switch to manual focus, but I feel a single point autofocus option is the easiest solution.

Hasselblad Teleconverter

I love this teleconverter. There is such an obvious quality improvement over digital zoom, and the results can look genuinely photographic in a way that I don’t think you could tell that this was a phone and not a dedicated camera.

The problem is that Oppo separates it into its own mode, which means you cannot use it in Master mode, so you can’t use any of your presets. That is just such a frustrating limitation on a device this good. I want a simple toggle to enable the lens from within the regular shooting modes, which is how it is done on Vivo phones. I am hoping that this can be fixed with a software update, rather than having to wait for the next generation.

Video

Oppo has gone properly big on video in the X9 Ultra. Every rear and front camera supports 4K 60p Dolby Vision, while the main and 3x cameras can also shoot 4K 120p Dolby Vision and 8K 30p. Oppo has also added O-Log 2, ACES support, real-time LUT preview, and the ability to burn in LUTs from standard .cube files.

Video quality is fantastic, autofocus is quick, and video stabilization is very good. There are a few minor quirks. I can’t find anywhere in the video app that tells me what microphone I am using, so plugging in a receiver, there is no indication in the video app that it's actually using my external mic to record. The autofocus is also just a little bit too jumpy. I can manually lock on to subjects, but I would love to see more subject detection and tracking similar to a digital camera to make the whole process a little easier.

Phone Performance

Like most 2026 flagships, the Find X9 Ultra is powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, and in day-to-day use, it feels incredibly speedy, and I did not notice a single stutter in normal use. More importantly, I had no issue editing 4K 120p or 8K footage shot on the phone in CapCut, and exports were quick. For photos, snapping 200MP images in the Hasselblad high-res mode was far quicker than on the X9 Pro, and there was none of the mosaic style capturing requiring me to hold the camera steady.

Thermals also seem reasonably well managed, with Oppo saying the phone has a new Encapsulated Thermal Unit, vapor chamber cooling, and graphite layers designed to deal with heat spikes. I am not a gamer, but for tasks like capturing 8K and 4K120 video, while the phone got a little warm, I certainly did not run into alarming heat problems in my use.

The battery isn't quite the monster squeezed into the Find X9 Pro, with a slightly smaller 7050mAh cell. Although the silicon-carbon battery is pretty enormous for a flagship camera phone, and in my own use, I was getting around a day of heavy shooting, and a day and a half of mixed use from a charge.

Wired charging tops out at 100W, wireless at 50W, and while you need the right SuperVOOC or AirVOOC charger to hit the headline figures, you can still get 55W charging with USB-PD, and I managed to charge to around 34% in 15 minutes and 63% in 30 minutes from empty, which is enough to relieve any battery anxiety.

The software is ColorOS 16 based on Android 16, and I am a big fan, and, in fact, it is my favorite Android skin. It looks clean, feels fluid, and adds genuinely useful features without becoming irritating. This time around, Oppo has added a cleaner lock screen, which can hide notifications in a notification drawer at the bottom of the screen, removing them as a distraction. Oppo is also promising that Apple Airdrop support via Google's QuickShare will be coming soon.

The software has Oppo's usual suite of AI photo editing tools. There is nothing new on the Ultra that we haven't seen before, but then Oppo already had one of the most well-rounded groups of tools. There are options to AI erasers, reflection removal, perfect shot to change expressions or open blinking eyes, enhance clarity, or change the lighting in portraits.

The tools generally work well, or at least as well as I have seen gen-AI on other devices. For small fixes with easy-to-replicate backgrounds, the results are usually very good, but more complicated generations do tend to trip it up, and occasionally, there are some interesting hallucinations. The less gen-AI heavy tools are better, the reflection removal tool is usually pretty solid, and the unblur has saved my shaky hands a couple of times.

Final Verdict

For me, the Oppo Find X9 Ultra is hands down the best camera phone I’ve used yet. Does a phone need four cameras? It depends on who you ask, but now that I have spent a few weeks with the phone, my resounding answer is yes. The 3x camera is phenomenal, the 10x camera zoom range is incredibly useful, and the quality far exceeds any digital zoom. Hasselblad Master mode is also a standout; it finally gives me exactly the kind of less-processed, more camera-like images with custom film recipes I've been wanting from a flagship phone. Add in superb video, excellent battery life, a gorgeous screen, and a design in Tundra Umber that I absolutely love, and Oppo has made my perfect camera phone.

It is not completely flawless. Standard mode can still look too processed for my taste, the teleconverter integration is more limited than it should be, and there are still some minor settings tweaks I'd love to see. But if your priority is having the most capable, most versatile, most photography-focused phone possible, the Find X9 Ultra is exceptionally hard to argue against.

Alternatives

If you ever been wondering what it would look like if Hasselblad made a compact camera, then you're in luck, as Oppo has just officially launched the Find X9 Ultra, with looks inspired by the legendary Hasselblad X2D camera, and one of the most ambitious camera systems we have ever seen on a phone. Although, the best news – Oppo is finally taking its Ultra phone global.

Of course, every brand says its latest Ultra device is a “camera in your pocket”, but the Find X9 Ultra backs that up with a frankly ludicrous camera spec sheet with a total of five different cameras on the back covering 14-460mm with optical quality, and secondary sensors larger than you’d find as the main sensor in most mainstream flagships.

Starting with the big headline five-camera system that Oppo is calling its New-Generation Hasselblad Master Camera System. Designed in collaboration with Hasselblad, the hardware includes a 200MP main camera, a 200MP 3x telephoto, a 50MP ultra-wide, a dedicated multispectral True Color camera, and, most excitingly of all, a 50MP 10x optical telephoto.

Oppo’s made this possible with what it calls a Quintuple Prism Reflection Periscope Structure, which folds the light path five times in order to fit a 10x optical zoom lens into the camera bump roughly the same size as the previous generation. The company says this is the world’s first 50MP 10x optical telephoto, which pairs a 1/2.75-inch sensor with an f/3.5 aperture, alongside sensor-shift optical stabilization for keeping things steady at massive zoom ranges. Oppo also says the camera can use in-sensor cropping to achieve 20x (460mm-equivalent) optical-quality zoom, thanks to the high-resolution sensor, which should make this one of the best long-range zoom systems we have seen on a smartphone to date.

The main camera uses a 200MP Sony LYTIA 901 1/1.12-inch sensor with an f/1.5 aperture, which Oppo says delivers light intake comparable to the previous generation’s 1-inch main sensor. The camera has a native 23mm-equivalent focal length, but can also crop in to 2x without losing quality, doubling as a nifty-fifty. There is also Real-Time Triple Exposure support and its own HDR pipeline designed to maintain high dynamic range and compete with developments like the Xiaomi 17 Ultra’s LOFIC sensor tech, which I raved about in my review.

The 200MP 3x (70mm-equivalent) telephoto uses a large 1/1.28-inch sensor with a fast f/2.2 aperture and a 15cm minimum focus distance, letting it double as a telemacro camera. Oppo says this sensor can also crop to deliver 6x (139mm) shots with 50MP of native detail without leaning heavily on digital zoom.

And rounding out the system for cameras you can actually use is a 50MP ultra-wide camera with autofocus, a 1/1.95-inch sensor, and a fast f/2.0 aperture, which, according to Oppo, captures 56% more light than the previous generation.

Finally, the X9 Ultra debuts the second generation of Oppo’s True Color camera, which is a dedicated multispectral sensor designed to improve white balance and color accuracy across photos, motion photos, and, for the first time, video.

The X9 Ultra also comes with an updated version of Hasselblad Master Mode, which is designed to avoid the over-processed look that plagues a lot of smartphone photography, with Oppo promising a more natural rendering, less aggressive tone mapping, and absolutely no AI. It also supports 50MP JPEG MAX and 50MP RAW MAX across multiple focal lengths, along with nine film simulations and custom presets.

Video also gets a major push, with Find X9 Ultra supporting 4K 60fps Dolby Vision HDR recording across the zoom range from 0.6x to 30x, while the main and 3x telephoto cameras can also capture 4K 120fps and 8K 30fps video. There is a new O-Log2 profile, ACES support for professional color workflows, and even 3D LUT support with real-time preview and LUT burn-in. Oppo even made a dedicated video rig for the X9 Ultra with handles and a cooling fan – although, sadly, this is unlikely to make its way outside of China.

An accessory that is coming to global markets is the optional Hasselblad Earth Explorer Kit, including a compact camera-style Explorer Case finished to match the Hasselblad X2D styling of the X9 Ultra, with a two-stage shutter button for half-press focus, and a physical dial for smoother zoom control, and quick switching between modes, as well as an adapter ring to mount standard 67mm filters.

There is a brand new 300mm Explorer Teleconverter, a full-metal add-on lens designed to attach to the 3x telephoto camera and extend it to a 300mm equivalent focal length, which is around 13x optical zoom, or can go up to 600mm optical quality using in-sensor cropping. These telephoto adapters are popping up everywhere now, but having tested quite a few of them, I will say they are no gimmick.

Outside of the cameras, the Find X9 Ultra is every bit the expected flagship. It has a 6.82-inch 144Hz QHD+ AMOLED display, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset, up to 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage, and a massive 7,050mAh silicon-carbon battery with 100W wired and 50W wireless charging. It also arrives with the latest ColorOS 16, with improvements to silence the clutter on your lock screen and upcoming AirDrop support, and for durability, IP66, IP68, and IP69 ratings.

The Oppo Find X9 Ultra will be available from May 8 in the UK, Europe, and most global markets with the exception of North America. 

As you’d expect from one of the most ambitious camera phones ever the price is at a premium. Although, starting at £1,449 for 12GB+512GB it's not a big a shock as I expected. The price of the Hasselblad Explorer kit with the telephoto lens is to be confirmed.

You might also like...

Check out more of the best camera phones or the best Android phones for photography in our guides.

I’ve long been a fan of Vivo’s phones for their Zeiss co-engineered cameras, so the launch of the Vivo X300 Ultra has me very excited. This is the first time Vivo has given one of its Ultra-series imaging flagships a proper international debut, even if “global” still, frustratingly, stops short of the US.

As you’d expect from an Ultra phone, the X300 Ultra puts photography front and center. Vivo is calling its camera system the Zeiss Master Lenses Collection, built around a triple-prime setup with 85mm, 35mm, and 14mm equivalent focal lengths. Which immediately makes this phone feel a little different from rivals, as instead of the usual 24mm-first approach, Vivo is leaning into focal lengths that will look more familiar to photographers.

The standout for me is the 35mm Zeiss Documentary Camera. That is a noticeably narrower field of view than the 24mm-equivalent main cameras found on most flagship phones, but 35mm is one of photography’s most loved focal lengths for street, travel, and documentary work. Vivo says it is designed to offer a more natural, human-eye-like perspective, and it pairs that lens with Sony’s LYTIA 901 sensor in a large 1/1.12-inch format, with support for 200MP direct output. It still does not quite match the sheer sensor size of some 1-inch rivals, but on paper, it looks like one of the most interesting main cameras on any phone right now.

The 85mm Zeiss Gimbal-Grade APO Telephoto Camera also sounds incredible. It uses a 200MP sensor, with Zeiss APO standards, and adds a Zeiss T* coating plus Super Blue Glass to reduce flare and ghosting. Vivo is also promising 3-degree gimbal-level OIS and up to 60fps AF tracking in Snapshot mode, which could make this one of the most capable telephoto cameras on a phone yet for shooting fast-moving subjects like wildlife, sports, or concerts.

Rounding out the rear cameras is a 14mm Zeiss ultra-wide, which Vivo describes as an “industry-leading main-camera-grade ultra wide-angle” camera. I am not usually the biggest ultra-wide shooter, but this is one area where phone makers still too often ask users to accept obvious compromises in image quality. Vivo is clearly pitching this as something more serious.

And, as we’ve started to see from a few recent Chinese launches, Vivo isn’t stopping with the cameras built into the phone. The X300 Ultra supports two optional telephoto adapters: a new 400mm equivalent Vivo Zeiss Telephoto Extender Gen 2 Ultra and a lighter second-generation 200mm equivalent extender. The 400mm option is the more eye-catching of the two, with Vivo calling it a breakthrough in magnification, optical performance, stabilization, and structure. It is co-engineered with Zeiss, uses a Kepler-inspired optical design, and supports 200MP optical output. Meanwhile, the 200mm extender has slimmed down from 210g to 153g, which at least makes the whole idea a little more practical.

These external lenses still sound slightly wild, but they are also one of the few genuinely fresh ideas in smartphone photography at the moment. After seeing more brands experiment with modular long-lens add-ons, I am increasingly convinced they are more than a gimmick.

The X300 Ultra is also pitching itself as a video powerhouse. The X300 Ultra supports 4K 120p 10-bit Log video and 4K 120p Dolby Vision video across all rear cameras, which is the sort of spec sheet that will immediately catch the attention of serious creators. There is also a new Pro Video mode, support for custom 3D LUT monitoring while shooting in Log, and compatibility with ACES workflows, which makes the X300 Ultra feel more deliberately aimed at professional video users than most phones.

Vivo has gone even further with an optional SmallRig Pro Video Rig Kit, which includes an expandable cage, cold shoe mounts, quick-release ports, dual-hand grips, physical shutter and zoom controls, plus a cooling fan for longer recording sessions. It is undeniably niche, but it shows Vivo is thinking about building a broader ecosystem around the phone for people who actually want to shoot seriously with it.

Vivo is also introducing an all-new color science system, built around a 5MP multispectral sensor with 12 color channels and an upgraded flicker sensor. The company claims this helps it deliver more accurate color and tonal rendering, while also offering film-inspired color styles and deeper manual control for both stills and video.

Away from the cameras, the rest of the phone reads like a flagship. The X300 Ultra is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, alongside Vivo’s VS1+ imaging chip, and backed by a substantial 6600mAh battery with 100W wired and 40W wireless charging. It also gets a 6.82-inch 2K ZEISS Master Color display with up to 4,500 nits local peak brightness, plus IP68 and IP69 durability.

The Vivo X300 Ultra will be available in 16GB/512GB and 16GB/1TB configurations, and comes in black and a two-tone white mabled or soft green finish. On paper, at least, this looks like one of the most ambitious camera phones of the year, and one that should be on the wishlist of any serious phoneographer.

Spend any time around the latest big-name devices, and it is easy to find yourself staring at four-figure prices as if they are somehow reasonable. Apple’s current iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max line starts from $1,099, while Samsung’s Galaxy S26 Ultra starts at $1,299, and even the "flagship killers" from OnePlus have crept up to $899 for the OnePlus 15.

Against that backdrop, the Nubia Z80 Ultra landing at $799 suddenly feels less like an awkward question aimed at the rest of the market.

Because this is not some stripped-back “flagship killer” in the old sense, the Nubia Z80 Ultra still packs a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip, a 6.85-inch 144Hz OLED display, a 7,200mAh battery with 80W wired and 80W wireless charging, plus IP68 and IP69 protection. On the camera side, it also has three top sensors: a 50MP 35mm main camera, a 50MP ultra-wide, and a 64MP telephoto, along with a dual-stage physical button that feels very deliberately aimed at photography fans.

The big brands can still charge a premium partly because they sell marketing polish, a wider ecosystem of devices, decades of built-up trust, and, often, more cool-factor. But the Z80 Ultra does make it harder to pretend that every $1,200 flagship is expensive purely because cutting-edge hardware costs that much. Sometimes it is just because brands know they can get away with it.

What I like about the Nubia Z80 Ultra is that it exposes how inflated the top of the market has become. If a phone can offer this kind of display, battery, performance, and camera ambition for this amount of money, then a lot of so-called premium pricing elsewhere starts to look less like necessity and more like positioning.

Maybe the Nubia Z80 Ultra is not proof that all flagships are overpriced. But it is a very good reminder that many of them probably are.

You can buy the Nubia Z80 Ultra from Nubia's official US store.

You might also like...

Check out more of the best camera phones and best Android phones for photography in our guides

It's funny, really. We photographers love being given tactile ways to interact with our cameras. We adore physical dials, dedicated buttons and satisfying clicks. Yet at the same time, our pockets are filled with featureless glass slabs. There is an irony there that a new phone, the Unihertz Titan 2 Elite, quietly exposes.

The concept is simple: a compact Android smartphone with a full physical QWERTY keyboard built into the lower half, much as BlackBerry did at its peak. That might sound like nostalgia dressed up as innovation. But spend a moment with what this thing can actually do, and the appeal starts to make real sense.

What the Titan 2 Elite offers

To start with, unlike the BlackBerrys of old, the Titan 2 Elite does have a decent camera. Specifically, a dual 50MP rear camera system, primary plus telephoto, covering a broad shooting range and up to 20x zoom.

Those are solid mid-range numbers, and the combination covers most situations a travelling photographer actually encounters. The Elite Pro version adds optical image stabilization to the main camera, which is the one to consider if you are serious about low-light or video.

Where the phone really earns its keep, though, is in the workflow that follows the shot. Captioning images, responding to clients on location, writing up notes before they evaporate: all of these are slow and error-prone on a flat touchscreen. The Titan 2 Elite is built to solve exactly that.

There's also a dedicated programmable physical button on the side that launches the camera instantly, which is precisely the kind of hardware shortcut camera manufacturers keep trying (and mostly failing) to bring back to phones.

Why this matters

Unihertz has been producing physical-keyboard Androids since 2019, and the Titan 2 Elite is its eleventh Kickstarter campaign. The launch drew genuine attention at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, and the campaign has since raised more than $2.2 million from nearly 5,000 backers. This is not a fringe pursuit.

The timing is spot on, too. The Clicks keyboard accessory for iPhones has generated considerable online discussion, but the Reddit community following the Titan 2 Elite has noted one telling difference: Unihertz arrived at MWC with a fully working device, while rivals showed renders. For a community that has been burned by crowdfunding promises before, that distinction matters.

Impressions from the MWC booth are cautiously positive. The phone is more compact than its predecessor, which some users welcome and others don't. The orange colour option, while striking in photographs, drew mixed reactions from people who handled it, with several noting the keycaps were harder to read than on the black version. The black model looks and feels more considered.

The AMOLED display is a meaningful upgrade on the previous model's LCD, and it gets bright enough to check images comfortably in sunlight. Battery life should cover a working day.

What do they cost?

Kickstarter early-bird pricing starts at $349, with a standard price of $397. The Pro version is $479 during the campaign. The base model ships in June; the Pro follows in October. And while crowdfunding campaigns always carry risk for the buyer, Unihertz has successfully shipped 10 previous devices through the same platform.

Overall, for photographers who type as much as they shoot, and who quietly mourn the large-scale disappearance of physical controls from mainstream devices, the Titan 2 Elite will be worth checking out.

The GoPro action camera has been a staple of the outdoor photography and videography scenes for quite some time, enabling bungee jumpers, shark divers and volcano spelunkers to document their exploits without needing to lug large camera bodies and lenses around with them. Being able to edit this footage in the field is a huge advantage, as waiting until you get home can try the patience of even the most hardened extreme sports enthusiast, and there's nothing more important than getting that footage out on the internet as soon as possible.

Asus’ original PX13 was well-received when it arrived back in 2024, and this GoPro edition absolutely supercharges it, pumping the specs sky high to create a compact workstation laptop that can tear through video and Photoshop tasks and potentially beat the latest MacBook Pros at their own game. Will it be one of the best laptops for video editing? The signs are all good.

Specifications

Price & Availability

This is a laptop that will set you back $3,999 or £2,999. That’s an awful lot for something so small and specialised, and you can get powerful gaming laptops or a MacBook Pro with an 18-core M5 Pro CPU and 64GB of RAM for the same sort of cash. You do get a lot of processing power (and a lot of RAM) for your money, however, and it may well be an essential buy for a group of videographers looking for an editing solution they can take with them wherever they go.

Design

It’s unclear how much input GoPro had in the design of the PX13 GoPro Edition, but the camera company’s footprint is light. It comes in a strap-fastened case that’s both GoPro and ProArt branded, and there's also a softer carrying case with the ProArt logo on it. On the laptop itself, you won’t find GoPro apart from one logo on the back and another on the F8 key, which, when pressed, will summon the GoPro Player software for playback, trimming, and export of files from all the company’s cameras. The keyboard backlight is also a soft cyan colour rather than the usual white, which also ties in with the company’s identity.

There are some grooves cut into the back of the laptop’s lid, but that’s all that’s new compared to the original PX13 - it’s still a black rectangle, and all the other changes are on the inside. This is a good thing, because Asus’ portable workstation is well-equipped, with a pair of USB4 ports that are good for hooking up to all kinds of fast external storage, docks, and external screens, and the OLED touchscreen is nice and bright, though a little bit shiny and reflective if you’re working near strong artificial lights. It’s a shame it only has a 60Hz refresh rate, as GoPro’s cameras are capable of producing much more than that, and it would be nice to play it back, but that’s probably what the full-size HDMI 2.1 port is for, connecting to a large external screen with a higher maximum framerate and playing back on that. 

Particularly notable is the trackpad, which has a section at the top left that acts as a dial. Older ProArt laptops actually had a physical control here, but now we get a touch-sensitive circle you can twiddle your finger on to adjust brush sizes, zoom in and out, move sliders around in something like Lightroom, or just about anything else you can think of, customised in the Asus software.

Otherwise, this is a well built 13in laptop. It’s not trying to be a thin and light model, so it weighs a bit more than something like a MacBook Air, and can feel a bit chunky as a result. This is easily forgivable, however, when you consider how uncompromising this mobile workstation is in terms of its performance. It feels remarkably small if you’re carrying it about, however, especially if you’re used to larger 15- and 16-inch models.

Performance

Asus hasn’t held back with its choice of components in the PC13 GoPro Edition. The 16-core AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 is an absolute sledgehammer, with a powerful integrated GPU that’s almost as good as some discrete Nvidia chips and beats Apple’s efforts in benchmark tests. 

In the Geekbench 6 benchmark, which works both the CPU and GPU hard with a range of tests, the PX13 GoPro edition scores well. Its Ryzen AI Max chip is up there with Intel’s Core Ultra 9, and is just behind Apple’s M5 in the multi-core CPU score, though it falls behind a bit when just a single core is used.

The GPU, which is especially powerful for an integrated model, posts a score that’s not too far away from that of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4060, a lower mid-range card from 2023 that’s still relevant today (you could certainly play games on the PX13 GoPro Edition if you wanted to, though more recent GeForce cards will outclass it), and handily beats the graphics capabilities of the base-model M5. The extra graphics cores in the Pro and Max models of the M5 may well propel them past this score, but they’ll also increase the cost of a Mac using them.

For video editors, the inclusion of that GPU will be the most interesting thing about the laptop. Scrubbing through multi-track timelines and complex sequences remains fluid and responsive, while export times will also be cut as GPU effects take less time to render. Having 128GB of RAM will help speed up complex workflows too, though at a time when the cost of memory is being pushed up by the demands of AI data centres, having this amount looks like a serious luxury. It means an editor can comfortably run Premiere Pro, After Effects, and maybe even Photoshop simultaneously alongside browsers, and even carry out on-device AI model processing, without needing to close and re-open apps because they’re slowing the PC down.

Battery life, while improved over the original PX13, which used an Nvidia GPU and therefore sucked more power, tops out at only about six and a half hours. That’s fine, and will get you through many edit sessions, but doesn’t come close to that offered by laptops like the MacBook Pro or Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 15 Aura.

Final Verdict

The choices Asus and GoPro have made for the PX13 GoPro edition make a lot of sense if you’re building a mobile workstation for photo and video editing. The enormous amount of RAM, backed by strong CPU and GPU performance, makes it a smooth and responsive laptop to use in editing apps, and also as a general-purpose PC for whatever else you need to do. The high level of connectivity means you can set it up with external SSDs and monitors at the heart of a desktop setup only to whip it away when you need to head into the field for filming, and there's real value in that. The major downside of the PX13 GoPro Edition is its high price, though this has become par for the course for highly specced laptops, especially those with so much RAM.

Alternatives

I recently reviewed the Nubia Z80 Ultra, and at a starting price of just £579/€759/A$1,311, I was astonished by the quality of the camera hardware. The phone packs a flagship-level triple camera array on its rear, including a 35mm equivalent main camera with a 1/1.3-inch sensor, an ultrawide with a massive 1/1.55-inch sensor, and a 1/2-inch 70mm telephoto.

These days, it feels like no Chinese flagship camera phone is complete without a dedicated photography kit that turns it into a compact camera. We've seen it with the Xiaomi 17 Ultra, the Vivo X300 Pro, and most recently, the Oppo Find X9 Pro. Despite being a budget-friendly option, the Nubia is following suit, and the brand sells an optional Retro Photography Kit to make this slab a little more ergonomic.

The Retro Photography Kit sells for slightly over one hundred pounds in the UK, so it's a sizable investment, especially when you consider that's one-sixth of the cost of the phone. I wanted to find out if it was worthwhile, so I've been playing with it for the past week or so.

The Hardware

Upon opening the package, I was surprised by how many pieces came included in this kit. It's a very modular design, and you can easily switch from a minimal rig to something more substantial.

The core of the kit is essentially a phone case. It pulls apart into three sections; there's a plastic and vegan leather middle section, which needs to be attached to the phone first, and two aluminium end caps that affix on either side.

With just the phone case attached, there isn't any added utility other than a couple of lanyard attachment points, but it certainly makes the phone look and feel a lot more like a vintage camera. The ergonomics are almost certainly worse in this configuration, but it looks awesome. It brings the Sigma BF to mind.

The case has metal buttons, including a nice textured red shutter button, but they're passive. What I mean by that is the buttons are just poking through to the buttons on the actual phone. If you want some added functionality, you'll need to attach the Neo Bar.

The Neo Bar connects to the top of the case with some sturdy hooks, and it adds a tactile two-stage shutter button, a zoom rocker, two ratcheting control dials, and a cold shoe mount. All the parts that you'll touch are made from aluminium, and they're extremely satisfying to use.

Unlike most of the other photography kits I've tried, the Neo Bar connects to the phone over Bluetooth. There are positives and negatives to this decision. The upside is that it leaves the phone's USB port free, so you can use it for charging or connecting an external microphone. You can also use the Neo Bar as a wireless remote, although the form factor doesn't readily lend itself to that.

The main downside is that you'll need to remember to charge it from time to time. There's also likely some latency between the buttons and the phone, but it was quick enough that I couldn't really notice.

By default, the shutter button and zoom rocker work as you'd expect them to. The right dial adjusts the exposure compensation, and the left dial switches between colour profiles. However, these controls are very customisable in the camera app, and you can use them for anything from switching aspect ratio to focus and sharpness level adjustment.

The next modular piece is a leather-effect half-case with an integrated grip. It really completes the vintage look; it's just like the protective casing my grandfather kept on his analogue SLR cameras when I was a kid. This piece is mostly ergonomic, but it does add a 1/4-20 thread for use with a tripod. It's awkwardly positioned under the handle, though, so your phone will look a little lopsided when mounted.

The kit includes an adapter to use 67mm filters with the main sensor, but sadly, it blocks all the other cameras when it's in place. The main lens is also compatible with Fotorgear lenses, but I don't have any to try out.

Finally, there's a nice neck strap made from a thick rope-like material, and an additional cold shoe mount that can be used without the Neo Bar in place.

What's it like to use?

As a lifelong photographer, the experience of shooting with smartphones can be frustrating, but the reality is that's what I do most often. Cameras are all about ergonomics and quick access to your most needed settings; in many ways, the touchscreen interface of a phone is the polar opposite.

Photography kits like this one will always be a niche proposition, but I don't think they're a gimmick; there's genuine utility to a setup like this. It's not something you'll bring with you every day, but if you're taking your phone out with the express purpose of shooting photos, you might find you have a better time with a photography grip attached.

I found that with the Z80 Ultra dangling around my neck, I took more photos than usual, as I didn't need to pull it out of my pocket. Being able to quickly launch the camera with the shutter button meant I never missed a candid shot, either.

I also found myself using the different picture profiles and filters more often, as I can just quickly rotate a dial to switch to the next mode. Of course, if you're more of a control freak, you could set these to manually control things like the ISO and shutter speed, and you'll have a much more pleasant experience than trying to do the same with clumsy touchscreen settings.

When it comes to ergonomics, this kit isn't my favourite. It's unusually tall, and if you have smaller hands, reaching the shutter button could be a real chore. The grip is quite shallow, too, so one-handed use without a strap feels quite precarious.

Aesthetically, though, the Nubia Retro Kit stands out above the rest. It's a real head turner, and it's no accident that this kit makes the phone resemble a Leica M7. As soon as you pull this out, people are going to want to know what it is. Whether that's a good or a bad thing will likely depend on your personality type.

Should I get one?

The Retro Photography Kit for the Z80 Ultra is by no means a necessity. You can do all the same things without the kit attached, but it's much more fun with it on. It's a tactile and satisfying experience that a touchscreen just can't compete with.

Plus, you can experiment with photographic filters or even attach external lenses. I wouldn't imagine the lens quality will be on par with Vivo's Zeiss Teleconverter or Oppo's Hasselblad extender, but I did stumble across an adapter in my research - so you might actually be able to combine the two kits.

At around £100, the kit doesn't come cheap, but considering the quality of the components, it seems like a perfectly fair price. Whether it's worth spending that much on an accessory for a £579 phone is completely up to you.

You might also like...

Looking to up your mobile photography? Check out our guide to the best camera phones and the best Android phones for photography.

It’s no secret that we were big fans of the Oppo Find X8 Ultra. With its large sensors, refined Hasselblad color science, and incredible focal lengths, the Find X8 Ultra only fell short of a coveted five-star rating because it wasn’t available globally.

In his review, Gareth Bevan called it his “favorite camera phone last year”, but with the imminent launch of its successor, the Find X9 Ultra, and based on these new teased specs, I think he might have a new champion.

Zhou Shijie, product manager at Oppo, shared on Weibo how they’ve managed to cram a 10x optical quality camera – a focal length you'd usually need a teleconverter for – inside the latest X9 Ultra. This announcement could well be the beginning of the end for the humble compact camera.

World's first phone camera technology

According to Zhou Shijie's posts, the Find X9 Ultra will feature Oppo's most advanced imaging system to date, and with a continued partnership with master Swedish camera makers Hasselblad, as Oppo looks to continue to define and disrupt the phone-camera market.

The new 50MP 10x optical telephoto lens boasts a five-reflection prism that has enabled OPPO to shrink the module length from 41mm to a super-thin 29mm, all the while maintaining a huge 230mm focal length.

Oppo has an incredible track record of delivering telephoto innovations, so these new developments come as no surprise. In 2017, it showcased a prototype with a 5x dual camera zoom system. In 2023, it released the Find X6 Pro, featuring a large-sensor periscope lens. And in 2024, it pioneered an inverted periscope lens, achieving a breakthrough in slimness.

The latest innovation delivers native 10x optical zoom, 20x optical quality zoom, and up to 120x digital zoom. This world-first five-prism setup is made possible by nanoscale prism cutting and an air diaphragm, triple AOA active calibration, and a customized JNL 50MP Fusion Sensor. Oppo has also “optimized the microlens and color filter, significantly reducing color shading and ensuring accurate and consistent colors.”

With the OPPO Find X9 Ultra having a planned global release on April 20, 2026, we’ll only have to wait just a little longer to witness, firsthand, just how this new 10x lens performs, but when we do, and it finally lands on European shores, I wouldn’t be surprised if it's finally awarded it's five star rating.

You might also like...

Interested in upping your mobile photography? For more of the best camera phones, check out our guide. And check out the best add-on lenses for smartphones that are already on sale

Nothing has built its reputation by making phones that feel different from the samey slabs, and the Phone (4a) Pro continues that, but with a more mature design while not losing its sense of fun. But this mid-ranger is up against some very strong competition from phones like the Pixel 10a, Samsung Galaxy A57 5G and iPhone 17e, so it needs to offer more than looks alone.

This is the second model the duo of new devices in Nothing’s more affordable (a)-series launched earlier this month, and sits just above the regular Phone (4a). The (4a) Pro offers a more premium metal build, a new Sony main camera, superior zoom processing, the Glyph Matrix from the flagship Phone (3), and a more powerful Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 chip.

Specifications

Price & Availability

The Nothing Phone (4a) Pro starts at $499 / €479 / £499 for the 8GB + 128GB version, while the 12GB + 256GB model rises to $599 / €549 / £549 / AU$949. The 8GB + 256GB configuration will be exclusive to India only.

That pricing puts it right into one of the busiest and most competitive parts of the phone market, where it faces off against dozens of devices from Chinese brands like Xiaomi, Vivo, Oppo, and Realme, as well as big hitters like the Pixel 10a, Samsung Galaxy A57 5G, and iPhone 17e. The (4a) Pro also shares a fair amount of DNA with the regular Phone (4a).

With so many devices sharing the same processor and camera setups, it's becoming increasingly more difficult to separate these devices on hardware alone; however, the metal build, NothingOS, and distinctive Glyph Matrix do help the (4a) Pro stand out a little more against the competition, where I think choice now comes more down more than ever to the look of a device rather than its spec sheet.

Design

The (4a) Pro brings a fairly substantial change in design direction for Nothing phones, with the (4a) Pro stepping away from its signature full transparent-back look to move to an “aircraft-grade” aluminum unibody. While this does sound like every other phone on the market, Nothing has still kept a distinctly Nothing twist. While the rear panel is mostly solid metal, the camera island still keeps that industrial, exposed internals aesthetic. The design feels like a clash of two competing ideas, but somehow they come together really well, and the result, I think, is that the Phone (4a) Pro is one of the best-looking phones around right now.

That is obviously subjective, and I think it will still have a bit of a polarising appeal, but it is also a little more restrained than models, which I actually think is a good thing. Its phone equivalent of the Headphones (1). If this is the direction Nothing is taking its design language, I’m all for it.

I have the Silver version, which I think looks fantastic, especially with the industrial details around the camera block. Black is the safer, more understated option, while Pink is fresh and fun. I do think the Pink finish would have looked better with a color-matched camera island rather than the Silver one, and the mismatch makes it feel slightly less considered than the other two options, but that is a small complaint in the grand scheme of things.

Then there is the Glyph Matrix, which I absolutely love, although maybe part of that is just that I am a 90s kid and it taps into some Tamagotchi nostalgia. The Glyph Matrix is made up of 137 mini-LEDs, and it can display practical information such as timers, a battery indicator, a digital clock, and custom contact notifications. It is the sort of thing that sounds like a novelty, but actually living with it for a few days, I did come to appreciate that every time I put the phone face down on a desk and still got useful information without picking it up. Next to the Glyph Matrix, there is also a tiny red recording indicator, which is invaluable if you are filming yourself and cannot easily see the front screen.

Button layout is the same as previous Nothing phones. On the right, you have separate volume buttons and the power button, which can be long-pressed to summon Gemini, while a double press opens the camera. On the left-hand side, there is Nothing’s Essential Key, which is slightly shinier and more rounded than the other buttons to visually and physically stand apart. This button lets you quickly capture screenshots, voice notes, and other bits into the Essential Space (but more on that later).

The display is great for a phone at this price. It is a 6.83-inch AMOLED with a 1260 x 2800 resolution, 144Hz refresh rate, and a quoted peak brightness of 5,000 nits. There is also 2,160Hz PWM dimming for sensitive eyes. In use, the screen looks sharp, colorful, and bright. I did find it a little reflective, but it is easily good enough for viewing or editing photos and video outdoors.

The screen is protected with Gorilla Glass 7i on the front alongside a factory-applied screen protector. For durability, the (4a) Pro also comes with an IP65 water resistance rating, so it can survive a dip in fresh water and low-pressure water jets. Nothing also says the (4a) Pro is 42% more bend-resistant than the previous model, although I have resisted the urge to test this.

Camera Performance

Whether you love or hate the new design, the cameras are the main reason to pay closer attention to the Phone (4a) Pro over the regular Phone (4a). The headline upgrade is the superior Sony LYT-700C main camera, which replaces the Samsung sensor used in the cheaper model. On paper, both sit at the same 50MP resolution, 1/1.56-inch size, and f/1.88 aperture, but the Pro’s sensor is more capable, especially in lower light, where it produced cleaner results that are genuinely pretty impressive.

In the day, the main camera performs well. Images are sharp; if you pixel peep, detail isn’t as strong as flagships, but the (4a) Pro avoids attempting to fix this with too much oversharpening, which can just make the situation worse. The 50MP sensor also allows for a 2x in-sensor crop, which, unlike some images I captured on the regular (4a), looks as good as a 1x image.

The ultrawide is not bad, but it's the weakest of the three cameras, though that is hardly unusual, especially at this price. It is still decent enough, especially in good light, but it does not have the same sharpness or consistency as the main and telephoto cameras.

The telephoto is a 50MP periscope with a 3.5x optical zoom equivalent to 80mm, and is backed by OIS, and is the same sensor as found on the Phone (4a), but the more premium Snapdragon 7 chip allegedly improves the imaging pipeline, which enables better processing and the headline 140x zoom.

The telephoto is usually always my favourite lens on a phone as it's the best for capturing details, and tighter framing, which fits my style perfectly, and the (4a) Pro’s is the one I gravitated to again here as it's just a really good one. Images from the telephoto came out clean and sharp. In the daytime, I can’t say that I see any noticeable difference between this and the regular Phone (4a), but at night, the shots on the (4a) Pro do look slightly cleaner and suffer from less motion blur.

You also get a 7x in-sensor zoom, which produced some solid photos with only a very minor loss of detail if I pinch in, but generally, you wouldn’t notice. Up to around 10x, I still found the zoom performance pretty good, which is enough reach for most real-world situations.

Where the phone falls over is at the long end of the zoom. Nothing advertises up to 140x ultra zoom, but I personally wouldn’t ever really stray over 30x if I wanted anything I might actually use. While AI-assisted super zoom does visibly improve on the raw capture, the results look very synthetic and overprocessed. At extreme zoom levels, the images get that unmistakable AI-painted look that just gives me the ick.

Overall, I would also say the consistency across all three cameras is good, but I did see some white balance and color discrepancies when switching between the cameras, especially in blue skies.

And on the subject of color, if I am being picky, while colors generally look pretty good, they feel generally more muted and not as exciting as other brands. Take a look below at the same photo taken on the (4a) Pro and the Oppo Find N6. I personally much prefer Oppo’s more accurate and vibrant colors.

HDR balance is good, and I like that Nothing tends not to overdo the deep-blue that some rivals use to force a more dramatic look, but one ongoing frustration is the preview-to-capture mismatch.

Like the regular Phone (4a), the Pro does not always show an accurate live preview of what HDR processing is about to do, so the final image can look noticeably different from what I thought I was taking. Other brands are better at showing something close to the final image in the viewfinder, and if you are trying to be intentional with your exposure, just trying to imagine it is quite annoying.

My absolute favorite Nothing camera feature, though, is the ability to add LUTs, which are custom photographic styles you can save as camera presets. You can create your own, import them via QR code, or browse community-made options online.

These are essentially the same idea as Fujifilm’s uber-popular film recipes, and you can do anything from tweaking colors, contrast, white balance, and adding film grain for ready-to-share images without editing.

Macro is handled by the telephoto rather than the ultrawide, so you get a much more flattering perspective. Sharpness is excellent across the frame, but especially in the centre. Nothing does employ a little less artificial falloff (blur) than some other brands, I think plenty of brands really overdo it, but I would like to see a little more from Nothing, just to make the photos look a little more “proper” camera, rather than a phone.

Phone Performance

The Phone (4a) Pro runs on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 7 Gen 4, which is a reasonable step up over the non-Pro (4a) model with better multi-core and graphics performance. And in day-to-day use, the phone feels quick and responsive. App launches are snappy, and the UI is smooth. Speaking of, Nothing OS 4.1 remains one of my favorite Android skins, built on Android 16; it is one of the cleanest Android skins, and not far off the stock Pixel experience. But NothingOS still manages to stand apart enough with Nothing’s fonts, icons, and widgets. Nothing promises three years of Android updates and six years of security patches, which is respectable, even if some rivals now go further.

However, Nothing’s AI features are a bit more mixed for me. Nothing’s Essential System (Essential Space, Essential Search, and the Essential Key) is a clever idea. You can capture voice notes, screenshots, and thoughts on the fly, and the AI will analyse them to pull out useful information you can use as well as make it searchable. And there is some real usefulness there, although it's just not really how I interact with AI. I find it easier to drop all my assets in a single conversion with Gemini or ChatGPT. However, Essential Space does just generally stay out of the way, so if you don’t want to use it, it doesn’t hassle you to.

Nothing has also added some AI editing tools to the Phone (4a) Pro through the Gallery app, including an AI Pedestrian Remover for removing unwanted people and a Reflection Remover, for well, removing reflections. These two tools fall pretty far behind the bevvy of options found on other devices, but they are two fairly useful ones.

The pedestrian removal tool is fairly hit and miss; sometimes it just won't find people in a shot, and there is currently no way to manually draw around them. The generation behind the people is also fine, but quite obviously AI if you pinch in.

The reflection remover is the one I’d actually keep coming back to. It feels far more useful than pedestrian removal, as it's a much less "gen-AI", and I regularly shoot cute things behind glass in store windows. I wouldn’t call it flawless, but it's pretty good.

The (4a) Pro handles photo and video workloads well enough. Lightroom and CapCut both run better here than they do on the regular Phone (4a), and the faster chip clearly helps unlock more grunt, but this is not an editing powerhouse. In CapCut, I noticed some sluggishness when scrubbing the timeline, and exports are nowhere near the speed of flagship Snapdragon Elite phones. If you are the kind of person who just does the odd quick social edit or tweaks a few photos on the move, the Phone (4a) Pro is absolutely fine, but if you are regularly editing clips, you might want to invest in a phone with more power under the hood.

Battery life is decent without being a standout. The global version has a 5,080mAh battery, which is pretty average by current Android standards, though still in the same ballpark as Google and Samsung. In my testing, it comfortably lasted a full day of medium to fairly heavy use, but I usually ended the evening in power saver mode by the evening. My lab tests put it at 14 hours and 12 minutes in a mixed-use workload of productivity, video playback, video editing, and photo editing, which is solid enough but not exceptional.

The phone supports up to 50W wired charging. In Europe, there is no charger in the box, although other territories might differ, but you can achieve these speeds with most PD chargers, which most of us probably already have several of. These speeds are behind some proprietary charging solutions, but, in my testing, the (4a) Pro reached 33% in 15 minutes and 59% in 30 minutes, which is quick enough to make topping up painless, and the phone reached full in slightly over an hour. There is also 7.5W reverse wired charging for topping up accessories, though notably no wireless charging.

Final Verdict

The Nothing (4a) Pro is my favorite looking Nothing Phone yet, and one of the best looking phones I have used in some time. The design is excellent, it's mature but still a little playful. While it's polarising, I do really like the gimmicky Glyph Matrix, the front display is bright and sharp, and the camera system is genuinely good for the money, especially if you value having a proper telephoto camera at this price. I also love what Nothing is doing with custom LUTs as camera presets, which, for me, push the (4a) Pro out in front as one of the most personalisable camera experiences you can get at this price.

That said, the (4a) Pro isn’t perfect. The natural image rendering could use a bit more personality, the HDR preview still does not always match the final shot, and the AI zoom becomes AI mush well before Nothing’s headline 140x figure. Likewise, the Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 is strong enough for everyday use, but it does not turn the Phone (4a) Pro into a serious editing machine. But still, I think Nothing has made a very appealing mid-range camera phone, and easy to recommend to photographers on a budget.

Alternatives

Oppo has spent the last few generations steadily refining its book-style foldables, focused on making foldables thinner and lighter. The Oppo Find N6 is the latest model in the company’s Find N line, and Oppo’s big pitch here is a new “Zero-Feel Crease”, which promises to make the inner screen crease – a long-held criticism of folding phones – a thing of the past.

There are also the usual new phone expectations. Oppo is upping performance, adding new productivity features, and enhancing the Hasselblad-branded camera system that borrows from the company’s recent camera-focused flagships.

From my perspective, the Find N6 sits in an interesting place. It is clearly competing with other premium foldables such as the Honor Magic V-series and Samsung Galaxy Z Fold for productivity, but foldables have always been behind the best bar-style camera phones when it comes to photography. Oppo might be edging ever closer to the perfect design for its foldables, but can it also produce a foldable camera phone that is not a compromise?

Specifications

Price & Availability

Another year, another huge disappointment for international Oppo/foldable fans. The N series is again not officially available in Europe, the UK, or the US. You can import the phone thanks to its global ROM, and you will have full access to everything Google, but as ever, you likely forfeit any warranty, and overseas imports may not work with your network carrier.

In China, the phone will cost ¥10,099 for the 16GB+512GB version. Direct conversions from Chinese prices are never quite accurate, but that works out as around $1,500 / £1,200 / €1,300. Although I'd expect it to be more expensive if launched on Western shores and comparable to the Honor Magic V6 (which will at least launch in Europe).

Design

Oppo really nailed the design with last year's Find N5, with one of the thinnest and lightest foldables yet, and honestly, I don't know how they even improve on that. So perhaps unsurprisingly, the Find N6 doesn't really rock the boat. At just 8.93mm folded and 225g, it's still incredibly slim and light for a book-style foldable, to the point that, in my hand, it feels only barely different from a normal flagship bar phone. I have said this before about the recent Oppo and Honor foldables, but it is worth repeating: we are now at the point where folding phones just feel like normal phones, and I would be perfectly happy carrying this as my daily driver even if I only opened the inner screen occasionally.

Oppo’s headline design feature is the so-called Zero-Feel Crease, and while that name oversells things slightly, there is a marked improvement on the last model. The crease is remarkably shallow, genuinely on par with the best I have seen from rivals, and I do not really know how much shallower foldables can get from here. This could genuinely be close to peak crease.

Still, it is not magic. You can see it when the screen is off and light catches it the right way, and you can still feel it under your finger. I found it especially noticeable when using the stylus, where the slight unevenness over the crease interrupts the smoothness of writing just enough to remind you that this is still a folding display. I don't want to downplay it; it is much better than the previous model, even if not as transformationally so as marketing might have you believe.

Visually, Oppo has stayed close to the previous generation. The camera sits in the familiar centered “Cosmos Ring” rather than moving to the squarer island look of the Find X9 Pro. Despite Oppo claiming the centered layout keeps the phone stable on a table, when open and laid flat, there is still a decent amount of wobble, which especially makes stylus use a little more uneven than ideal.

There is a side-mounted fingerprint reader in the power button, which is fast and accurate, even if it does require a little relearning if, like me, you have muscle memory for in-display scanners. Face unlock is present too, but like most single-camera solutions (except the Pixel’s), it's not secure enough for sensitive apps like banking and locked folders.

The biggest difference is the replacement of the old Alert Slider with the Snap Key, Oppo’s take on the action button. This doesn't really come as a surprise, as Oppo has been steadily removing it from all its recent models, but I do miss the tactile charm of a proper alert slider. However, I will concede that the Snap Key is objectively far more useful; it can launch the camera, toggle alerts, turn on the torch, translate text, capture content to Oppo’s AI-driven Mind Space, and more.

Both screens are strong too, although similar, if not the same, as those found on last year's model. The 6.62-inch cover display and 8.12-inch inner panel are sharp, bright, and colorful. Both displays have a good white balance out of the box, but you can also tweak this to your liking in the settings.

However, I said this before, and it's a general complaint with the current slate of foldables, the almost square ratio of the inner screen just isn't quite right. For multitasking two apps side by side, that shape works fine. However, for video, you end up with a viewing area that is not dramatically bigger than the outer screen once black bars are factored in. Similarly, with apps like Lightroom, menus can end up on top of images rather than alongside them.

Similar small but wider displays like the iPad Mini just handle layouts better. Oppo has done some work here with more flexible floating windows, which are very useful, but do make the content smaller, and it’s not the big screen app experience I want from an inner screen. I'd love to see a Fold N7 with a shorter but wider inner display, and it is exactly this kind of idea that makes tri-fold phones seem increasingly sensible.

Finally, durability is still a key concern for folding phones. Oppo says the Find N6 uses a second-generation titanium hinge that has been tested by TÜV Rhineland for a million folds, which is definitely way more than you'll do in the lifetime of the device. The frame is reinforced 7000-series aluminum, with an aircraft-grade fiber rear panel, and nanocrystal cover glass. The Find N6 gets an IP56, IP58, and IP59 certification, which is impressive for a foldable, though it still trails the latest Honor Magic V6's IP68/69 rating.

Camera Performance

For me personally, the Find N6 has big expectations to live up to, because Oppo’s recent camera phones have been excellent, and the Find X9 Pro was my phone of the year in 2025.

On paper, the setup on the Find N6 is a slight improvement on the N5. There is a new 200MP 21mm main camera – up from 50MP on the N6 – a 50MP 70mm telephoto, and the 8MP ultrawide is replaced by a 50MP 15mm sensor. The N6 also benefits for the first time in the series from Oppo’s True Color Camera, a multispectral sensor designed to improve white balance accuracy.

Sensor sizes are broadly similar to the previous model, with the main upgrade being the jump in resolution on the primary and ultrawide cameras, which should improve both the quality of the in-sensor zoom between 1x and 3x, but also handle low light better with more room to combine pixels and do computational wizardry.

I'm going to caveat this with: for a foldable phone. But for a foldable phone, the Find N6 cameras are excellent. They can't quite compete with the best camera phones, but this phone isn't a 1-inch sensor beast or packing multiple complex periscopes, but for day-to-day snapshots, they are fantastic.

The look of Oppo images remains one of the brand’s biggest strengths. I am a big fan of the color science from the Oppo Lumo Engine and Hasselblad collaboration; colors are balanced and natural, but with just enough saturation to make scenes lively without tipping into gaudy. The added True Color Camera seems to help here too, delivering usually quite dependable white balance, although I did see some noticeable color shifts on occasion between the three lenses.

HDR is another plus. It does not crush highlights or over-lift shadows, which makes images feel a lot more natural, rather than other brands that aggressively process images.

There is not a huge amount of fall-off in the background, so images can look slightly flatter and more two-dimensional than those from phones with larger sensors and wider apertures. That doesn't make the results bad, but it does stop them from having an almost camera-like rendering shown by models like the Xiaomi 17 Ultra.

Low-light performance squeezes a lot out of relatively modest sensor sizes. Night shots retain a lot of detail, with a strong balance between the highlights and shadows. Again, like daytime HDR, Oppo does a good job here of flattening images while keeping them natural and without overprocessing them. Although I saw a little more light blooming in some shots than is ideal.

The N6 also relies more heavily on long-exposure night processing than rivals with bigger sensors and faster apertures. Not a bad thing, just something to be aware of if you have unsteady hands or like to capture fast-moving subjects in low light.

When it comes to zoom, the telephoto camera is the only sensor that remains the same as last time out. That said, the 3x (70mm equivalent) telephoto is excellent, and Oppo’s in-sensor crop gives very good results out to around 6x (effectively 139mm), and even 10x remains genuinely usable if your subject is still and doesn't have too much intricate detail.

Up to about 30x, the superzoom still holds together surprisingly well, especially on buildings, where Oppo strikes a good balance between detail enhancement and realism, and crucially, it does not seem to descend into obviously fabricated generative AI.

The limitations arrive with more complex subjects and at the far end of the zoom range. Animals, birds and people are less consistent, and 120x is well, unusable. That sounds harsh, but it is fair; max zoom figures on phones are still mostly marketing.

Finally, macro performance is excellent. Oppo uses the 3x camera for macro, which gives a more flattering, more natural working perspective than the ultrawide macro systems found on some rivals.

Detail is strong, especially in the center of the frame, though the depth of field can become a little too narrow and there is some minor oversharpening. Even so, this is the kind of macro mode I actually want to use.

Phone Performance

The Oppo Find N6 is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, though in this case Oppo is using a custom 7-core version tailored to the thermal limits of an ultra-thin foldable. On paper, that might sound like a compromise, but in actual use, I never really found it one.

Day-to-day performance was excellent, and creative tasks in Lightroom and CapCut ran quickly, exports were fast, and there was no annoying lag or stutter when scrubbing through a video timeline. With the inner screen being incredibly useful for photo and video work, the performance more than keeps up if you want to do some light editing on the move.

Battery life is a small but welcome step up. The N6 sports a 6000mAh silicon-carbon battery, which is 400mAh up on the previous generation. It might not sound huge, but in my lab conditions battery test, the Find N6 got a result of 16 hours 20 minutes, a healthy two-hour improvement on the previous model. Although it does pale in comparison to bar-phones, with the 19 hours 43 minutes of the reigning champ Oppo Find X9 Pro.

But in practical terms, the phone lasted me around a day to a day and a half of mid to heavy use. It easily survived a twelve-hour flight from London to Hong Kong while watching video, messaging, and typing up this very review with around 20% battery remaining when I got to my hotel.

If you do run low, charging is incredibly quick, while Oppo rates it at 80W wired and 50W wireless with its SuperVOOC chargers, the N6 also supports up to 55W over PD. In my testing, PD charging got it from empty to 29% in 15 minutes and 59% in 30 minutes, which is quick enough that a top-up while I shower is enough before I leave the house in the morning.

ColorOS remains my favorite Android skin. It's clean, fast, and visually slick. Settings are easy to navigate, customization is present but not exhausting, and Oppo’s overall design language feels polished. The only minor downside is that there is still some pre-installed bloat, and Oppo duplicates most system apps with its own. Those apps are actually very good, but if you are deeply committed to Google’s ecosystem, you may find yourself uninstalling quite a few of them.

It's 2026, so of course, AI features are front and centre here. Oppo’s Photos app also remains a genuinely good alternative to Google Photos, and Oppo has one of the best mobile suites of AI image tools around, including face enhancement, object removal, reflection removal, portrait glow, unblur, and more.

These tools are generally very effective, even if they are not always fully convincing. You can definitely get away with some AI tweaks for social media, but if you can zoom in or really study an image, it's not that hard to spot the AI at work.

Below, top to bottom: AI 4K Detail Enhance, AI Eraser, and AI Reflection Removal

Oppo also has an AI repository called Mind Space for collecting screenshots, which the AI then aims to pull useful information from. Mind Space itself sounds clever, though it's just not the way I personally interact with AI, and I find simply throwing information into Gemini or ChatGPT still feels like a more natural way to get what I want out of AI helpers.

Finally, there is an optional stylus. This isn't the first Find N phone with a stylus, but this is the slickest implementation yet. The stylus slots into a case on the rear of the phone that diverts the phone's wireless reverse charging to automatically keep the pen topped up. It’s nowhere near as discreet as Samsung’s S-Pen in the Ultra, but good luck finding a spare millimeter of internal space in the N6 for a pen.

The stylus features a click-button shortcut for screenshots, notes, and text capture. The stylus is a little short for longer writing or drawing sessions, but it works well for quick note-taking. The most entertaining feature is its ability to turn doodles into finished AI artwork; hardly essential, but definitely fun. There are also productivity tricks like turning circled notes into charts, though workplace AI tools such as Gemini or Copilot will usually do a better job.

Final Verdict

The Oppo Find N6 is my new favourite foldable. Last year’s model felt like Oppo’s first foldable flagship that was slim and light enough to actually replace my bar phone, and the N6 doubles down on that, as well as improves on a few of last year's weaknesses with enhanced cameras and a nearly invisible (in most lights) crease.

Phone performance is excellent, powering through creative tasks, with a battery that lasts all day, and often a little more. I also continue to think Oppo makes some of the nicest smartphone software around. The cameras are also impressive enough that I never felt regret that I was just carrying a foldable. Oppo’s continued Hasselblad partnership and Lumo image engine produce really nice colors with balanced HDR and a good amount of detail, especially from the new 200MP sensor.

Still, the Find N6 does not quite rewrite the rules. The crease may be shallow, but it is not gone. The inner display is great for multitasking, but not ideal for every app. And while the cameras are very good, the best camera-focused bar phones still offer better results. Then there is the biggest practical issue of all: if you live in the UK, Europe, or the US, this is not officially on sale for you anyway.

Alternatives

Oppo has unveiled the Find N6, its latest flagship foldable that promises to tackle one of the category’s oldest complaints – the inner screen crease – as well as improving on the Hasselblad camera system to challenge the best foldable cameras.

Starting with the cameras, the new phone packs a triple camera system co-designed with Hasselblad, led by a 200MP 23mm main camera, alongside a 50MP 70mm (3x) periscope telephoto camera and a 50MP 15mm ultra-wide. There is also the debut of Oppo’s dedicated True Color Camera for the first time in a foldable. The True Colour Camera adds a spectral sensor designed to improve white balance and color accuracy.

Other improvements to the cameras include better tele-macro shooting, with the telephoto camera able to focus from as close as 10cm. While the ultra-wide sensor now gathers 50% more light than the previous generation.

The N6 is also leaning hard into its renewed Hasselblad partnership. The Find N6 includes flagship Hasselblad features like Hasselblad Portrait Mode, XPAN mode for cinematic 65:24 stills, as well as Hasselblad Master Mode with extensive manual controls and color tuned to mimic the Hasselblad X2D.

When it comes to video, all three rear cameras support 4K 60fps Dolby Vision, while the main camera goes a step further with 4K 120fps Dolby Vision and Log capture for more advanced grading workflows.

Beyond the cameras, the Find N6 has a 6.62-inch cover display and an 8.12-inch inner screen, with both panels rated at up to 1,800 nits brightness. The device is among the thinnest book-style foldables on the market, although it is marginally beaten by the Honor Magic V6, and it is backed by IP56, IP58, and IP59 dust and water resistance ratings, which again, lag a little behind the Honor’s IP68 and IP69 ratings.

The crease, or lack thereof, is the big story here. Oppo says its second-generation Titanium Flexion Hinge and new Auto-Smoothing Flex Glass reduce hinge height variance to 0.05mm (basically it's shallower) and improve long-term crease resistance significantly compared with the previous model. Diligent device testers at TÜV Rheinland have certified the device's crease and durability across up to 600,000 fold cycles.

Inside, the Find N6 is powered by a 7-core version of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 platform alongside a 6,000mAh silicon-carbon battery, which is the largest yet in the Find N series, with 400mAh more capacity than the N5. The N6 can be recharged with up to 80W wired and 50W wireless charging using Oppo's SuperVOOC tech, or up to 55W wired with PD-certified chargers.

Oppo has also redesigned its multitasking, with a new Free-Flow Window system, which can run up to four apps at once in floating windows in a desktop-style environment. There is also a new Oppo AI Pen with 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity and features including quick notes, global annotation, and AI-assisted tools that can turn sketches into artwork or handwritten notes into editable charts.

The Oppo Find N6 will be available in two colors – Stellar Titanium and Blossom Orange – the latter of which is a softer version of Apple’s signature color. The phone will launch in Asia and Australia starting from March 20, although much to the disappointment of Western foldable/Oppo fans, there are currently no plans for a wider launch. Currently only Chinese pricing is available, with the Find N6 costing from ¥9999 (~$1450/£1090) 12GB+256GB version tup to ¥11999 (~$1742/£1308)for 16GB+1TB.

You might also like...

Check out more on the best camera phones and best Android phones for photography.

I’ve been reading about a supposed backlash towards the recent announcement that Arri and Honor will collaborate on the forthcoming Robot Phone to bring cinema-grade color science to smartphones.

Aside from some initial reaction videos on YouTube, I haven’t found any opinions online remotely close to what I’d call a backlash, but I do have some thoughts of my own.

While I certainly don’t feel angry towards the announcement, I am struggling to see how the Robot Phone will “revolutionize” cinematography as claimed.

What seems more likely is that Arri and Honor have pumped a whole lot of money into marketing this “revolutionary” device, but this won’t stop it from being a flop.

Don’t get me wrong, the Robot Phone is an exciting prospect. The camera is infused with Arri color science, widely considered the creme de la creme for superior highlight roll-off and natural color reproduction.

Add in the behemoth 200MP sensor and AI-powered subject tracking, and mount it all on a three-axis gimbal that folds into the body of the phone, and on paper you’ve got some serious filmmaking capabilities.

But looking at the phone, it takes about two seconds to start picking it apart. Firstly, there’s the mechanical arm joining the camera to the phone.

While this is made of titanium alloy and “super steel” – which is just marketing speak for modern alloy steels like those used in kitchen knives – it looks flimsy as the camera folds out above the phone, and I fear that a hard knock could send it flying.

Then there's the ergonomic constraints, especially how the camera is geared towards filming in portrait orientation – which don’t seem versatile enough for professionals, despite the alluring AI subject tracking and stabilization.

I just can’t see any cinematographers or professional content creators choosing this device over high-end mirrorless cameras or something like an iPhone 17 Pro Max with gimbal setup.

No doubt the Honor Robot Phone packs cinema-grade potential but, from the techy name to the moving parts, I think it’s general tech enthusiasts, not filmmakers, who are going to have a field day with it.

You might also like…

Read our expert takes on the best phone for video recording and the best cinema cameras for producing top-tier films.

Nothing is still one of the youngest smartphone companies around, but it has quickly built a reputation for doing things differently, leaning heavily into transparent industrial design, playful software touches, and a community-driven approach to product development.

The Nothing Phone (4a) is the latest model in the company’s more affordable “a-series”, designed to bring elements of its flagship devices to a lower price point. It builds on the Phone (3a) with refreshed cameras, revamped Glyph lighting system, a faster Snapdragon processor, and an upgraded AMOLED display.

Nothing is trying to differentiate the Phone (4a) from other mid-rangers as a more creative smartphone, emphasising its camera presets and LUTs built right into the camera app. I have loved these on previous Nothing phones, and it brings me ever closer to my dream of having my Fujifilm film recipes on my smartphone.

On paper, with a triple camera setup, including two 50MP sensors, the Phone (4a) looks like a strong contender for the best budget camera phone – but the real question is whether the photography experience matches the ambition.

Specifications

Price & Availability

The Nothing Phone (4a) starts at $349 / £349 / AU$649 with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, rising to $399 / £399 / AU$699 for the top 12GB RAM configuration.

That price pits it against devices like the Google Pixel 10a and Samsung Galaxy A-series phones. For the money, the hardware is reasonably competitive: a large AMOLED display, a modern Snapdragon chip, and a surprisingly ambitious periscope telephoto camera. But here, the value lies in the device's style, with the Phone (4a) offering a much more eye-catching and unique design that will stand out from the crowd.

Design

Nothing has built its identity around its distinctive design, and the Phone (4a) continues that philosophy. At a glance, it looks very similar to previous Nothing devices, but the company has refined several elements of the design language while keeping the signature transparent aesthetic that has become its calling card.

The rear of the phone still uses a clear glass panel that reveals stylised internal components beneath it. This isn’t a literal view of the electronics inside, but rather a deliberately arranged design that mimics them, and it gives the phone a chic industrial look. Its three cameras sit high on the back, out of the way of my fingers, and fit inside a pill-shaped bump, with a distinctive aluminium surround swirl around it. Overall, it's just a cool-looking phone.

Nothing has expanded the range slightly this year. The Phone (4a) is available in white, black, blue, and pink, and the brighter finishes help emphasise the industrial design beneath the glass by providing a little more contrast. The pink in particular feels slightly softer, while the blue version adds a bit more energy, but both add a bit more pizazz than the more subdued monochrome options.

If you already own a Phone (2a) or Phone (3a), you may struggle to immediately tell them apart unless you look closely at the details. Normally, that would feel like a criticism, but in this case, it’s not a problem. Nothing’s design is still unique enough in the smartphone market that it hasn’t yet become stale, and the Phone (4a) still stands out on a table full of generic-looking rectangles.

Build quality feels solid for a mid-range device, and Nothing has improved durability compared to its predecessor. The Phone (4a) is rated IP64 for dust and water resistance, which means it can handle splashes and rain without issue, though it’s not designed for full immersion like some flagship devices. Nothing also claims improved structural rigidity and stronger glass protection, which should help the device survive the usual bumps and drops of everyday use.

Despite any tweaks, the overall shape and layout remain extremely close to earlier Nothing phones. Physically, the Phone (4a) measures 163.95 x 77.57 x 8.55mm and weighs 204.5g, putting it in the same general size category as most modern mid-range Android phones. The large footprint is mainly driven by the 6.78-inch display, which dominates the front of the device with relatively slim bezels and a centred punch-hole selfie camera.

That display is one of the phone’s highlights. It’s a 6.78-inch AMOLED panel with a resolution of 1224 x 2720 and a pixel density of around 440ppi. The panel supports a dynamic refresh rate up to 120Hz, which helps keep scrolling smooth and responsive, while the brightness can reach up to 1,600 nits outdoors and 4,500 nits peak for HDR content. In everyday use, it looks sharp and vibrant, easily competitive with other phones at this price.

Nothing also gives you two main display color profiles. The Standard mode aims for a more neutral presentation, but I found it slightly undersaturated. The alternative Alive mode boosts color a little more and gives photos and videos more punch, which I ended up preferring most of the time.

Under the display is an optical fingerprint sensor, which works reliably but isn’t quite as fast or consistent as the ultrasonic sensors used in some higher-end phones. That said, it still unlocks the phone quickly enough that it never felt frustrating in day-to-day use.

Along the sides, the button layout is fairly conventional. You get the usual power button and volume controls, all of which feel well-positioned and easy to reach when holding the phone. The only additional control is Nothing’s Essential Key, which sits separately on the left side of the device. Pressing it captures screenshots, voice notes, or screen recordings and sends them to the company’s new AI-powered organisational tool called Essential Space.

Personally, I never found this feature particularly useful. Essential Space is designed as a repository that collects screenshots, notes, and recordings and uses AI to analyse them and extract useful information. It’s an interesting concept, but it's just not the way I interact with AI assistants, and I don't find it as useful as dropping whatever I need into Gemini or CatGPT when needed. I’d have preferred the option to remap that key to something more practical for me, like launching the camera or toggling silent mode.

The most distinctive part of the Phone (4a) design continues to be the Glyph system on the rear of the phone – this time taking the form of the new Glyph Bar. This is Nothing’s latest iteration of its signature lighting system, which has evolved from the lights used in earlier models to 63 tiny LEDs arranged in segmented zones. It can display notifications, timers, progress indicators, and recording lights when shooting video with a little more contextual information through patterns than the previous Glyph lights.

While the Glyph interface has always been a little bit of a novelty, I actually find it useful in practice. I tend to keep my phone face down on my desk while working, and the subtle light patterns make it easy to see when something important has happened without having the screen constantly lighting up for every weather alert or marketing email.

Camera Performance

The Nothing Phone (4a) packs a fairly ambitious camera system for a mid-range phone. Two cameras from the Phone (3a) make a return, with a 50MP main camera, and an 8MP ultrawide, but the 50MP telephoto lens has got an upgrade – from 2x optical zoom to 3.5x – and Nothing claims it can digitally zoom up to 70x.

The main camera uses a 50MP 1/1.57-inch sensor, which is relatively large for a phone at this price. Combined with optical image stabilisation (OIS), it’s designed to capture more light, helping improve dynamic range and low-light performance. The telephoto camera uses a periscope-style lens with an 80mm equivalent, which is an ideal focal length for portraits and tighter compositions.

In practice, though, the camera experience is a little more complicated. One of the first things I noticed when shooting with the Phone (4a) is that the HDR preview isn’t particularly clear. In scenes with strong contrast, the camera preview often makes photos look significantly overexposed, even though the final processed image comes out correctly balanced. It meant that while composing shots, I often had to ignore what I was seeing on screen and trust the processing pipeline to fix things afterwards. The final images usually looked good, but the shooting experience itself felt less composed than I’d like.

Once the phone finishes processing the image, the HDR output actually looks quite pleasing. Compared with many smartphones that push aggressive HDR processing, the Phone (4a) tends to produce a more restrained result. Highlights are controlled, and shadow detail is preserved without creating that artificial “over-processed” look that some phones suffer from. The results might not always be technically the most dramatic, but they can feel more natural and photographic.

Color rendering is where things become more subjective. In the default color mode, images can look slightly flat, with colors that feel a little muted and contrast that doesn’t quite pop. For some phone photographers, this might actually be desirable; it's perhaps more true-to-life, and it gives images more flexibility for editing later (although the extent to which you can edit a JPEG is limited). But straight out of the camera, the photos sometimes feel a bit lifeless compared to other brands like Apple's warmth or Xiaomi's film-like tones.

However, where Nothing’s camera colors redeem themselves is when paired with the ability to apply LUTs (look-up tables) directly within the camera as presets. LUTs are essentially color profiles that transform the look of an image. The Phone (4a) allows you to import new presets easily via downloads or even QR codes and save them to the device. There are also a few preinstalled presets, although frustratingly, you can’t edit any of these. You can even replace the default camera with a preset of your choice.

This is the one camera feature I truly wish all phones had. It gives a way to build a style into the capture process rather than relying entirely on editing afterwards. As someone who abandoned being a Canon user for over a decade to jump into Fujifilm’s film simulations and film recipes, I have been itching for a phone to give me the flexibility over my phone images so I can color match my camera and phone – and the Phone (4a) comes the closest yet. You can even add grain effects to images, helping create a slightly more film-inspired look.

Of course, LUTs don’t improve the actual camera hardware. So while they can make photos look more interesting, they can’t fix limitations in sharpness, dynamic range, or sensor performance.

Image detail from the main camera is generally good in decent lighting. However, I did notice that motion blur can appear more often than expected, even when shooting in fairly bright conditions. It’s difficult to pinpoint whether this comes from the sensors, the camera choosing slower shutter speeds, or the imaging pipeline itself, but it does mean you need to be careful when photographing while moving.

A proper telephoto camera is a welcome inclusion at this price point (last year's 2x telephoto does not count). The 3.5x optical zoom produces pleasant portrait perspectives and is genuinely useful for everyday photography. The camera also includes optional retouching tools and adjustable bokeh effects. Some of these effects allow you to change the shape of the blur highlights, including novelty shapes like stars or snowflakes. They’re fun to experiment with, but they feel more like playful extras than tools aimed at serious portrait photographers like Vivo's excellent Zeiss lens bokeh options.

But while the optical zoom performs well, the phone’s more extreme zoom modes are less convincing. Nothing advertises up to 70x “Ultra Zoom”, but in practice, I found photos start to become fairly unusable beyond around 10x zoom. Image quality drops rapidly after that point, and the highest zoom levels are just plain bad.

Macro photography is handled using the telephoto camera rather than the ultrawide lens. This actually works well because it produces a more natural perspective and avoids the distortion that ultrawide macro cameras often create. The results are solid, if not particularly remarkable.

Phone Performance

The Nothing Phone (4a) is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 7s Gen 4, a mid-range chipset designed to deliver solid everyday performance while maintaining good power efficiency. In real-world use, that generally holds true.

For everyday tasks, the phone feels quick and responsive. Browsing the web, scrolling through social media, switching between apps, and streaming video all happen smoothly with very little slowdown. In typical daily use, I didn’t experience any noticeable lag or stuttering. Apps opened quickly, multitasking was smooth, and general navigation around the operating system felt snappy.

Where the limitations of the chipset begin to show is when you start pushing the phone harder. Tasks like photo and video editing can put more strain on the processor, and during heavier workloads, I did occasionally notice slower processing times with my Lightroom or CapCut exports taking noticeably longer than they would on a flagship device. Although this doesn’t mean the phone struggles with creative work entirely, it’s still perfectly usable for editing photos or short clips on the go, and I just wouldn’t rely on it if you are a heavy mobile editor.

Battery life is pretty good. The device houses a 5,080mAh battery, which Nothing claims can deliver up to 17 hours of combined usage. In my experience, that estimate feels a little ambitious. In my controlled battery test, using a mix of video editing, photo editing, video playback, and productivity tasks, the Phone (4a) lasted 14 hours and 12 minutes, which falls a little behind rivals with larger cells.

In the real world, the phone did comfortably last through a full day of medium to heavy use, although I usually came home in the evening with the phone in battery saver mode. However, recharging is super quick; the phone supports 50W wired fast charging, which in my tests creached 35% in 15 minutes, 61% charge in roughly 30 minutes, and a full charge in just over an hour. So a quick top-up while getting ready in the morning was often enough to provide enough charge for the day.

The Phone (4a) runs Nothing OS 4.1 based on Android 16, and it remains one of the cleanest Android interfaces available. The design leans heavily into Nothing’s minimalist aesthetic, with monochrome icons, custom widgets, and subtle animations that match the brand’s overall visual identity.

In many ways, it feels similar to the software experience on Google Pixel devices: close to stock Android, but with a few carefully designed additions rather than heavy customisation. Nothing also promises three years of Android updates and six years of security patches, which is respectable support for a mid-range device.

Nothing also includes a handful of AI-assisted editing tools, including reflection removal and pedestrian removal, but this pales in comparison to the AI editing suite available on other devices. However, both tools can run directly on the device without requiring an internet connection, which is convenient when editing photos on the go.

However, their effectiveness varies. The pedestrian removal tool, in particular, is quite inconsistent. Sometimes it correctly identifies people in the scene and removes them cleanly, but other times it fails to detect obvious subjects entirely. Even when it does work, it can leave behind slightly blurry patches where the removed person used to be. It's a nice-to-have, but Nothing is lagging far behind the competition here.

Final Verdict

The Nothing Phone (4a) continues the company’s tradition of making smartphones that feel a little more interesting than the competition. Its transparent design and Glyph lighting system still stand out in a market full of near-identical devices.

For photographers, the camera system isn’t a mid-range champ, but it puts in a decent performance. The cameras produce pleasingly natural images, however the ability to apply LUTs directly in-camera is genuinely a gamechanger for me, and adds a whole new dimension to the average camera hardware. However, inconsistent HDR previews, muted default colours and limited usability of the higher zoom ranges mean it doesn’t quite deliver a fully rounded camera experience.

Performance is solid for the price, with smooth everyday use and dependable battery life that easily lasts a full day. The screen is really nice to use, large and bright and Nothing OS provides a clean, fast Android experience.

Overall, the Phone (4a) isn’t the outright best camera phone in its class, but it offers a refreshing design that I really like. It is still one of the few mid-range phones with any design personality, and if you care more about style than photographic perfection then the Phone (4a) might be perfect.

Alternatives

Rugged phones are brilliant in theory, but in practice they often feel like you’re carrying a paving slab in your pocket. The AGM G3 Pro sets out to fix that, promising proper durability, built-in thermal imaging and even wireless charging; all in a body that’s slim enough to live with day to day. So does it finally hit the rugged-phone sweet spot, or is it just another compromise? I’ve been using it as my daily phone for the past month to find out.

When I reviewed the Tank 4 Pro last year, I was impressed that it had slimmed down from the Tank 3 Pro’s frankly absurd 696g to a still-hefty 538g. The AGM G3 Pro takes things even further, tipping the scales at 375g.

Yes, that’s still a lot heavier than a standard smartphone (around 170–190g for a typical flagship), but in rugged-phone terms, it’s certainly not the heaviest. You’ll notice the weight at first, but your pocket (and your jeans) won’t resent it nearly as much as they would with something like the Ulefone Armor 29 Ultra, which is an eye-watering 688g and almost comically chunky.

It doesn’t have the Tank 4 Pro’s built-in projector, or the Armor 29 Ultra’s dual AMOLED screens and one-inch sensor. But it does have two party tricks neither of those rival ruggeds can pull off: thermal imaging and wireless charging. So, how does it hold up everywhere else?

AGM G3 Pro: specifications

AGM G3 Pro: Price and availability

Pricing is… complicated. At the time of writing, Amazon has the G3 Pro at $699 in the US, making it more expensive than the Tank 4 Pro ($529.99) but cheaper than the Armor 29 Ultra ($807.49). In the UK, though, it flips the script: £599, which undercuts both the Tank 4 Pro (£674) and the Armor 29 Ultra (£639.99).

As your recent news alerts may have hinted, international pricing is currently a bit chaotic for a number of reasons, so I’d strongly recommend checking current prices before buying. The value of this phone will depend entirely on where you are, and possibly whether it's a Tuesday or a Wednesday.

AGM G3 Pro: Build and design

The biggest surprise with the G3 Pro is how… nice it feels. AGM has clearly tried to move away from the “industrial accident” aesthetic most rugged phones embrace. The alloy frame and textured polymer shell feel solid without being aggressive, and the phone sits flatter than expected thanks to a large, flat wireless charging pad on the back.

That charging pad also helps reduce the usual lumpiness you get with rugged phones. Between it and the camera cluster sits a genuinely powerful camping LED, while the camera module itself houses the main sensor, macro lens and thermal camera, plus a rather serious-looking speaker grille.

Durability is excellent, as you’d expect. IP68/IP69K and MIL-STD-810H mean it’ll laugh off drops, water and pressure washing. I was a little surprised to find “Panda Glass” instead of Gorilla Glass on the front, though – it’s fine for scratches, but generally not quite as tough when it comes to drops.

On the right side of the phone, you'll find the volume rocker and power button. The power button is slightly indented and doubles as a fingerprint sensor, which works reliably once you get used to its preferred touch technique. It's not the fastest fingerprint implementation I've encountered, but it's consistent enough for daily use.

The left edge houses the SIM/microSD tray (protected by a screw-secured rubber cap) and, below that, a customizable action button. Unlike the Armor 29 Ultra's two programmable buttons, the G3 Pro has just one, but it supports three different actions: single-tap, double-tap, and long-press. This makes it more versatile than the Tank 4 Pro's simpler implementation, and in practice, three customizable actions proved sufficient for most situations.

A small but welcome detail: the rubber port covers are screwed in, not glued. That suggests they’re replaceable when they wear out, which is exactly what you want on a phone designed to take abuse. Finally, one small visual quirk: the main camera is offset to one side to make room for the speaker. It’s not a problem functionally, just slightly odd to look at.

AGM G3 Pro: Performance

The Dimensity 7300 processor puts the G3 Pro firmly in mid-range territory. It’s nowhere near as quick as the Tank 4 Pro’s Dimensity 8300, and it can’t touch the Armor 29 Ultra’s flagship chip. On paper, it scores about a third of what a top-end processors like the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3/4 manages. In real life? It’s absolutely fine.

With 12GB of RAM and fast UFS 3.1 storage, everyday use feels smooth. Apps open quickly, multitasking is painless, and the 120Hz refresh keeps everything feeling responsive. Nor did I run into the camera lag issues that plagued older rugged phones. Heavy gaming will push it, and you’ll need to dial settings down for demanding titles, but that’s hardly a shock on a phone like this.

The display is the most obvious compromise. It’s a perfectly decent IPS LCD – bright enough, sharp enough, and colour-accurate – but once you’ve used AMOLED on competing rugged phones, the difference is hard to ignore. Battery life, on the other hand, is reassuring. The 10,000mAh cell easily got me three days of moderate use, and standby drain is impressively low. After a week unused, I still had around 50% left.

Charging is decent rather than exciting at 33W wired (around three hours from 20%), but the real win is 18W wireless charging. On a rugged phone, where opening port covers repeatedly isn’t ideal, this is genuinely useful – and I ended up using it far more than I expected.

AGM G3 Pro: Cameras

The camera system is something of a mixed bag. The 64MP Sony IMX682 main sensor is the same one used in various mid-range phones, and it delivers respectable results in good lighting. What I appreciated most was the natural color reproduction and realistic contrast; none of the over-processed HDR look that plagues some smartphones.

Its photography capabilities are certainly a step down from the Armor 29 Ultra, with its 1-inch Sony IMX989 sensor. However, it still produces images that are perfectly usable for documentation, social media and general photography. The lack of optical image stabilization is frustrating, though; I had to discard several photos that looked sharp on the display but turned out blurry in the final result. Also, the 2MP macro camera is, as on most phones, fairly useless, producing muddy, low-resolution images.

Where things really fall apart, though, is night photography. Compared with the Tank 4 Pro's decent low-light performance and the Armor 29 Ultra's exceptional night capabilities, the G3 Pro struggles badly in darkness. The camera has trouble focusing, and results are soft and noisy even with the LED flash. If you frequently need to photograph in low light, this camera will disappoint.

The 50MP front camera, meanwhile, is overkill for its actual capabilities. While it's technically capable of 4K video, AGM has limited it to 1080p, making the high resolution rather pointless. It does produce decent selfies and video calls, though.

Video recording maxes out at 1080p at 60fps, which feels a little outdated for a new phone in 2026. The Tank 4 Pro and Armor 29 Ultra both support 4K recording, with the Armor 29 even offering 8K. The one plus point here is that electronic stabilization works adequately, but this is clearly not a phone designed for serious videography.

AGM G3 Pro: Thermal imaging

The thermal camera is the G3 Pro's standout feature and its main reason for existing. AGM claims 512×384 resolution, though this appears to be interpolated from a 256×192 sensor.

While professional thermal cameras offer higher resolution, for a phone-integrated solution, this performs impressively. The dedicated Thermal AGM app provides good functionality, including the ability to bracket specific areas for temperature tracking, record video and set thermal alarms. The frame rate drops significantly when "Super Resolution" mode is enabled, but the quality improvement is noticeable.

A thermal camera might seem like a gimmick, but for a number of professions this could be genuinely essential. You could use it, for instance, for spotting heat leaks around windows, checking which components were heating up on electronics, and even detecting warm areas in walls.

Having thermal imaging literally in your pocket is incredibly convenient, and I've found myself using it more than I expected. However, let's be clear: this is a first-response tool, not a replacement for professional thermal imaging equipment. The resolution and accuracy are adequate for initial assessment, but serious engineering work will still require specialized devices.

AGM G3 Pro: Special features

Two special features deserves special mentions. Along with the normal flashlight, the 1K-lumen flood light is genuinely bright and useful. Combined with the thermal camera, it makes the G3 Pro a very practical tool for night work or emergencies.

The 5W speaker is another standout feature, capable of hitting 116dB. That's loud enough to potentially damage hearing, so I'd caution against using it at maximum volume. Still, for outdoor use or noisy worksites, having this much volume available is undeniably useful. Just please, don't be that person blasting music or TikTok clips on public transport. (Headphones, wonderful invention.)

AGM G3 Pro: Connectivity

The G3 Pro offers some excellent connectivity options. 5G support provides fast data where available, while Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2 handle wireless connectivity efficiently. NFC enables contactless payments, and there's even an infrared port for using the phone as a universal remote. It's a feature you don't see much any more, but I've often found it useful, especially when staying hotels where the remote is broken or has run out battery.

And here's another old-school favourite: a 3.5mm headphone jack. So many devices only offer a USB port for wired headphones these days, which is no use if you want to charge them, so this went right up my flagpole.

When it comes to your phone connection, the dual SIM setup uses a combined tray that accepts either two nano SIMs or one nano SIM and a microSD card. With 512GB onboard, most users won't need expansion, but personally, I'd have preferred AGM to offer space for both SIMs and a card simultaneously.

AGM G3 Pro: Verdict

The AGM G3 Pro makes smart, deliberate compromises to deliver something rare: a rugged phone you can genuinely use every day.

It’s lighter, thinner and more refined than most of its rivals, while still offering full IP68/IP69K protection and genuinely useful professional features. Thermal imaging, wireless charging and a powerful LED light give it a clear identity, and battery life is reassuringly strong. Yes, the LCD display and mid-range processor are compromises, and the camera struggles badly in low light. But if you’ve been put off rugged phones by their sheer bulk, the G3 Pro might finally win you over.

In conclusion, if thermal imaging matters to you, and you want a rugged phone that won’t feel like a punishment to carry, the AGM G3 Pro is a great option.

Samsung's 2026 flagship is a camera upgrade and downgrade on paper, with faster lenses but a smaller 3x sensor and a few other less obvious drawbacks compared to the S25 Ultra. Alongside the iPhone 17 Pro and Pixel 10 Pro, though, it's still a powerful player packing impressive specs and plenty of shooting modes. Set against the best from Oppo, Vivo, and Xiaomi, though, the camera struggles to stand out. But can features like Privacy Display and the new AirDrop support help it shine? Actually, yes.

Starting with the camera, the most notable changes in the S26 Ultra’s specs are an aperture upgrade for the primary 200MP camera, which now has a faster f/1.4 lens (down from f/1.7), and the 5x periscope telephoto. There’s also an on-paper downgrade: the 3x bridge camera between the primary and periscope has a smaller, albeit newer, sensor, and both the primary and 5x cameras don't focus as near as the S25 Ultra, so it's generally much weaker for macro photography.

With the latest Snapdragon for Galaxy power, an excellent new feature – Privacy Display – which keeps prying eyes at bay, the most seamless AirDrop support we've ever seen on an Android phone, faster charging and plenty of smarts under the hood, though, the S26 Ultra could still be an excellent smartphone even if it isn't the best camera phone around.

Galaxy S26 Ultra design and screen

The Galaxy S26 Ultra feels immediately familiar, but Samsung has softened the harder edges of the S25 Ultra, giving the phone a slightly gentler, more cohesive look. It still feels every bit the flagship, with premium materials, matte-finished sides and an integrated S Pen that remains a genuine differentiator. The small hardware tweaks are modest rather than transformational, and anyone upgrading from a Galaxy S25 Ultra or even an S24 Ultra should feel right at home.

The S26 Ultra is 7.9mm thick and weighs 214g, which makes it 0.85mm thinner and 17g lighter than the iPhone 17 Pro Max, despite the fact both phones feature 6.9-inch displays. Samsung’s panel is excellent: a 6.9-inch Dynamic AMOLED 2X running at 3120 x 1440 with a peak brightness of 2,600 nits and a pixel density of roughly 498ppi. By comparison, Apple’s iPhone 17 Pro Max uses a 6.9-inch OLED at 2868 x 1320, 460ppi, and claims up to 3,000 nits outdoors. The real standout, though, is Samsung’s new Privacy Display, a hardware-based system that dynamically controls wide and narrow pixels to reduce off-angle visibility in public spaces. This works exactly as advertised and can be set to specific apps, making it a true point of differentiation.

One caveat for photographers is the rear camera layout. While there's no MagSafe or Qi2 built into the phone, the large camera array can still make cases that add the feature incompatible with wallet-style accessories and many MagSafe chargers and mounting accessories. Even so, between the excellent display, slim build and genuinely useful Privacy Display, the S26 Ultra remains a strong design package.

Galaxy S26 Ultra camera specs

Samsung’s quad-camera formula has held strong since the S23 Ultra, with an ultra-wide, primary, 3x, and periscope camera.

The S26 Ultra’s primary camera is a 200MP 1/1.3-inch sensor, the same physical size as the iPhone 17 Pro Max’s main sensor. But with its faster f/1.4 lens, it captures a shallower depth of field and should do a fine job in low light, even if it can’t match the 1-inch sensor size of the new Xiaomi 17 Ultra.

The ultra-wide camera is a 1/2.52-inch sensor and f/1.9 combo, a solid spec for an often-neglected element in the smartphone camera mix. It’s also very wide at 13mm equivalent, so it captures plenty of detail, and the 50MP resolution means it can benefit from pixel binning to capture native 8K content.

The 10MP 3x camera remains a weak point. Because it uses a small 4:3 sensor, it lacks sufficient native 16:9 resolution for full-detail 4K capture, which shows up as softer results, especially in low light. This year, Samsung has actually shrunk the sensor, dropping the pixel size from 1.12 microns to 1 micron, resulting in a tiny 1/3.94-inch size. It is a newer sensor, so it could still offer improvements, but its spec is still an across-the-board head-scratcher, especially when set against the improvements to the other cameras and what else is on the market from Honor, OPPO, Vivo, and Xiaomi.

Finally, the 5x periscope camera with a 115mm equivalent focal length combines a faster f/2.9 lens with the same 1/2.52-inch sensor as the S25 Ultra, which should help in low light, when capturing moving subjects, and compensate a little for hand shake.

All things considered, the hardware mix isn’t necessarily exciting, but it’s still competitive with Apple and Google, Samsung’s main competition in the West.

Processing, AI, and camera software

Samsung loads up the S26 Ultra with its latest computational photography smarts, but at a base level, its photo processing remains very Samsung. Colors are handled with the same characteristic boosting, sharpening is aggressive in auto mode, and pinching in on shots reveals the mottling characteristic of Samsung’s specific brand of noise suppression.

Shooting modes – Standard + resolutions

Shooting modes are mostly unchanged, with modes including Portrait, Photo, Video, Pro, Pro Video, Food, Panorama, Slow Motion, Hyperlapse, Portrait Video, and Expert RAW, which can be downloaded through the Galaxy Store. Photos are captured at 12MP by default, with a 200MP option available for the primary camera, and 50MP options for the ultra-wide and 5x cameras.

Expert RAW and Camera Assistant

Expert RAW, Samsung’s downloadable bracketing RAW capture mode, gets an added feature for 2026: Virtual Reflector, which simulates a reflector to create more balanced exposure in shadows. This gives you a live preview and seems to work best with faces. It doesn’t work with the front camera, but it’s a novel on-device tool for RAW fans.

In addition to Expert RAW, you can download Camera Assistant through the Galaxy Store, and this is a must for photographers picking up the S26 Ultra. It's where you can customize which zoom shortcuts appear on-screen, turn off auto lens switching, and enable handy video tools like audio monitoring via Bluetooth headphones.

Shooting experience

Samsung’s camera UI is very flexible. You can rearrange and remove shooting modes that appear on-screen when you fire up the camera, and Quick Launch is on by default, so a double-tap of the power button quickly gets you into the camera.

The camera is really fast in bright light, so you can snap without waiting. Like with most phones, when the lights drop, computational photography extends the shutter speed, and a steady hand means you’ll get a much sharper shot. This is especially true of the 3x and selfie cameras, which have the smallest sensors and the slowest lenses.

In auto mode, Samsung does have filters, but we would have really liked a Vivo or Xiaomi-style set of default shooting modes, like Zeiss Natural, which dials back punch and over-processing a bit while retaining the benefits of computational photography. In Pro mode, you can adjust contrast, saturation, and more, but in doing so, you sacrifice some of the dynamic range and processing benefits of auto mode.

On the plus side, the Pro photo and video modes are fully featured. And the addition of APV video on top of Log and Expert RAW means enthusiast photographers and videographers will have plenty to sink their teeth into.

Galaxy S26 Ultra photo quality

The good

The S26 Ultra’s 200MP primary camera remains the star of the show, not because you’ll be shooting 200MP all day, but because it gives Samsung a ton of latitude to work with. In default 12MP mode, it’s reliably sharp across the frame, with enough micro-contrast to make textures pop without you having to fight focus or motion blur in decent light. It’s also one of those cameras you can lean on in almost any scenario: landscapes, food, quick street shots, indoor portraits. It rarely feels out of its depth, and when you do want to crop in, there’s still meaningful detail there, even if Samsung’s sharpening is excessive when you start pixel-peeping.

Night photography is also better than previous Ultras, and it’s one of those improvements you notice without having to go hunting for it. The S26 Ultra still brightens scenes aggressively, but it’s less heavy-handed with the sky. Older Galaxy phones often lifted night skies until they turned into a weird, muddy, overly saturated gradient, like the phone was allergic to true blacks. Here, Samsung seems more comfortable letting darkness look like darkness. You still get that Samsung punch, but it’s toned down just enough that night scenes feel cleaner and more believable, with fewer strange color shifts where street lighting meets the sky.

The ultra-wide is another solid shooter. Samsung’s f/1.9 lens paired with a 50MP sensor means it pulls in a lot more light than many ultra-wides, and that helps in exactly the situations where ultra-wides usually struggle: indoors, at dusk, and in mixed lighting. It also gives you a touch more subject separation than you’d expect at 13mm equivalent, which makes close-up shots feel less flat. And because it doubles as a macro camera, it’s versatile. Detail holds up well, focusing is quick, and it’s the kind of ultra-wide that won't totally distort your shots. That said, fans of expansive photos and videos should check out the Vivo X300 Ultra, featuring a best-in-class ultra-wide setup.

Samsung’s 5x periscope remains a strong option, especially if your comparison set is the iPhone and Pixel rather than the China-first camera champs. It isn’t best-in-class for raw detail or natural rendering, and if you’ve used the top Vivo or Xiaomi flagships, you’ll know Samsung still isn’t matching that level of finesse. But alongside the phones most people are realistically buying in the West, the 5x holds up well. I still prefer Apple’s slightly wider 4x focal length for general portrait and everyday tele work, but Samsung’s processing does a better job of keeping hand shake and noise under control when light drops, so you end up with more consistently usable shots.

One area the S26 Ultra compromises is macro photography, with the primary and 5x cameras doubling the nearest focus distance. This results in significantly weaker detail for close-up shots and, ultimately, a worse phone for fans of that specific type of photography.

Anyone considering an alternative that excels in this area should look to the Oppo Find X9 Pro and Vivo X300 Pro.

A subtle wins this year is how smoothly the S26 Ultra moves between cameras in photo mode. Switching focal lengths feels less like jumping between four different cameras and more like moving through a single system. Exposure and white balance still aren’t perfectly matched in every situation, but the transition itself is fast and fluid, and that matters when you’re shooting quickly and don’t want the phone to feel like it’s catching up to you.

HDR is also generally handled well, especially with backlit subjects. The S26 Ultra is happy to lift shadows, but it doesn’t always turn the scene into that over-processed HDR look where everything is equally bright and equally flat. Backlit faces tend to be protected well, highlights are usually controlled, and the end result is often pleasing rather than obviously “fixed.” It’s not the most natural HDR style on the market and can pull up ghosting with moving subjects, but it’s typically one that works, and it keeps the camera feeling dependable in tricky lighting.

Samsung’s AI processing improvements are mostly incremental, but they do add up in day-to-day use, especially when zooming in. The phone feels a little better at resolving fine detail without turning everything into a crunchy mess, and it’s slightly more controlled about how it cleans up noise in darker scenes. You can still spot Samsung’s heavy processing when you zoom in, but the straight-out-of-the-camera success is higher than it used to be.

The selfie camera has been leveled up by software. Skin tones are still warm, mostly flattering, and very Samsung, but they’re less hit-or-miss, especially under indoor lighting.

The bad

Color is the S26 Ultra’s biggest weakness. Skin saturation is pushed hard and regularly swings too far into red, especially indoors and in mixed lighting. It’s a very Samsung look, but it isn’t subtle, and it can make people shots feel more stylized than lifelike.

Color accuracy also varies between cameras, and it’s most obvious once light drops. Jump from the primary to the ultra-wide or telephoto and you can see shifts in white balance and overall tone, so a scene that looks neutral on one lens can look warmer or more saturated on another. It doesn’t always ruin a shot, but it chips away at the “pro” feel when you’re shooting across focal lengths.

Noise reduction is another recurring issue. Samsung cleans up grain so aggressively that it creates a mottled texture, particularly in shadows and night scenes. At a glance, it looks tidy, but as soon as you crop in, fine detail gets smeared and then sharpened back up, which leaves images looking a little synthetic.

That processing pipeline ties into the phone’s default warmth. The S26 Ultra often prioritizes a warm, punchy look over realism, which can be flattering in some scenes, but it also means neutrals drift and skin tones get an extra push toward orange-red.

Bright light sources can also bloom and bleed at night, softening parts of the image and making high-contrast scenes look less clean than they should.

And then there’s the 3x camera, which remains the weak link by a wide margin. In anything but strong light, it produces softened images that are then over-sharpened, and the results don’t hold up to cropping. It’s usable, but it’s the least “Ultra” part of the whole setup.

While the 5x camera is mostly reliable, its nearest focus distance is frustratingly limiting. Unlike phones like the Honor Magic 8 Pro and Vivo X300 Pro, the S26 Ultra doesn’t support telemacro, so it won’t capture close-up shots with super-high-impact detail.

Finally, contrast is still dialed up too high in auto mode. It makes shots look bold on a phone screen, but it can crush subtle tones and exaggerate the already heavy saturation.

Samsung Galaxy S26 video quality

Video is where the S26 Ultra feels a bit more consistently “Ultra,” given it’s a weak area for all phones.

The big upgrade is night video. Samsung’s latest Nightography video processing makes a meaningful difference, pulling in more usable detail and keeping scenes cleaner than older Galaxy Ultras. It still can’t match the low-light video you’ll get from the 1-inch-sensor crowd like the Xiaomi 17 Ultra, but if you’re upgrading from a Samsung phone, you’ll notice the improvement.

In daylight, video is a strong point. Clips are smooth, detailed, and nicely impactful, especially when you’re shooting close-up subjects on the ultra-wide and primary cameras. Focus is mostly reliable, but it can get a bit fiddly when you’re moving between subjects, and the lack of telemacro on the 5x limits your creative options for close-up detail work.

All that said, the primary camera makes the S26 Ultra an excellent quick-capture and vlogging tool when you turn it around. Point it at anything when the light is right and 4K footage looks great, and in bright light, 8K is genuinely usable if you want the option to crop in later.

The pro features are also a real plus, but APV Log comes with a major caveat: file sizes are huge – around 2GB for a 10-second clip – which means you’ll want an external SSD like the Lexar ES5 if you plan to shoot in the codec. And a point to note when picking up a Lexar or SanDisk SSD: pairing it with a MagSafe-style case is a must so you can keep the drive attached as part of your workflow.

Galaxy S26 Ultra performance and battery

Performance is one of the Galaxy S26 Ultra’s clearest strengths. Powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy, the spec boost compared to the S25 Ultra translates well. Whether gaming, multitasking or exporting high-resolution video, the S26 Ultra feels fast, stable and unflustered. Samsung has also redesigned the vapour chamber and says it now spreads heat across a larger surface area for a 21% thermal improvement, which helps explain how well the phone sustains performance under load. In testing, it also handled APV clips relatively swiftly, and that is a lot of data to move around on a phone.

The Galaxy S26 Ultra comes in 256GB and 512GB versions with 12GB of RAM, while the 1TB model steps up to 16GB. That compares reasonably well with the iPhone 17 Pro Max, which offers 256GB, 512GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities. Future-proofing is also a strong point: the S26 Ultra ships with Android 16 and One UI 8.5, and Samsung promises seven generations of OS upgrades alongside seven years of security updates.

Software adds value too. Galaxy AI and One UI remain useful, but the bigger win is Samsung’s new AirDrop support inside Quick Share, which rolled out at the end of March 2026. Transfer speeds still do not quite match Apple-to-Apple for very large files, but the integration is impressively frictionless.

The S26 Ultra's battery life is solid rather than class-leading: the 5,000mAh cell is good for a full day of moderate use, and Samsung claims up to 31 hours of video playback. Charging is stronger, with Super Fast Charging 3.0 rated for up to 75% in around 30 minutes, and Samsung’s own charger guidance confirms USB PD/PPS support, so you aren't locked into a proprietary ecosystem.

So is the S26 Ultra's camera really "Ultra"?

After six weeks with the Galaxy S26 Ultra, it is clear Samsung has built one of the most complete flagship phones of the year. Its excellent Privacy Display is a genuine point of difference, the software support is class-leading, performance is consistently strong, and the new Quick Share support for AirDrop makes it one of the most seamless cross-ecosystem Android phones yet. Add in a premium design, long-term software support and faster charging, and the S26 Ultra feels thoroughly future-proofed.

For photographers and videographers, there is still plenty to like. Samsung continues to offer one of the richest pro-grade camera experiences on any mainstream phone, with deep manual controls, advanced shooting modes, and enthusiast-friendly codecs, including Log, Expert RAW, and APV. Video is also a strength from the main camera in particular, especially with the improvements to Nightography.

The problem is that the camera hardware doesn't stand out. The main and ultra-wide cameras are dependable, and the 5x telephoto remains competitive against Apple and Google, but the weaker 3x camera and the loss of close-focus flexibility on the primary and 5x modules hold the system back. Samsung’s processing also leans too heavily on saturation, contrast, and noise reduction.

As a result, the Galaxy S26 Ultra is not the best camera phone you can buy, especially when Oppo and Vivo are currently delivering more impressive pure photo quality. But it may still be the best Android flagship overall for buyers who want a brilliant screen, outstanding software longevity, polished performance and a camera system that is versatile, ambitious and very capable.

If you were to guess which foldable phone would have the best camera system, you'd probably assume it'd be something like the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold, Google Pixel Fold, or a Chinese heavyweight brand like Honor with one of its Magic V-series phones. But there's one foldable that's just trounced the competition to win 8th place on the prestigious DxOMark smartphone camera ranking. That makes it by far the highest-placed foldable phone DxO has ever tested, with the next-best foldable - the Honor Magic V5 - down in 29th spot. And who's responsible for this world-beating new Foldable? Well, it's Motorola, of course!

The new Razr Fold has a camera system so good that it beats some of the best camera phones on the market, like the Google Pixel 10 Pro XL, iPhone 16 Pro Max, and Oppo Find X8 Pro.Heck, it's even close to matching the awesome Xiaomi 17 Ultra for image quality. You could argue that as the Razr Fold costs $1999, it darned well should have a stellar camera system. But historically, foldable phones are a compromise design that have to be as thin as possible in order not to be too bulky when folded. That means there's less space within each foldable section for cameras, thereby restricting the size of image sensors and lenses that'll fit inside.

But somehow Motorola has managed to cram in a 50MP Sony Lytia 828 sensor for the Razr Fold's main camera. This is a relatively large 1/1.28-inch chip with 2.44um pixels and is fronted by a large aperture f/1.6 lens. It's teamed with a telephoto module that uses a 50MP Sony Lytia 600 sensor for its 3x zoom lens, while a 50MP wide-angle module with a 122-degree field of view completes the triple-camera array.

DxO praised the Razr Fold for its "Well-rounded camera performance that is adapted for a variety of use cases", along with its good low light image quality, natural-looking portrait shots, and high-performing telephoto camera. Only some minor focus inconsistencies in video recording and noticeable noise in challenging lighting conditions kept the Razr Fold from scoring even higher.

So there you have it: if you want a foldable phone which also has a camera system that doesn't compromise on image quality (and you've got a spare $2,000 burning a hole in your pocket!), then Motorola should be top of your shortlist ahead of it going on sale from April 13.

Last year’s Oppo Find X8 Ultra was hands-down my favorite camera phone last year – it’s Hasselblad cameras offering some of the most consistent and high-quality camera-like photos I have yet used on a phone. However, the reason why it is conspicuously absent from my list of the best camera phones is that the phone was essentially impossible to buy outside of China.

However, some good news! At MWC 2026 in Barcelona, Oppo has just confirmed its next-generation flagship, the sequentially named Oppo Find X9 Ultra, but the most exciting news is that it will finally make its global debut, and Europe is included in the initial release.

Oppo has said the new X9 Ultra is “built to be your next camera”, integrating what Oppo describes as its most advanced imaging system to date, with the camera system again being co-developed with the master Swedish camera makers Hasselblad.

In my review of the Oppo Find X8 Ultra, I described it as one of the most complete camera phones I’d ever used. Its combination of large sensors, refined Hasselblad color science, and genuinely useful focal lengths made it feel less like a phone with good cameras and more like a rival to compact cameras. It even convinced my colleague Kallum to leave his dedicated behind on a trip to Sweden and shoot his entire trip with just the X8 Ultra instead.

Speaking at Oppo’s event in Barcelona, Elvis Zhou, CEO of Oppo Europe, said: “In 2026, many devices will carry the ‘Ultra’ label. We believe the title must be earned.” After the bar set by the X8 Ultra, that’s a bold statement – but one that, if history is anything to go by, Oppo might just be able to back up.

Check out some sample images from the Oppo Find X8 Ultra below:

You might also like...

Check out more of the best camera phones and the best Android phones for photography.

Modular smartphones have come and gone before, but at MWC 2026, Tecno is taking another swing at the idea – and this time, it’s photography that’s firmly in the spotlight.

The brand has unveiled what it calls its Modular Magnetic Interconnection Technology, a concept ecosystem built around an ultra-thin base phone that measures just 4.9mm thick. Instead of bolting on bulky accessories, Tecno's device uses a precision magnetic array and pogo-pin connectors to snap slim, purpose-built modules onto the back of the device.

I had some hands-on time with the concept, and it's one of the most ambitious (and polished) modular systems I have ever seen, and the one with the most potential to catch on outside the walls of MWC.

For photographers and content creators, the system includes several camera modules. The most interesting component is perhaps the detachable telephoto lens module. Rather than simply extending the built-in camera, this acts as a standalone imaging sensor, using the phone’s display as a viewfinder with low-latency live preview. It’s not a million miles from what Xiaomi showed off last year at MWC – although Tecno has gone much further with designing an entire ecosystem rather than just the one lens.

There’s also an Action Camera module to compete with the likes of GoPro and DJI, with wireless connectivity via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and even mmWave built in automatically, so you don’t have to have the camera attached to the phone.

There are also functional modules like an ultra-slim power bank that doubles usable capacity without dramatically increasing thickness. The modules can even stack on top of one another, while remaining comparable in thickness to a typical smartphone.

It’s still just a concept, but the idea of carrying a super-slim pocketable phone that can transform into a creative toolkit on demand is undeniably appealing. If Tecno – or anyone else – can make modular photography genuinely effortless, this could finally be a form factor that catches on.

You might also like...

Check out more of the best camera phones and the best Android phones for photography

Vivo has offered the first official look at its next flagship imaging powerhouse at MWC 2026 in Barcelona – the X300 Ultra – and crucially, it has hinted that this time the Ultra model will be heading to more global markets.

For now, the design is still under wraps, and the X300 Ultra is only showing behind a camera case at Vivo’s booth, but the X300 Ultra has teased some key camera info as the company looks to build on its growing reputation for top smartphone photography.

The headline feature is a new 400mm equivalent Vivo Zeiss Telephoto Extender Gen 2 Ultra, its longest mobile telephoto extender yet at a whopping 400mm. Like previous lenses, this new model is again co-engineered with Zeiss and designed to meet APO standards to combat chromatic and spherical aberrations. Vivo says the lens supports the full 200MP readout from the sensor, and using all those megapixels, can stretch to a huge 1600mm optical quality zoom using in-sensor cropping. Vivo also says the lens is backed up by “gimbal-grade OIS” and motion-tracking autofocus.

Vivo has also previewed a pro camera cage for the X300 Ultra, complete with cold shoe mounts, dual-hand grip, physical shutter and zoom controls, and even an integrated cooling fan for sustaining high-resolution recording.

Perhaps the biggest news, though, is availability. Vivo has stated that the X300 Ultra will launch to a more international audience than its previous phones – a significant shift for a brand whose most adventurous camera phones have often been limited to China.

In a statement from the company, it says, “Vivo’s presence at MWC 2026 underscores its steadfast commitment to engaging more deeply with the global mobile ecosystem and competing at the forefront of the premium segment”.

In DCW’s review of both the Vivo X200 Ultra and Vivo X300 Pro, we found Vivo’s telephoto cameras amongst the best in the Android world – delivering incredible detail with a polished, almost proper camera-like feel. The X300 Ultra looks set to double down on that, and I for one can’t wait to try it out.

You might also like...

Check out more of the best Android phones for photography and the best camera phones.

Mobile World Congress 2026, the annual Barcelona trade show where the phone industry gathers to unveil its biggest ideas, has a habit of producing one announcement per year that makes everyone else's look incremental by comparison. This year, that announcement is from a company most people in the UK would struggle to name.

Chinese brand Honor holds around 3% of the European smartphone market. In a category dominated by Apple and Samsung, it is, for most consumers here, somewhere between an unfamiliar name and an invisible one. 

That could be about to change, though. Not because Honor has made a slightly better phone, but because it has identified and solved a consumer problem that nobody else has properly addressed to date.

The problem Honor wants to solve

The modern smartphone has done something remarkable for photography: it's genuinely democratised it. The quality gap between a quick snapshot taken on a mid-range phone and one taken by a competent photographer with a expensive DSLR has narrowed to the point where many people can't tell the difference. 

Video, however, is a different matter. Good video has always demanded skills that don't come bundled with the hardware. Stabilisation. Subject tracking. Smooth camera movement. The discipline to pan slowly, to hold a frame, to follow a subject without lurching or losing focus. 

A shaky, poorly framed video clip looks amateurish in a way that a slightly imperfect photograph simply doesn't. And yet right now, social media is shifting decisively toward video; with Instagram openly imitating TikTok, YouTube Shorts competing with Reels, and every platform prioritising the moving image. Which means the gap between what people want to create and what they're technically equipped to produce has never been more visible or more frustrating.

Honor's Robot Phone, unveiled today at MWC in Barcelona, is a serious attempt to close that gap. And if it succeeds, it won't just be a remarkable piece of engineering. It could be the device that finally puts Honor on the map in Europe.

The Robot Phone looks, at first glance, like a well-made smartphone. Slim, premium, the kind of device you'd walk past without a second thought. But the rear camera module sits within a housing that slides open to deploy a robotic arm, tipped with a camera, on a four-degrees-of-freedom gimbal system. That arm rotates, tilts, tracks and reframes (autonomously, in real time) driven by a self-developed micro motor that Honor has miniaturised to a remarkable degree.

The engineering challenge this presented was immense. Inside a smartphone, every millimetre is accounted for. Fitting a mechanical arm into that space meant building a micro motor 70% smaller than anything currently used in mainstream devices; roughly the size of a one euro coin. 

Honor used the same high-performance steel and titanium alloys developed for the Magic V6's hinge, and the same simulation tools, to optimise every component. Seven millimetres of internal space was the target. They hit it.

The camera riding on that arm is a 200MP sensor, attached to a three-axis gimbal stabilisation system that Honor claims delivers the best stabilisation performance currently available on any smartphone. AI Object Tracking follows a chosen subject automatically in real time. AI SpinShot produces smooth 90 and 180 degree rotational camera movements: the kind of cinematic transitions you'd normally only achieve in post-production or with a considerably larger and more expensive rig. 

At the Barcelona event, Honor also touted a partnership with ARRI – the professional cinema camera company whose name appears on the side of cameras used on major film sets – to bring cinematic-quality video processing to the Robot Phone from launch.

To understand why all of this matters, picture a few familiar situations. You're travelling, trying to film a sunrise from a moving vehicle, but every bump and jostle shows up in your footage, and keeping the horizon straight requires constant attention. 

You're at a party, trying to capture your friend dancing. Every time they move out of frame you have to readjust the phone, breaking the moment. Or maybe you're filming yourself and need a slow, controlled pan that would normally require a tripod and a gimbal head.

The Robot Phone addresses all of these in hardware rather than software. The gimbal corrects motion in real time. A double tap on the screen locks onto a subject and tracks them automatically. The arm can execute cinematic camera movements that the user simply couldn't produce by hand. 

Honor's own framing is that the Robot Phone is designed to help people move from capturing moments to telling stories. And that's not marketing language, it's a genuine distinction. 

Great video has always required skills that are genuinely hard to master. The Robot Phone is a serious attempt to put those capabilities in everyone's pocket.

The tracking and stabilization are the core of the Robot Phone's appeal for video creators. But there's another dimension that only becomes clear in person, and which Honor has been somewhat coy about in its pre-show marketing: this phone has something very close to body language.

The robotic arm doesn't just move functionally; it responds expressively. It nods. It shakes its head. When asked a yes or no question, it answers in gesture rather than words. It tracks you during a video call, following your movement around a room. It can even do a backflip. And (the detail that prompted genuine laughter at the Honor stand), it dances to music, detecting a beat and moving in time with it. You can also chat to it ("Do you like my outfit?") and it will 'nod' or 'shake its head' accordingly.

It's absurd. It's also completely charming, and in a market saturated with phones that are essentially identical rectangles, charm is not nothing.

The Robot Phone is not yet available. Not available to buy, not available to review, and the journalists at the event weren't even able to get hands-on with one. Instead, a couple of models were demonstrated by Honor staff behind a rope. So, although no one said this out loud, it seems pretty clear that the device is not quite finished yet.

As for release dates, Honor says that it is targeting the second half of the year, launching in China first and international markets to follow. No pricing has been announced, and the units on show at MWC were demonstrations rather than hands-on prototypes. 

Analysts have already questioned whether the robotic arm can survive the real world (pockets, bags, drops), and that remains a fair concern until the finished product is in reviewers' hands. At the same time, the confirmation that this is a real commercial product rather than a concept is significant. 

What's already clear is that Honor has built something that does things no other phone can do, at a moment when video has never mattered more. Photography was democratised years ago. If the Robot Phone delivers on its promises when it ships, video might be next. And a brand that currently holds 3% of the European market could find itself with a great deal more to say for itself.

I'm at Mobile World Congress 2026, the annual gathering in Barcelona where the phone industry comes to show off its best work, make bold promises, and occasionally embarrass itself.

This year, one of the most compelling things on the show floor wasn't from any of the usual suspects. It was Honor's Magic V6: a foldable phone that directly addresses the reasons many people who tried a Samsung Galaxy Z Fold in the shop went quietly went back to their regular handset.

Run your finger across the inner display of a Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 and you can feel it: a raised ridge running down the centre of the screen where the hinge sits beneath. It's the foldable phone's original sin, the thing that reminds you, every single time you use it, that this is a piece of engineering under stress. Then there's the thickness — the Z Fold 6 is 12.1mm closed, which is to say noticeably chunkier than any conventional flagship.

There's more. The battery struggles when the big screen is open. And the cameras, decent as they are, never quite match what Samsung puts in the Galaxy S series. The result is a phone that asks you to accept compromises across the board in exchange for that large unfolded display.

The Honor Magic V6, unveiled here in Barcelona, has had a very credible go at solving all of this at once — and having spent time with one here, I'm inclined to believe the hype.

What's magic about the Magic V6?

Let's start with that crease. Honor has reduced it by 44% compared to the V6, using a new ultra-thin glass construction certified by SGS. Run your finger across the inner display and you find… almost nothing. It really does feel like a mini tablet.

The screen's great too, especially in bright light. That's because a silicon nitride anti-reflection coating brings reflectivity down to 1.5%, meaning the screen stays usable in direct sunlight. The outer screen peaks at 6,000 nits brightness, the inner at 5,000 nits. These are exceptional numbers, and the displays live up to them in person.

Then there's the battery. The V6 carries a 6,660mAh cell built using fifth-generation silicon-carbon battery technology, achieving 25% silicon content: a first for any foldable on the market. Honor claims this delivers 24 hours of battery life even with the inner screen open and in continuous use, backed by TÜV Rheinland certification; the first foldable to earn it.

Honor put it this way at the launch event: the battery is large enough to watch films on the unfolded screen for the duration of a return flight between London and Barcelona — four times over.

The other number Honor is shouting about is 8.75mm: that's the V6's thickness when folded. For context, an iPhone 16 Pro Max is 8.25mm, and Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold 6 is 12.1mm when closed. In other words, the V6 is a foldable phone barely thicker than the device most people already have in their pocket, but one that opens out into a 7.95-inch display. 

The weight, too, is genuinely impressive: Honor has completely reorganised the internal architecture, building the chassis around the battery rather than the other way around, reclaiming space typically lost to speakers, NFC and the charging port by repositioning each within the body.

The V6 comes in four colorways — white, black, gold and a red that deserves special mention. The red model has a soft, velvet-textured finish that catches light differently depending on how you hold it, and the camera module surround is finished using a diamond-cut polishing process. All in all, in a crowded Barcelona exhibition hall, this felt like a phone a lot of people will instinctively want to have.

So what's it like as a camera? Well, the V6 is the first foldable to feature Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip, and Honor has paired it with a 64MP periscopic telephoto lens (f/2.5, 1/2-inch sensor with optical image stabilisation) matched to the same portrait image processing engine used in the Magic 8 Pro: one of the stronger camera phones of the past year. The result, in practice, is a telephoto experience that doesn't feel like the usual foldable compromise.

For the main camera, you're getting a 50MP sensor f/1.6 with OIS, and there's also an 50MP ultra-wide camera (f/2.2). For selfies there's a 20MP front camera (inner and external screen).

Foldables have historically struggled with camera systems because the hinge mechanism eats into the space you'd normally use for a proper camera stack. The V6 manages the trick convincingly.

Both screens carry robust physical protection. The outer display uses Honor's Nano Crystal Shield — 5,600 layers of silicon nitride coating delivering ten times better drop resistance and 15 times better scratch resistance than conventional glass. The hinge is built from steel rated at 2,800 megapascals: roughly twice the structural strength of a car's A-pillar, and tested to half a million folds.

The V6 is also rated IP68 and IP69, a first for any foldable, meaning it handles prolonged submersion and high-pressure water jets without complaint. Both screens also support stylus input, open or closed, making it a genuine productivity tool rather than just a large-screen curiosity.

The Magic V6 will go on sale in China in March, with international markets to follow in the second half of 2026. Pricing has not yet been announced. My sense is that it won't be cheap; but as a statement of where foldable photography is headed, it makes a compelling case that Samsung's grip on this category is loosening.

Check out our guide to the best fold phones on sale now

While many people might be familiar with Leica co-branding phones released by Xiaomi, far fewer might be aware of its own-branded Leitzphone series of phones. Leica launched the series in 2021, though, as Japanese exclusives co-developed with Sharp, the western world is yet to experience the luxury German camera maker's take on the smartphone – until now.

Leica has unveiled its brand new Leitzphone – and this time it’s going global. To give it its full, not-so-catchy title, the ‘Leica Leitzphone powered by Xiaomi’ is the brand’s first internationally available Leitzphone, and combines Xiaomi’s latest flagship hardware with Leica’s design language.

Inevitably, comparisons must be drawn with the ‘Xiaomi 17 Ultra by Leica’, which launched in China earlier this year. The two devices share the same core hardware, including a processor, battery, and screen, as well as camera hardware with the same 1-inch main sensor and 200MP mechanical periscope telephoto co-developed between Leica and Xiaomi.

The main differentiator is design. The ‘Xiaomi 17 Ultra by Leica’ is a Xiaomi flagship with cameras co-engineered with Leica, while the Leitzphone is presented as a Leica-designed product powered by Xiaomi’s hardware. Are you keeping up? The Leica Leitzphone has a distinctly separate, more overtly Leica-centric physical design, moving away from the two-tone back of the Xiaomi and opting for a look more closely matching the classic black Leica’s classic cameras.

The rear panel is finished in black fibreglass, paired with a knurled metal frame and Leica’s iconic red dot. Leica describes the design as following its principle of “reduction to the essential”.

Camera specs

One of the most distinctive features is the new rotatable camera ring. This physical ring allows continuous adjustment of zoom, ISO, shutter speed, or exposure compensation, as well as switching between Leica Looks.

Behind the lens ring, the triple camera system remains the same as that found in the Xiaomi 17 Ultra. The main camera pairs a 50MP 1-inch Light Fusion 1050L sensor with an f/1.67 aperture and 3.2μm 4-in-1 Super Pixels. It also incorporates LOFIC (Lateral Overflow Integration Capacitor) technology to expand dynamic range by storing greater charge directly at the pixel level, which, simplified, means each Pixel can hold more light for clearer nighttime photography and high-contrast scenes.

Alongside it sits a 200MP periscope telephoto camera using a large 1/1.4-inch sensor, offering a 75–100mm equivalent optical zoom range with optical image stabilisation. Like the Xiaomi 7 Ultra, the zoom is mechanical and physically moves between 75–100mm, so you get genuine optical quality throughout.

Completing the trio is a 50MP 14mm ultra-wide camera with a 115° field of view.

Compared to earlier Leitzphone models, which were largely devices built around a single large sensor as their headline feature, this iteration feels far more in line with modern flagship expectations.

Design & UI

Leica has also redesigned the camera UI, including a new dedicated Leica Essential Mode. The camera app features thirteen Leica Looks and five Leica bokeh simulations from classic Leica lenses, alongside familiar touches such as Leica shutter sounds. There are even digital reinterpretations of classic Leica cameras, including an M9-inspired colour profile and a monochrome profile inspired by Leica Monopan film.

In a move that reflects the growing use of AI in image manipulation, the Leitzphone also supports the Content Authenticity Initiative. As introduced with the Leica M11-P, the Leitzphone embeds cryptographically secured metadata into original images via a dedicated security chip in line with C2PA standards.

Power

Under the hood, this is every bit a 2026 flagship. It runs on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 platform built on a 3nm process, paired with 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage.

The 6.9-inch HyperRGB OLED display offers a 2608 x 1200 resolution, a 1–120Hz LTPO refresh rate, and up to 3,500 nits peak brightness, while a 6,000mAh battery supports 90W wired and 50W wireless charging.

Video capabilities stretch to 8K at 30p and 4K Dolby Vision at up to 120p, with full log recording.

Price & Availability

The Leitzphone is available from today at Leica stores, and will be sold in a single 16GB+1TB model, costing £1,700 / €1,999 / AU$2,299.

It's not a cheap phone, but an equivalent 1TB iPhone costs £1,599 here in the UK, and for only a small premium, you are getting a superior camera system from an iconic camera brand. And, if you're in Australia, it's cheaper than the 1TB iPhone Air, which is the cheapest high-storage Apple handset at AU$2,599.

You might also like...

Check out more of the best camera phones and best Android phones for photography.

The Xiaomi 17 Ultra is Xiaomi’s latest statement piece in mobile photography. Co-engineered again with Leica, the 17 Ultra builds on the company’s Ultra-series momentum from the excellent Xiaomi 15 Ultra, but pushes even harder into “phone as camera” territory.

The 17 Ultra still sees Xiaomi continue pursuing 1-inch sensors in phones, with a new 1-inch Light Fusion 1050L sensor utilizing new tech for even better HDR. But the headline-grabbing news is Xiaomi combining the two separate telephoto cameras on the 15 Ultra into a single new 200MP telephoto camera featuring a 75-100mm mechanical optical zoom. Whilst we have seen this used on a few niche Sony Xperia phones, it's the first attempt by Xiaomi, and perhaps signals the start of a new chapter in the Ultra phone wars.

However, this lens comes with trade-offs. The mechanical zoom system, while technically fascinating, doesn’t dramatically expand range over the 15 Ultra’s two telephoto lenses, despite taking up the same physical space, and macro performance also suffers from a longer minimum focus distance than last time around.

The Xiaomi 15 Ultra was not only one of the best camera phones of last year, but came so close to being my perfect compact camera replacement. Xiaomi has taken some bold steps with the 17 Ultra, but has tweaked the formula too much, or has it finally built a phone that truly feels like it could replace your everyday carry?

Specifications

Price & Availability

Launching at £1,299 / €1,499 for the 16GB+256GB version and £1,499 for the 16GB+1TB version. Given the hardware on offer – a 1-inch sensor, mechanical zoom system, 200MP telephoto, 6000mAh battery, and Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 – the price is obviously very premium, but it feels justified for anyone who cares about their photography.

There are cheaper options for performance – look no further than the speedy OnePlus 15 – but compared to flagship rivals like the Galaxy S26 Ultra or iPhone 17 Pro Max, Xiaomi offers the far more adventurous camera hardware for serious photographers.

Its real competition is from the wave of Chinese Ultra phones we're expecting in the next few months, with last year's Oppo Find X8 Ultra and Vivo X200 Ultra giving Xiaomi its closest challenge – although it remains to be seen if sequels to those phones will be released globally, where currently the Xiaomi 17 Ultra has a huge advantage in availability.

Design

The Xiaomi 17 Ultra is available in a traditional Black or White, as well as 17 Ultra’s hero color – Starlit Green – which is the version I tested. While I was a little unsure how I felt about the color from press images, in person, I actually kind of love it. The mineral-like finish gives it a subtle sparkle, and it is nowhere near as attention-grabbing or in-your-face as I expected it to be. It's playful, a bit different from everything else out there right now, and it's not bright orange.

Even with the new mechanical zoom camera, the weight is still very modest at 219g, shaving around 10g off the heaviest version of the 15 Ultra. This puts it a few grams lighter than the iPhone 17 Pro Max or Pixel 10 Pro XL and on par with the Samsung S25 Ultra. None of these are light phones, but I’m willing to put up with that for the camera hardware. The weight also feels more balanced than the previous version of the phone, and holding both the 17 Ultra, to me it feels less top-heavy than last time out.

That said, the camera island remains huge, even though Xiaomi has dropped one lens compared to the previous Ultra; the new mechanical zoom lens takes up so much internal space that the island maintains both the same width and protrusion from the rear panel. The large camera island is also a magnet for fingerprints; my fingers just naturally kept coming to rest on the glass when handling the phone, which led to a lot of wiping off grease before I could shoot.

The new zoom has also pushed wide and ultra-wide modules lower, almost touching the bottom edge of the camera island, and I did occasionally get my finger in the frame of the ultrawide lens when shooting quickly.

With Xiaomi clearly comfortable borrowing from Apple’s design lead with the rest of the Xiaomi 17 series, I actually would have preferred it if the 17 Ultra debuted its own “plateau” style camera bar and shifted the cameras up into the top left of the phone as much as physically possible.

Unlike the Xiaomi 15 Ultra by Leica or Leica Leitzphone, the “standard” version of the 17 Ultra does not include the rotating lens ring around the camera module. There is an optional Photography Kit available in a Pro version with tactile zoom and exposure compensation controls, and a Lite version with just a two-stage shutter button. I didn’t have one to test at the time of publication, but the previous generation’s kit made the phone feel like a true compact camera, and I suspect/hope the same will be true here.

The buttons around the side are as you’d expect – power and volume. Xiaomi has mixed things up a little here and split the volume rocker into separate circular up and down buttons with engraved markings. It looks distinctive enough from other similar designs, and the two buttons do provide better tactile separation.

Thankfully, Xiaomi has resisted following along with the industry and adding a dedicated camera control button. It’s something I rarely, if ever, use on other devices, and I just do not see the point of it when on-screen controls are so much easier. However, I do wish there were an action button on the left side like Apple or Oppo offers for access to a quick setting.

The 17 Ultra should be relatively robust; it's IP68 dust and water-resistant, and Xiaomi Shield Glass 3.0 protects the display. There is also a factory-installed screen protector already on the display (although in my experience, these can’t take much of a beating), and a clear hard-plastic case in the box. The case feels a little cheap considering this isn’t a cheap phone, but when a lot of phones don’t include any case at all, beggars can’t be choosers.

Screen

One of my biggest complaints about last year’s model was the curved display. Some people love them, but I have just never been a fan. I’m pleased to say Xiaomi has gone flat this time – and, well, obviously, I much prefer it. The flat screen gives the 17 Ultra a much sleeker look, and I prefer the feel of it in the hand.

The 6.9-inch HyperRGB OLED display is excellent. It’s sharp with a 2608 x 1200 resolution, and smooth with a 1-120Hz refresh rate, which is also LPTO, so it can hit anywhere in that range depending on the screen content. The screen can get incredibly bright outdoors; it’s rated up to 3500 nits. Colors look fantastic. There are two primary color modes – Original Color Pro, which is the default, and Vivid for a little bit more saturation. The default is slightly warm to my eyes, but the screen color temperature can be easily adjusted in the settings.

Camera Performance

• Main camera: 50MP, 23mm, ƒ/1.67, 1-inch Light Fusion 1050L, OIS
• Telephoto camera: 200MP, 75–100mm mechanical zoom, ƒ/2.39–2.96, 1/1.4", OIS, 30cm macro
• Ultrawide camera: 50MP, 14mm, ƒ/2.2, 1/2.75", 115° FOV

Main lens

Xiaomi remains in an increasingly exclusive group of manufacturers still championing 1-inch sensors in phones. The 17 Ultra is built around a 50MP 1-inch Light Fusion 1050L sensor with an f/1.67 aperture and OIS. As a photographer, you’ll have a hard job convincing me that bigger sensors aren’t just better, and in practice, this one is outstanding.

Shooting at 1x, the sheer amount of detail is extraordinary. Zooming into images reveals texture in brickwork, foliage, and fabric that most smartphones just can’t compete with. Even when using the 2x in-sensor zoom, there is no noticeable drop in optical quality.

Xiaomi is debuting its LOFIC HDR technology, which physically increases full-well capacity by capturing overflow charge – a word salad which essentially means it lets in more light than before. You can see it in action, particularly at night.

Low light in general is impressive. The combination of that large sensor, Leica’s optical design, and Xiaomi’s processing means shadows retain depth while highlights don’t blow out as easily. The phone also isn’t afraid of contrast, which I love. Night shots feel more atmospheric, rather than being artificially flattened by overzealous HDR like so many other phones, which gives images a more authentic, photographic character.

Telephoto lens

The 17 Ultra has switched from two telephoto lenses to one, which, on paper, seems like a major downgrade, but the new 200MP telephoto is technically one of the most interesting lenses I’ve used on a phone.

It covers a 75–100mm equivalent range with a mechanical optical zoom system, meaning you can switch between classic portrait focal lengths – 75mm, 85mm, 90mm, 100mm – without relying on digital cropping. The lens also supports up to 400mm (17.2x) optical-quality in-sensor zoom thanks to its massive 200MP resolution. From an engineering perspective, it’s impressive.

However, the mechanical zoom is more technically impressive than it is transformative. A 25mm shift within the mid-telephoto range simply isn’t really a huge compositional leap. It’s clever, and I appreciate the engineering achievement of using the large 1/1.4” sensor over a wider focal range, but it’s not something that dramatically changes how I shoot day-to-day. I found myself settling into the 3.2x focal length, and if I needed to get closer, more often than not, just bypassed the 4.7x straight to a longer focal length. It was rare that jumping from 75mm to 85mm or 100mm really made much of a difference to how I composed a shot.

All that said, this is still one of the best telephoto cameras I have ever used on a smartphone. Image quality from this telephoto is excellent. Detail is crisp, and subject separation at those mid-telephoto focal lengths is natural and flattering. Portraits at 75mm and 100mm in particular have a really beautiful compression that isolates subjects cleanly from the background.

Thanks to the lens stretching up to 100mm (4.7x), and that 200MP sensor, you can crop in up to 400mm, or four times from the sensor without theoretically losing any quality (that 17.2x zoom marketing figure is from the main sensor). The in-sensor zoom is really very good; it retains so much detail, but with some more complex scenes, more noticeable sharpening comes into play.

Beyond 400mm, AI assistance steps in. It's good, but not class-leading. Xiaomi’s approach feels more restrained than some rivals. It enhances edges and clarity based on what it can recognize, rather than aggressively inventing detail with generative stunts. The trade-off is that images can just look slightly over-sharpened at extreme zoom levels, but they avoid the uncanny, painterly artifacts that plague some competitors.

Macro

Macro is handled via the telephoto (down to 30cm) and the ultra-wide (down to 5cm). Quality is still excellent – sharp, contrasty, and detailed – but there is a small regression compared to the previous 50MP 3x setup, which allowed closer focusing. The mechanical zoom system limits how close you can get with the telephoto. It’s not a deal-breaker, but if you love shooting tiny details at very close distances, you’ll notice it.

Ultrawide

The 50MP ultrawide (14mm equivalent, 115° field of view) is one of the best I’ve used. It’s pretty sharp across most of the frame, with well-controlled distortion and decent edge detail, although corners are a little weak. It also allows moderate cropping before images begin to fall apart – something not all ultra-wides can claim. It’s a rare ultrawide lens that doesn’t feel like an afterthought, and even rarer one that I actually want to use.

Performance

Consistency is my biggest gripe with the Xiaomi 17 Ultra. Color consistency between lenses is largely good, but certainly not flawless. White balance remains steady most of the time, though I did notice far too frequent shifts between the main and telephoto lenses, particularly in blue skies. The telephoto also tends toward a slightly harsher, more contrasty rendering, while the main lens produces softer, more faded tones. It’s subtle, but if you’re switching lenses mid-shoot, you’ll see it.

Despite some inconsistencies, what truly sets the 17 Ultra’s camera apart, though, are their character. Much of that character comes from the Leica color profiles, which, like Fujifilm’s super-popular film simulations, add a more photographic look to otherwise boring JPEGs with minimal effort.

You can shoot in Leica Vibrant or Leica Authentic. Vibrant is more of the “standard” choice; it has bolder colors and is a more faithful representation of the scene. But I couldn’t stop using Leica Authentic. It’s slightly under-saturated, with a mild vignette and cinematic contrast, and it produces a convincing Leica-camera-like look. There are also Leica-developed filters for black-and-white and more filmic looks, and they’re genuinely good.

I’ve tried out a lot of filters on different phone cameras over the years, but I still find Xiaomi/Leica’s feel the most genuine. If you are just looking for natural basic snaps, then a Pixel or iPhone might be the better option, but if you are a photographer who cares about the style, tone, and emotion of your images, I think no one does this better than Xiaomi right now.

Image depth of field is also very nicely handled, and is some of the most camera-like I’ve seen yet. I don’t know if this is down to the larger 1-inch and 1/1.4-inch sensors or Xiaomi’s computational rendering being spot on, but images can look like they’ve come from a larger sensor dedicated camera, with a depth of field in some scenes that feels genuinely optical.

Overall, the 17 Ultra may not always produce the most clinically perfect images in every scenario. But stylistically, it is delivering some of my favorite photos right now.

Phone Performance

The Xiaomi 17 Ultra is powered by Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 Mobile Platform, built on a 3nm process, paired here with 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM and either 512GB or 1TB of UFS 4.1 storage. On paper, that’s about as flagship as it gets right now.

In day-to-day use, the 17 Ultra is very quick. Apps open instantly, multitasking is smooth, and I never once saw it pause, even in more heavy-duty apps like Lightroom or CapCut.

Speaking of which, my usual test of exporting 100 DNG files in Lightroom took roughly 30 seconds, which is as fast as any other top phone I’ve tested. My 10-minute 4K video edit in CapCut rendered in just under three minutes, which is the kind of time I want to see if I’m leaning into the 17 Ultra’s 4K 120p Log footage. Scrubbing through 4K 120p footage on the display felt fluid and responsive, with no dropped frames or stuttering during playback.

My Geekbench results landed at 3,560 for single-core and 10,512 for multi-core. That’s right in line with other Snapdragon 8 Elite devices I’ve tested this year. Compared directly, it essentially matched the OnePlus 15 and Honor Magic 8 Pro, and it outperforms the Oppo Find X9 Pro’s MediaTek Dimensity 9500 in multi-core workloads.

Battery life comes courtesy of a 6,000mAh Xiaomi Surge Battery, which, on paper, sounds generous – although it is a significant reduction from the Chinese 17 Ultra. I'm still not sure why the global version is lumbered with a smaller capacity cell when other manufacturers seem to have no issues selling large battery models here.

In practice, I found it good, but not exceptional. I consistently got through a full day of heavy use – including shooting, editing, social uploads, and a fair bit of video playback – but I didn’t stretch to two days the way I have with some recent rivals. Considering the size of the cell and Xiaomi’s claim of improved energy density with 16% silicon content, I was quietly hoping for a bit more longevity.

Charging, however, is excellent. The 17 Ultra supports 90W wired HyperCharge and 50W wireless charging. But even with standard PD charging, I saw impressive speeds: 15 minutes took me from 0% to 40%, and 30 minutes pushed it to 69%. Even if the overall endurance isn’t class-leading, knowing I can get to almost half full with a quick 15-minute charge is anxiety-relieving.

On the software side, the 17 Ultra runs Xiaomi HyperOS 3 on top of Android 16. Functionally, it’s fast, stable, and easy to navigate. There is some pre-installed bloatware outside of Xiaomi’s own suite of apps, which is irritating on a premium phone.

There are also a few little frustrations throughout the OS. Home screen grid options are limited, jumping awkwardly from 4x6 straight to 5x9, with no middle ground. I found the limited options for adjusting on-screen UI element size beyond basic text scaling frustrating. There’s no option for a unified notification and control center, which feels unnecessarily restrictive. And you can’t uninstall apps directly from the home screen. All a little nit-picky, but it adds friction.

Where HyperOS 3 does shine is in its integrated photo editing tools. Xiaomi’s gallery app offers a Lightroom-rivaling level of editing options for adjusting tone, colours, or details, and the interface is really simple to use. Xiaomi’s HyperAI tools are also built into the app, including options like object eraser, generative expand, and reflection removal. These tools aren’t the best I have used on a phone, but do a decent job, especially on simpler backgrounds. I found the generative AI had a little more trouble than other brands with matching the exact texture of a photo, with the generations being noticeably blockier in resolution, but without pinching in, it is harder to notice.

One AI feature I genuinely loved, though, is the gallery’s AI bokeh effect. It applies a more convincing shallow depth-of-field look to existing images than the portrait mode alone, and in some cases, it genuinely mimics a larger sensor look. For quick social-ready edits, it’s addictively good.

Verdict

The Xiaomi 17 Ultra has some of the best cameras I’ve ever used on a phone. The 1-inch sensor produces hugely detailed images with controlled highlights, especially at night, where the phone shines (not a pun). The overall look of images feels genuinely photographic. I love the Leica-tuned profiles that give images a professional tone that, to my eye, stands out from almost every other flagship right now.

But it’s not flawless. The mechanical 75–100mm zoom is technically clever, yet in real use, I didn’t find the 25mm range enough to be transformative. I also noticed too much inconsistent color and white balance between the main and telephoto lenses to consider the camera system truly reliable. Macro has also taken a hit; it's still good, just not as detailed as before.

Performance-wise, it’s lightning fast thanks to the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, and editing even 4K 120p footage feels effortless. Battery life is solid but not exceptional from the 6,000mAh cell, though super-fast charging (even on PD) helps. HyperOS 3 works well enough, but it’s not my favorite Android skin.

Alternatives

Xiaomi has been steadily refining its tablet line over the past few generations, and the Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro is positioned by Xiaomi as a “PC-level productivity” device. It pairs flagship silicon with a redesigned version of HyperOS 3 and a new Focus Pen Pro and Focus Pro Keyboard, in the hopes of being more than just a Netflix machine.

The Pad 8 Pro sits above Xiaomi’s standard Pad 8 and follows on from the Pad 7 Pro, bringing major silicon upgrades thanks to the Snapdragon 8 Elite, 3.2K 144Hz display, AI-powered photo editing tools, and improved workstation-style multitasking.

For creatives, it needs enough ooph for editing RAW files on the go, running creative apps, video editing, and working on the move. On paper, it competes with premium Android tablets and even flirts with entry-level laptop territory when paired with Xiaomi’s Pro Focus Keyboard – but ambition and execution aren’t the same. So can the Tab 8 Pro compete to be one of the best tablets for photo editing?

Specifications

Price & Availability

The Pad 8 Pro starts at £529 for the 8GB/256GB version and £599 for the 12GB/512GB model (other regions TBC).

It isn't cheap, but it comes in far below the iPad Air with similar storage. Although Apple's machine does have iPadOS's more robust ecosystem. Compared to rivals in the Android space, it undercuts Samsung's S11 tablet whilst offering mostly comparable specs.

Once you add the Focus Pen Pro (£89) and Pro Focus Keyboard (£179), you’re approaching laptop money, but if you're looking for a tablet, that's not really the point.

Design

At just 5.75mm thick and weighing 485g, the Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro is impressively slim for a productivity-leaning tablet. In the hand, it feels manageable; I can comfortably hold it one-handed for reading or sketching without the keyboard attached, and the 11.2-inch footprint strikes what I think is a genuine sweet spot between portability and usable workspace. It’s large enough to edit photos or run two apps side by side without feeling cramped, but not so big that it becomes cumbersome in a bag.

The rear panel has a metallic finish that looks clean and understated. If I’m being honest, it’s bordering on a little bland, but it’s inoffensive and professional. The only visual interruption is the camera bump, which is surprisingly tall given there’s just a single average camera and flash. It doesn’t ruin the design, but it does feel oddly disproportionate.

Build quality overall is strong. The chassis feels rigid with no flex. For buttons, there is a volume rocker that sits along the top edge and is easy to reach in both portrait and landscape, and the power button houses a fingerprint reader.

The sensor itself is quick and reliable, unlocking the tablet pretty much instantly. Face unlock is significantly faster and more convenient for casual use, but as usual, it can’t be used for secure authentication in banking apps or locked folders. It still only seems to be Google that has cracked secure facial recognition with just a camera.

Audio is handled by a quad-speaker setup, and for a tablet this slim, it performs pretty well. There’s a decent stereo spread thanks to the four drivers, making Netflix and YouTube surprisingly immersive. Bass is predictably limited, but dialogue is clear, and the volume is more than adequate for a small room.

Display

The 11.2-inch 3.2K display is one of the highlights of the Pad 8 Pro. It’s sharp, vibrant, and, crucially for creative work, well balanced. Colours look bright and accurate in the default mode, though there’s a Vivid option if you prefer more punch. I found the white balance slightly warm out of the box, but Xiaomi gives you a decent level of control over the white balance in the settings to fine-tune colour temperature, which I always appreciate.

At 144Hz, scrolling feels silky smooth, whether scrubbing through a video or just browsing the web. Brightness is perfectly fine indoors and in most shaded outdoor scenarios, though it’s not particularly bright at peak levels. Under harsh sunlight, you may find yourself wishing for a little more.

There are also useful eye-care features, including a reading mode and adaptive colour adjustments that respond to ambient lighting. For long editing sessions or late-night writing, these genuinely help reduce strain.

Keyboard & Accessories

There are a few optional accessories to turn the Pad Pro 8 from a tablet into something much closer to a laptop replacement.

The Pro Focus Keyboard is undeniably similar to Apple's floating Magic Keyboard, but it's a great design. Build quality on the keyboard is excellent: it has a soft, kinda leathery finish on the outside and a felt lining on the rear to protect the tablet. It looks good, professional and understated, but premium.

However, the keyboard is fairly heavy, and once attached, the whole setup becomes much closer to laptop weight. It is also noticeably top-heavy. On a desk, that’s not an issue, but on a bed or your lap, the balance can shift backwards, and I did have the tablet tip over once or twice. The hinge also has a somewhat limited range of motion, which restricts how far back you can tilt the screen.

Key spacing is compact, but I quickly adapted, and I could type at nearly normal speed. That said, I’m not entirely convinced it replaces my MacBook keyboard for full-time work; it’s excellent for travel and light productivity, but extended writing sessions still feel more comfortable on a traditional laptop.

Attachment is handled magnetically, with pogo pins transmitting data and power. The connection is secure and snaps into place satisfyingly, with no Bluetooth pairing fuss required.

The Focus Pen Pro follows a familiar minimal design language; there are only so many ways you can design a stylus, and this one leans into the clean, Apple Pencil-like aesthetic. It feels good in the hand, with accurate tracking and reliable palm rejection. Writing and sketching are smooth and responsive, though it still doesn’t quite replicate the tactile resistance of paper.

I particularly like the squeeze shortcut, which can quickly open a drawing canvas, take a screenshot, or start a screen recording. Both squeeze and touch controls can be reassigned, and in supported apps, swiping can adjust tool size. Charging is handled magnetically via a dedicated spot on the tablet, keeping things tidy and cable-free.

Cameras

Tablets are not really serious photography tools, and the Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro doesn’t attempt to change that, delivering a setup that’s just practical enough.

On the rear, there’s a 50MP main camera. In use, it’s very much fine. It’s more than capable of scanning documents, capturing whiteboards in meetings, or taking quick reference shots when your phone isn’t to hand.

Detail is respectable in good light, but there’s noticeable sharpening applied to images, which gives photos a slightly over-processed look when viewed at full resolution. It performs reasonably well indoors in medium lighting, which is realistically where most tablet photography happens, but it lacks the quality I’d expect from even a mid-range smartphone.

The 32MP front-facing camera is the more important sensor on a device like this, and thankfully, it’s a strong performer. Video calls are clear and sharp, with solid HDR performance that kept my face well-exposed even against bright windows or overhead lighting.

Performance

Powered by the latest Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip, I expected the Pad 8 Pro to be a decent performer, and in everyday use, it's extremely quick. Swapping between apps, editing photos, streaming video, and switching multiple browser tabs all felt fluid and responsive. I didn’t encounter any noticeable slowdowns during my time with it.

For editing, exporting 100 DNG files to JPEG in Lightroom took around 40 seconds, which is very respectable. A 10-minute edit in CapCut exported in roughly four minutes – again, impressive. For editing photos on the go or short-form video work for social, it has more than enough grunt.

The 8 Pro runs on HyperOS 3 based on Android 16, and for the most part, I like it. The interface looks modern, animations are smooth, and navigation is fairly intuitive. That said, there is some pre-installed bloatware, which feels slightly at odds with the premium price.

Multitasking is easy on the Pad 8 Pro, though Xiaomi doesn’t do a great job of explaining it. You can run split-screen apps, open floating windows, and enable Workstation Mode for a more desktop-style layout. However, there’s very little onboarding to guide you through these features, and I suspect some users won’t realise what it is capable of.

With this said, though, I still hesitate to suggest Android tablets as genuine productivity machines to compete with laptops. I can get work done here, but the OS is a little more fiddly, and I can’t quite move anywhere near as quickly as I can on my MacBook. Everything just takes that little bit longer.

Xiaomi's Workstation mode is one of the best attempts at a desktop-like experience I have used on an Android tablet; the windowing is functional and easy to use and jump between for multitasking. However, that said, app scaling in windows can be quite inconsistent, and some websites' content can’t adapt to the window sizes, which breaks the illusion of a true laptop replacement. None of this is necessarily Xiaomi's or the Pad 8 Pro's fault; it's just the reality of using a screen size between a phone and a laptop. I wish Xiaomi included some more UI scaling options in settings, as this might have gone some way to solving some of these issues.

The Pad 8 Pro has plenty of AI built in. Google’s Gemini features, including Circle to Search and Gemini Live, are present, and Xiaomi’s own photo Gallery app offers a number of AI features. AI Bokeh and skin retouching are effective without being overly aggressive, and tools like AI Expand and Eraser do a good job, but aren't class-leading. They are solid at detecting subjects, but generated areas can look slightly pixelated compared to the original image.

Battery life has also been good. After several hours of streaming, browsing, and word processing spread over two to three days, I was still sitting at around 20%. And when you do need to plug in, 67W charging is fast.

Final Verdict

The Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro is an excellent Android productivity tablet. It’s thin, powerful, and well designed, with excellent performance in creative apps. The display is great quality and at 11-inches hits a portability sweet spot between functional and cumbersome.

For just watching movies on a plane, it is overkill; however, if you are set on a tablet as a laptop replacement, it's hard to recommend a better Android option at this price point. Although for the full experience, I'd also invest in the accessories, especially the Focus Pro Keyboard, which, of course, adds further expense.

I still find Android’s ecosystem a little limiting as a true laptop replacement. App scaling and desktop workflows aren’t as polished as I need for a work machine. That said, while I couldn’t replace my laptop with it, I could absolutely travel with just the Pad 8 Pro.

Alternatives

Xiaomi has unveiled the global version of the Xiaomi 17 Ultra, its latest imaging-focused flagship, which is again co-engineered with Leica. On paper, it might be the most technically ambitious camera phone the company has produced to date.

Building on the Xiaomi 15 Ultra’s “Optical Night” philosophy, the 17 Ultra introduces a new 1-inch Light Fusion 1050L sensor with LOFIC HDR technology and what Xiaomi is calling the industry’s first 75–100mm mechanical optical zoom paired with a 200MP sensor.

1-inch sensor and mechanical zoom

One of the hallmarks of the Xiaomi Ultra series has been the 1-inch main camera sensor, and Xiaomi isn’t mixing things up too much for the 17 Ultra.

The main sensor is again 50MP, 23mm equivalent focal length, with a 1-inch Light Fusion 1050L sensor and f/1.67 aperture, with OIS. However, Xiaomi says this new sensor uses LOFIC (Lateral Overflow Integration Capacitor) HDR technology to physically expand full-well capacity, rather than relying solely on multi-frame processing. That’s all quite a lot of jargon, but in simple terms, LOFIC increases the amount of light pixels can store, to better handle highlight information in high-contrast scenes, and should produce more balanced and detailed HDR.

But if the main camera is an evolution, the telephoto is more of a revolution – at least in smartphone terms. Xiaomi is introducing a mechanical zoom on its telephoto; this isn’t just sensor cropping between two fixed focal lengths. Xiaomi has implemented a mechanical optical zoom system that physically adjusts lens groups to deliver genuine optical coverage across the entire 75–100mm range – just like a real camera zoom lens.

It’s also the first Xiaomi flagship to carry Leica APO optical certification on its telephoto lens, using a triple-glass apochromatic design to minimize chromatic aberration at long focal lengths.

This means that the Xiaomi 17 Ultra swaps out the dual telephotos from the last model for just a single 200MP telephoto camera. The lens has a 75–100mm equivalent focal range and a variable f/2.39–2.96 aperture with all focal lengths between 75–100mm using the same large 1/1.4-inch sensor. It also allows lossless photos up to a 400mm equivalent using in-sensor zoom, thanks to that pixel-dense 200MP sensor. Xiaomi claims the 17 Ultra is capable of a total of 17.2x “optical-quality” zoom across its lenses.

The downsides to this new lens? Macro takes a hit; the close focus distance has jumped from 10cm on the 15 Ultra to 30cm on the 17 Ultra. The ultrawide camera also supports 5cm macro, but ultrawide is not really the ideal perspective for macro work.

Rounding out the camera system is a 50MP ultrawide, with a 14mm equivalent focal length, f/2.2 aperture, and 115° field of view. On the front, there is a 50MP selfie snapper with a 21mm equivalent focal length.

Video specs are also flagship-grade, maxing out at 8K/30p, but also supporting 4K Dolby Vision at up to 120p, and Log recording up to 4K 120p with ACES (Academy Color Encoding System) support, which standardises color across devices for post-production editing.

Faster processor and a new look

Despite housing a new mechanical telephoto system and a larger battery, Xiaomi says the 17 Ultra is its thinnest and lightest Ultra yet. It measures 162.9 x 77.6 x 8.29mm and weighs 218.4g or 219g, depending on the color. Speaking of, it launches in three colorways: Black and White models feature high-strength composite fiberglass backs, while the hero Starlit Green version uses genuine mineral particles in the finish.

Xiaomi has shifted to an all-flat body with a flat display and flat back, framed by an aluminium alloy chassis. The display is protected by Xiaomi Shield Glass 3.0, which Xiaomi claims is 30% more drop-resistant than the glass used on the Xiaomi 15 Ultra, and the phone retains IP68 dust and water resistance.

The screen is a 6.9-inch Xiaomi HyperRGB OLED panel with a 2608 x 1200 resolution, 1–120Hz LTPO refresh rate, and up to 3500 nits peak brightness, alongside TÜV Rheinland certifications for low blue light, flicker-free operation, and circadian-friendly performance.

Battery capacity has grown to 6000mAh, aided by a 16% high-silicon carbide design to increase energy density – although for whatever reason, this is a significantly smaller battery than the Chinese version of the phone. The 17 Ultra can recharge at up to 90W wired HyperCharge and 50W wireless charging, with compatible chargers.

Powering all of this is Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 processor, paired with 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM and UFS 4.1 storage in either 512GB or 1TB configurations.

Photography Kits

As with previous Ultras, Xiaomi is offering dedicated photography accessories to turn the 17 Ultra into as close to a compact camera replacement as possible.

The new Xiaomi 17 Ultra Photography Kit adds a physical shutter button and grip, and is available in black, white, and pink. While the Photography Kit Pro integrates a 2000mAh battery and more Leica-inspired ergonomics with a two-stage shutter button, flanked by a manual zoom rocker and a physical exposure compensation dial, as well as a filter ring for attaching screw-in filters like polarisers and ND grads. The Pro case will be available in just a svetle understated black.

Pricing and availability

The Xiaomi 17 Ultra will be going global – although, as usual, that does not mean the US, but you can expect it to land in Europe and Australia. US-based phone photography enthusiasts can likely import it, but double-check it works on your carrier’s network beforehand.

The Xiaomi 17 Ultra is launching at £1,299 / €1,499 for the 16GB+256GB version and £1,499 for the 16GB+1TB version.

Samsung’s Galaxy S26 and S26 Plus feel like the sensible siblings in the 2026 lineup. While the S26 Ultra grabs attention with its Privacy Display party trick and quad-camera, the regular models stick to a proven (arguably tired?) formula: clean, slim, premium feeling, and camera hardware that’s essentially unchanged from last year’s Galaxy S25 and S25 Plus.

That might sound a little underwhelming on paper, and out of the gate, these won't be no-brainer upgrades from the S25, but if you're coming from an S22, S23, or S24, the levelled-up AI could make all the difference. Specifically, the entire S26 family gets the brand’s latest AI processing, camera modes including improved night video and horizon locking, auto framing, and more.

Design: familar feeling

If you’ve held a Galaxy S phone recently, you’ll feel right at home with the S26 and S26 Plus. Both keep the same overall look as last year’s models: flat front and back, tidy camera rings, and a minimalist styling.

The big decision is size. The Galaxy S26 is the compact choice, with a 6.3-inch display and a lighter, easier-in-the-pocket build. The Galaxy S26 Plus steps it up with a 6.7-inch screen, a little more heft, and a more immersive feel for watching, gaming, and photo editing. Both feel comfortably premium in the hand without pushing into Ultra or Pro Max territory.

Slimmer than most flagships, the S26 and S26 Plus are 7.2 and 7.3mm respectively, with both available in six colors: Cobalt Violet, Sky Blue, Black and White, plus two online exclusive colours: Silver Shadow and Pink Gold.

Screen: small to big, sharp to sharper

Samsung’s AMOLED screens rarely miss the mark, and that continues here. The Galaxy S26’s 6.3-inch display runs at FHD+ resolution with an adaptive 1-120Hz refresh rate, and it still looks crisp and punchy for everyday use, making it great for fans of one-handed use and smaller phones.

The Galaxy S26 Plus is the one that big-screen lovers, gamers and on-the-go movie watchers will prefer. Its 6.7-inch Dynamic AMOLED 2X panel is almost Ultra-sized, bumps up to QHD+ resolution, which gives you more fine detail, and takes the crown as the sharpest display of all three S26 phones.

Frustratingly, the headline feature of the series, Privacy Display, is only available on the Ultra, which leaves the S26 and S26 Plus with very few highlights compared to their predecessors.

Camera: AI and aperture upgrades

If you were hoping for a big camera hardware shake-up on the S26 and S26 Plus, this isn’t the year. Samsung has essentially carried over last year’s camera approach, which means you’re getting a triple-camera setup that's competitive without being class-leading.

Both the S26 and S26 Ultra have the same camera mix: a 50MP main camera with a 1/1.56-inch sensor size and an f/1.8 lens, a 12MP ultra-wide with a 1/2.55-inch sensor and an f/2.2 lens, and a 10MP 3x telephoto with a 1/3.94-inch sensor and an f/2.4 aperture.

That 3x module offers the same modest zoom Samsung has used for a while, and it’s also the same 10MP, 1.0-micron pixel 3x unit found on the S26 Ultra. If past-gen Galaxys are anything to go by, it's handy in good light, but the phone will switch out for the primary camera when zooming in low-light scenes.

There are a few software upgrades for the Galaxy S26 and S26 Plus cameras. The first is nightography video, which leverages AI to improve lowlight video capture detail, color reproduction, and smoothness. Samsung's also added support for APV video, which unlocks higher-bitrate video capture and takes on Apple's ProRes support on its iPhones. The mode offers either Log or HDR capture, with astronomical file sizes: 10 seconds of Log recording costs around 2GB of storage space. Thankfully, you can capture to external storage.

Interface: OneUI with added AI

Diving into Samsung’s interface, OneUI might as well be called OneAI at this rate. New features aplenty, the S26 series’s Creative Studio can create sticker packs and edit photos using text prompts using gen AI, and the phone also analyzes screenshots and auto-sorts and indexes them, making them searchable and arranged in folders, and Bixby, Samsung’s voice assistant is smarter, acting like a ChatGPT-style LLM that can control your phone settings and pull online information all in one place.

Probably the neatest AI addition is Audio Eraser. We’ve seen it baked into the sound and video recorders, cleaning up audio recorded on phones, but now it works with third-party video apps as well. Whether watching YouTube or Netflix, you can dial out the background crowd during a gig or a football match, and it worked surprisingly well when we tested it.

Power, pricing, and availability

Samsung's S26 and S26 Plus use different chips from the Ultra: the latter gets Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy, while the S26 and S26 Plus use Samsung's own Exynos 2600. This is a shift in strategy compared to last year and new chip performance can vary wildly, so we'll have to watch this space to see how Samsung's 2nm 2600 fares.

Both phones ship with 12GB of RAM, with either 256GB or 512GB of storage, with Samsung ditching the 128GB starting capacity, which goes some way to justify the price bump for the base model this year.

Battery-wise, Samsung hasn’t reinvented the wheel with the Galaxy S26 and S26 Plus, but the capacities make sense for the two sizes. The Galaxy S26 packs a 4,300mAh battery, while the larger S26 Plus bumps that up to 4,900mAh, giving it more headroom for heavy screen time, gaming, and longer camera sessions. Both support Samsung’s Super Fast Charging 2.0 on the wired side, plus Fast Wireless Charging 2.0, and the Galaxy S26 also keeps Wireless PowerShare for topping up accessories on the go.

The Galaxy S26 starts at $899/£879/AU$1,549 for 256GB and $1,099/£1,049/AU$1,849 for 512GB. The Galaxy S26 Plus starts at $1,099/£1,099/AU$1,849 for 256GB and $1,299/£1,269/AU$2,149 for 512GB. Both are available to pre-order now and go on sale on March 11.

If you want the full Samsung “everything phone,” the Ultra is still the way to go. For a smaller, slimmer, lower-cost alternative with Samsung's AI features and familiar, premium styling, the S26 and S26 Plus could be sensible upgrades even if they don't offer much in the way of new hardware.

Motorola phones don't tend to grab many headlines outside of the flip phone sector, but its upcoming Edge 70 Fusion looks intriguing. Though positioned as a mid-range handset, it'll be the first phone to use Sony's 50MP LYT-710 sensor. Technical details about this are hard to find, but Motorola promises that the camera can take "ultra-clear" low-light images and offer "brighter" highlights in videos.

The camera array also features a 13MP ultrawide snapper, along with macro and depth modules. There won't be a dedicated telephoto camera, but '12-24mm' is printed around the flash, indicating that the primary camera could have 2x on-sensor lossless zoom. It's expected that the Edge 70 Fusion will also feature a 32MP selfie camera.

Elsewhere, Motorola has teased a 144Hz display with 1.5K resolution and "quad curved" screen edges, enabling a 96.2% screen-to-body ratio. Peak brightness is said to be 5,200 nits, with the display featuring HDR10+ support. The phone will also pack a huge 7000mAh battery, which Motorola claims is big enough to power the Edge 70 Fusion for up to 52 hours. Yet despite the high capacity battery, the phone is said to be just 7.99mm in thickness (excluding the camera bump). Processing power will be provided by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 7s Gen 4 chipset.

To make the Edge 70 Fusion stand out of the crowd visually, it'll be available in five body color options, all of which are Pantone curated colors. The rear panel will also get a fabric finish for a little extra distinctiveness.

Motorola is expected to fully reveal the Edge 70 Fusion at Mobile World Congress 2026, which starts on Monday, March 2.

Samsung has updated its flagship smartphone for 2026, with the Galaxy S26 Ultra packing its finest mobile camera tech to date with a quad-camera setup that brings back the mighty 200MP primary sensor. While this year’s camera hardware is very familiar to anyone upgrading from last year’s Ultra, from the design through to the software, there’s enough new here to get excited about.

The Galaxy S26 Ultra’s headline feature is Privacy Display, a hardware-and-software one-two punch that prevents prying eyes from seeing what’s on the phone’s massive 6.9-inch screen. It also sports a fresh new chip courtesy of Qualcomm, some nifty AI tools, our favorite being Audio Eraser for third-party apps, and should run cooler for gamers and long bouts of 4K or 8K video capture, thanks to the upgraded vapor chamber.

Starting at $1,299 / £1,279 / AU$2,199, the S26 Ultra is Samsung’s priciest non-folding phone to date, so what other tricks does it have up its sleeve?

Design: the S Pen’s back, but Titanium isn’t

The Galaxy S26 Ultra brings back much of what we know and love from the S25 Ultra, including the S Pen with 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity that stows neatly in the bottom corner. Expect Samsung’s trademark look and feel with a flat Armor Aluminum frame set against a flat glass front and back, and raised cameras around the back.

Despite its big screen, the S26 Ultra is relatively skinny at 7.9mm. The corners have been slightly rounded off, making it more comfortable in the hand and less angular than last year’s Ultra, and it’s also a comfortable 214g, a little lighter than an iPhone 17 Pro Max.

Available in six colors, you can pick up the S26 Ultra in Cobalt Violet, Sky Blue, Black, White, plus a couple of online-exclusive colors: Silver Shadow and Pink Gold. The phone’s also as durable as flagships get with an IP68/69 dust and water resistance ratings and Corning’s Ultra Gorilla Armor 2 glass on the front, complete with a glare-free finish.

Our biggest gripe with the S26 Ultra is its lack of MagSafe-style Qi 2 magnetic mounting, which is extremely handy for hands-free capture. Samsung will be dropping official cases that add the feature, or you can opt for one of the best Galaxy S26 Ultra cases from the likes of Mous or Pitaka, but if you’re a fan of case-free phones, magnets are out.

Screen: privacy please

If you’ve used a privacy screen protector before, then you know what Samsung’s headline feature for the Galaxy S26 Ultra does: it limits off-angle viewing, but unlike other phones, the S26 Ultra does it out of the box. Just press a button in the quick settings panel to toggle Privacy Display on or off, making it impossible for anyone on either side of you to see what’s on-screen.

Outside its foldables, many techies have felt Samsung smartphones have lacked serious wow-factor in recent years, so it’s great to see a headline feature that’s both practical and impressive land on its latest flagship. After using the phone, Privacy Display is easy to activate and effective, with the option to only fire up in specific apps, and you can adjust the effect's strength for maximum control.

Samsung product expert Kadesh Beckford confirmed that the Privacy Display works with third-party screen protectors for anyone who wants extra durability, and they also explained how the tech works: Samsung activates individual pixels to narrow the viewing angle, allowing only front-on viewing. Very cool.

The rest of the screen is less groundbreaking but a good box-checking exercise, with its Dynamic AMOLED 2X tech, 3120 x 1440 resolution creating a crisp 500 PPI pixel density, and a 120Hz adaptive refresh rate for iPhone 17 Pro-matching smoothness.

Camera: AI and aperture upgrades

On first glance, the Galaxy S26 Ultra’s camera is virtually identical to its predecessor with the same pixel counts and focal lenghts, but dig a little deeper and there are some differences.

Starting with the primary camera, it has a 1/1.3-inch primary sensor with a 200MP resolution. The upgrade comes from the faster f/1.4 lens, down from f/1.7, which should help with low-light performance. The 50MP 5x telephoto camera’s lens is also faster, f/2.9 versus f/3.5 in the S25 Ultra, paired with a 1/2.52-inch sensor, while the ultra-wide camera’s 50MP setup is identical across the board, with an f/1.9 aperture and a 1/2.5-inch sensor.

Our biggest issue with Samsung’s flagships of late has been the 3x camera. Sitting between two powerhouses (the primary camera and 5x zoom), it always delivered a noticeable drop in quality when it fired up, especially in low-light scenes. This year, Samsung seems to have confusingly dropped the sensor size from 1/3.52 inches to 1/3.94 inches. This could be a newer, better-optimised sensor, so we’ll have to get the S26 Ultra in for review before we write it off. But with a smaller sensor, this could be a downgrade in the 70-100mm range.

You can expect Samsung’s finest AI photo processing to debut on the S26 Ultra, which should help eke out more from the hardware mix than older Galaxy phones, and video also gets a solid set of software updates. Action camera fans will appreciate Horizon Lock, which takes stabilization to a new level, keeping the horizon level even with extreme tilts. Nightography video is another area AI has overcome challenges faced by small smartphone sensors. And a feature that seems perfect for gigs is Auto Framing: when zooming in beyond the telephoto camera’s native focal length, it uses AI to keep the performer centered in the frame.

The S26 Ultra also brings back Log capture, while adding support for APV codec capture at up to 8K resolution. If you haven’t used APV before, it stands for Advanced Professional Video and is a royalty-free alternative to Apple’s ProRes. Unlike Log capture, APV doesn’t flatten the tone curve. Instead, it’s a codec that captures higher bit depth, producing less gradient banding and artifacting, and delivering a crisper image.

Interface: OneUI with added AI

Diving into Samsung’s interface, OneUI might as well be called OneAI at this rate. New features aplenty, the S26 series’s Creative Studio can create sticker packs and edit photos using text prompts and gen AI, the phone analyzes screenshots and auto-sorts and indexes them, making them searchable and arranged in folders, and Bixby, Samsung’s voice assistant is smarter, acting like a ChatGPT-style LLM that can control your phone settings and pull online information all in one place.

Probably the neatest AI addition is Audio Eraser. We’ve seen it baked into the sound and video recorders, cleaning up audio recorded on phones, but now it works with third-party video apps as well. Whether watching YouTube or Netflix, you can dial out the background crowd during a gig or a football match, and it worked surprisingly well when we tested it.

Power, pricing, and availability

Qualcomm saves its higher clock-speed flagship chips for Samsung’s Ultra model, and this year is no exception, with the S26 Ultra powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy. Packing the largest vapor chamber of any Galaxy phone and delivering 20% better cooling, so gamers, 8K video fans, and video editors should see the benefits of this upgrade.

The S26 Ultra’s battery capacity remains unchanged at 5,000 mAh, though Samsung upgrades charging speeds with 60W wired charging, powering it to 75% in 30 minutes, and 25W wireless charging.

Available to pre-order now and on sale March 11, the Galaxy S26 Ultra starts at $1,299 / £1,279 for the 256GB model, climbs to $1,499 / £1,449 for 512GB storage, and tops out at $1,799 / £ 1,699 for the maxed-out 1TB, 16GB RAM configuration.

Competing head-on with the iPhone 17 Pro Max and Pixel 10 Pro, thanks to its Privacy Display, the Galaxy S26 Ultra could be the most interesting of the three, but can it really command such a high asking price even with its new party trick? Check back for the full review to find out.

Vivo’s V series has always sat in that interesting middle ground, not quite flagship, not quite budget, but designed to offer a slice of premium experience at a more accessible price. The Vivo V70 continues that tradition, bringing triple Zeiss co-engineered cameras and a redesigned look for a phone that feels more high-end than previous generations.

Although if you look beyond the new style and a slight bump in screen resolution, you might be a little underwhelmed, as there isn't really a huge amount of hardware updates to separate it from last year's V60.

The headline remains the same 50MP Zeiss Super Telephoto camera with a periscope structure and a 1/1.95-inch sensor as featured in the V60, but it's still something you don’t always see at this level. The V70 also introduces 4K 60p video to the V series and more AI options for portrait photography scenes.

After spending time shooting, editing, and living with it, here’s how it really stacks up.

Vivo V70: Specifications

Vivo V70: Price & Availability

The Vivo V70, like most of Vivo’s output, will only be coming to select markets in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, which is a shame for a compelling mid-range option. Converted, it works out around $450 for the 8GB+256GB version and US$550 for the 12GB+512GB version.

The closest competition is perhaps the Xiaomi 15T, which also squeezes in three cameras for roughly the same price. Compared to other rivals like the Pixel 10a or OnePlus 15R, Vivo leaps ahead in telephoto capabilities.

If you’re thinking of upgrading from the V60, however, the gains aren’t that dramatic, but you might be tempted by the swish new design.

Vivo V70: Design

The V70 might look a little familiar if you’ve been keeping one eye on phone releases over the last few months, with an eerily similar design to the recent OnePlus 15 and Oppo Find X9 Pro. Of course, no one really owns phone design, and those phones both borrow from other models, but it is interesting that Vivo chose to follow in such a similar style so close to those releases.

Regardless, the V70 looks and feels great – and I think much better than the V60. Picking it up, it does feel more expensive than it is.

I’ve been using the “Golden Hour” version with the Sunset Glow design. It’s really not personally my taste – I tend to prefer more understated matte finishes – but I can absolutely see the appeal. The etched glass catches the light beautifully, and it genuinely stands out in a sea of grey slabs. If that’s too bold, Alpine Gray, Sandalwood Brown, Canary Yellow, and Authentic Black offer more restrained options.

The aerospace-grade aluminium frame gives the V70 a reassuring solidity and feels good in the hand. The matte rail also blends seamlessly with the same metallic camera module.

The camera island sits neatly in the top-left corner, which keeps it out of the way of fingers, and it now houses all three lenses and the halo ring light in one unified block, which I prefer over the design of last year's phone that kicked the ultrawide off on its own.

At 157.5mm tall and under 195g, it’s marginally smaller and lighter than many current flagships. For anyone who finds today’s ultra-sized devices a bit unwieldy, this is a nice compromise.

The display is a 6.59-inch 1.5K AMOLED panel at 120Hz. It’s bright, colourful and sharp – not class-leading, but very good for the price, and a noticeable bump in resolution and quality over the V60. The flat screen with rounded corners is a big win for me. I’ve never loved curved displays, and this feels practical and modern.

There are multiple colour modes: Natural (my preferred setting), Professional (a touch warm and muted to my eye), and a more vibrant option if you like punchy tones. You can also manually tweak the colour temperature, which I appreciate.

Durability is another highlight with IP68 and IP69 ratings for water resistance, and a 10-point drop resistance. Vivo even includes a clear silicone case in the box. While I’m not usually a fan of clear cases as they tend to yellow over time, the case is good quality and a welcome inclusion.

Vivo V70: Camera Performance

• Wide camera: 50MP, 23mm equivalent, 1/1.56"
• Telephoto camera: 50MP, 73mm equivalent (3x), 1/1.95"
• Ultrawide camera: 8MP, 15mm equivalent

The 50MP main camera is very good. Images are sharp and detailed without excessive artificial sharpening. HDR is well controlled, and skies stay realistically blue. In low light, quality dips slightly, as you’d expect, but Vivo’s Night mode does a solid job. I consistently came away with usable, balanced images without that overprocessed look some mid-range phones suffer from.

There are quite a lot of color tuning options available in the native camera app. Zeiss colour tuning was my go-to. It delivers more natural tones than the default Vivid mode, but if you prefer bolder colors, then that is the one to go for. There are also several stylised options, including film-inspired looks that don't really look like film, but they do add an easy way to stylize photos without having to do any editing.

The 50MP Zeiss Super Telephoto with its periscope structure, though, is the star of the show, and genuinely impressive at this price. The telephoto has a native focal length equivalent of 73mm (or 3x), which is great for portraits. The 50MP resolution allows for in-sensor zoom, with options for 88mm and 141mm, which gets you a bit more distance without much of a dip in quality.

Digital zoom performance is though is also pretty strong. I was able to get usable shots equivalent to around 243mm with only a little excessive sharpening. Beyond that, the computational AI kicks in harder. At extreme zoom levels, textures become overly smooth, and digital sharpening is more obvious. But within sensible limits, this is one of the better telephoto experiences in the segment.

There is also Vivo's Stage Mode, which is designed specifically for balancing harsh spotlights and isolating performers at concerts.

The 8MP ultra-wide is clearly the weakest link. In good light, it’s fine for social use, but pixel peeping reveals muddier detail and more aggressive sharpening. The camera also sometimes produced images with a slightly different white balance than the other two lenses.

At night, it struggles noticeably more than the other two lenses. It’s usable, but you can feel where the budget constraints landed.

There is also Vivo's “Instant Camera” mode, which borrows heavily from Fujifilm's Instax Mini with image borders and stickers. You can then “print” your photos to your camera roll. Fun? Sure. Essential? Not really for me.

Macro photography is fine, it's not flagship-grade, but it's decent enough for casual use. Macro images suffer from too much computational sharpening and an occasional ethereal glow around fine detail.

There also seems to be a specific macro mode or macro indication on the phone, and the camera does bounce between lenses a little when you are trying to find the nearest focus, although the guide text tells you to move back if you're too close.

The 50MP selfie camera is sharp and clear in balanced light. It struggles a bit in backlit scenes with overzealous HDR. There are also numerous retouching options, but you can dial these down as you see fit. Portrait mode cuts out subjects well. Hair remains the usual challenge, but edge detection is solid overall.

Vivo V70: Phone Performance

The Vivo V70 runs on the Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 with either 8GB or 12GB of RAM – I have the latter version for review. If that sounds familiar, then it might be because it’s the same processor as last year’s V60. Although the Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 is still one of the go-to processors for most phones in this price/performance bracket.

Day-to-day performance is smooth. Apps open quickly, multitasking is fluid, and I didn’t notice any significant slowdowns. If you aren't going to push your phone with heavy editing or gaming, it's hard to argue that more powerful chips are necessary.

For upgraders, Vivo has had a bit more time to tune the phone, but benchmark improvements over the Vivo V60 are modest, with it just edging past the V60 on Geekbench's CPU testing and 3DMark's GPU tests (see below).

In my real-world tests, the V70 exported 100 RAW photos to 2048px JPEGs using Adobe Lightroom in one minute and five seconds, which is middle of the pack. It took 6 minutes and 9 seconds to complete my video export test, exporting a 10-minute, 4K 10-bit video into 1080p using CapCut. This was quite slow, and interestingly, slower than the previous model. That may improve with firmware updates, but for now, this is still solid mid-range performance, but not creator powerhouse territory.

Battery life is excellent. It has the same 6,500mAh cell as the last model, and it comfortably lasted a day and a half with general use. However, heavy filming and editing brought that under a day. For topping up, the V70 can take advantage of Vivo’s proprietary 90W FlashCharge – although whether a charger is included in the box likely depends on your market.

When charging via Power Delivery (PD) chargers, the V70 reached 30% with a 15-minute charge, 55% in 30 minutes, and was full in 61 minutes.

The V70 ships with OriginOS 6, built on top of Android 16, with Vivo promising four OS upgrades and six years of security updates. This replaces Vivo’s FunOS and is both a visual and functional improvement over previous Vivo skins. It feels more cohesive, slicker, and more modern, but there’s still too much pre-installed bloatware, and even Vivo’s VApp store and other Vivo apps' persistent notifications are a headache until you disable them.

Vivo V70: Verdict

Of the Vivo V-series phones I've tested, the V70 is the most refined to date. Yes, it heavily borrows some design cues from other phones, but I think it looks stylish, has a wealth of color options, and it feels more premium than its price tag. The spec sheet might also be a little disappointing to anyone considering this over the V60, but it has a noticeable bump in screen resolution, and still offers excellent battery life and decent long-term software support.

For photographers, this is a serious mid-range option. The Zeiss-tuned camera system is very good, the telephoto a particular standout and genuinely impressive for this class, but the overall shooting experience is consistent and enjoyable. Yes, the ultra-wide is weaker, but the other two lenses make up for its shortcomings.

If you’re upgrading from the V60, don’t expect huge performance leaps. But if you’re coming from an older device and want a stylish, photography-forward Android mid-ranger, then the V70 is a very solid choice – if you are in one of the select markets the V70 releases in.

Alternatives

If the rumors are true, then we are only one week away from the reveal of the Galaxy S26 Ultra. And as the February 25 Galaxy Unpacked launch event draws closer, Samsung is continuing to tease features from its next flagship camera phone.

The latest taster, perhaps unsurprisingly, shows off some of the phone’s AI camera features. In a trio of Shorts, Samsung shows off how the Galaxy camera will be able to reconstruct missing elements of an image using AI, as well as adding an element into a photo simply by asking for it in your own words, or sketching it into your image - multimodal input, in Samsung speak. The last short demonstrates how an element from a photograph - in this case a puppy - can instantly be turned into a selection of graphical stickers.

The emphasis here is the "fluid creative experience". Samsung wants to integrate AI into every aspect of the camera system so its use is completely natural, with a seamless capture, edit and share experience - no switching between apps, and no messing about in menus or fine-tuning tools. Traditional prerequisites for creating a compelling photo - experience, technical skill, etc - are no longer required, as thanks to AI this is "the easiest and most user-friendly Galaxy camera experience yet".

Past leaks have suggested that the S26 Ultra is unlikely to have much new camera hardware, so it was inevitable that Samsung would instead focus on software improvements when promoting the S26 Ultra. But as much as we love to tear into Samsung for its lack of camera hardware innovation, does this even matter any more? With AI now able to essentially magic an image out of nothing, it could be argued that the camera itself offers little more than suggestions to the Neural Processing Unit, whereupon AI modifies that raw image data so much that you'd never know whether the original exposure was captured on a 12MP or 200MP sensor.

Recent reports from Digital Chat Station suggest that Xiaomi is moving its Modular Optical System, first shown off at MWC 2025, into mass production.

Given its lack of compatibility across other phone brands and limited use even within Xiaomi's own device lineup, with only a prototype Xiaomi 15 supporting the lens, I don't think any of us saw this coming. However, since MWC, it appears that Xiaomi's confidence in the hardware concept has grown significantly to the point that the lab experiment might eventually find its way to a commercial release.

This isn't the first of its kind, with the Sony QX series and Alice Camera forging the way, albeit not terribly successfully. Xiaomi's solution attempts to overcome the 'bulk' of these by utilizing a high-speed LaserLink connection to offload all image processing to the smartphone's internal ISP. That keeps the unit at a lightweight 100g, but it does come with a significant downside.

This LaserLink connection requires specific hardware for the mounting, 10Gbps optical data transfer, and power delivery. This hardware is currently restricted to Xiaomi and even then likely to only be present in a select number of as yet unreleased phones, such as the rumored Xiaomi Mix 5. So, even though it might end up in mass production, how massive the uptake will be, only time will tell.

Impressive specs for a Micro Four Thirds sensor

The Micro Four Thirds 100MP sensor is the same size as used in the best Olympus (OM System) cameras and some top cameras from Panasonic's Lumix range. Impressively, it's even larger than the 1-inch sensor powering the Xiaomi 15 Ultra’s main camera.

Beyond the sensor is a compact 35mm lens, with a max aperture of f/1.4 (min f/11), an all-6G aspherical lens assembly, and a close focus distance of around 20cm. The lens also has both autofocus and manual focus with support for face recognition.

The lens is powered via pogo pins and a magnetic ring mount (akin to Apple’s MagSafe). Our reviews editor, Gareth Bevan, had a very brief hands-on with the system and was able to confirm that the magnetic connection is impressively strong and feels really secure in use.

At MWC, the system was already very polished for a concept, so we can only imagine the refinement that has taken place in the meantime. The design is minimal, the build quality is premium, and the focus ring is nice and smooth.

Gareth says, "The lens is really simple to operate; after snapping it to the back of the phone, the lens is activated in the phone's Pro mode in the camera app menu – this then switches into a dedicated UI for the lens, which is already looking slick."

There's no doubting that Xiaomi has created an outstanding product. What's left to be seen is whether enough people are happy parting with their hard-earned money to own it.

You might also like...

Interested in upping your mobile photography? For more of the best camera phones, check out our guide. And check out the best add-on lenses for smartphones that are already on sale

I've lost count of how many times I've rolled my eyes at tech launch events. The stage lighting, the dramatic pauses, the breathless reveal of a product that's basically last year's model with slightly better specs. Whether it's the latest iPhone, camera, laptop or tablet, the script is always the same.

So when Nothing CEO Carl Pei announced they won't be releasing a flagship phone in 2026, I perked up. "We're not just going to churn out a new flagship every year for the sake of it," he said. "We want every upgrade to feel significant." Imagine that. A tech company admitting they don't have anything genuinely new to say this year, so they're not saying it.

What we can learn

If you've been reporting on tech for as long as I have, the launch of a new flagship typically feels like Groundhog Day. Sometimes the improvements are meaningful: the Canon 5D Mark II to Mark III leap, or the arrival of Apple Silicon in MacBooks. But most of the time, the "new" model feels like a firmware update someone decided to charge $2,000 for.

I'm thinking of you, firms who've released multiple versions of essentially the same product in recent years. Cameras with identical sensors. Tablets with marginal processor bumps. You know who you are.

If the only result was that entitled tech reporters got bored, that would be one thing. But this annual cycle madness actively harms the planet. Every new release means resources extracted, factories running, packaging created, and perfectly functional equipment being discarded. The average photographer's drawer of "backup" cameras and phones is a monument to upgrades they didn't need. Same goes for old tablets and laptops.

In contrast, Nothing's approach acknowledges a simple truth. Sometimes the best thing you can do is nothing. The Phone (3) is still excellent, so why discard it? Why create waste and emissions for marginal gains nobody asked for?

Who agreed to this?

Somewhere along the line, we all agreed that technology needs to evolve on a strict calendar, as if innovation respects fiscal quarters. But genuine breakthroughs don't work that way. They're lumpy and unpredictable. Sometimes you get mirrorless cameras that change everything. Sometimes you get five years of the same thing with different buttons.

The tech world would do well to embrace this reality. Imagine if Apple made iPadOS genuinely excellent instead of releasing another marginally improved iPad. Or if Canon focused on perfecting their lenses instead of another R5. Or if Sony finally nailed their camera menu system.

This isn't about companies going quiet; it's about redirecting energy toward things that matter. Nothing is focused on developing its mid-range Phone (4a) series, and improving existing products through software in the meantime. Smart moves that don't require churning out hardware nobody needs.

Why this makes sense

Here's the beautiful part: if tech firms adopted this approach, our gear would stay relevant longer. No more sinking feelings when the "Mark II" drops six months after purchase. No more watching resale values crater. We'd have time to enjoy our tech, instead of perpetually lusting after upgrades.

I'm not naive enough to think this will catch on widely. Shareholders love new releases. But Nothing has shown there's another way. Even Apple, the OG of annual release cycles, could learn from this.

So here's to Nothing doing nothing. May it inspire tech makers to do the same. And who knows? If we're not frantically upgrading every year, we might actually use our gear for what it was designed for.

The smartphone battery wars are really heating up (not in a Galaxy Note way). Just as 7,000mAh+ batteries start to become the norm on many flagship phones, Realme has today gone one better with the release of its latest smartphone – the P4 Power 5G – featuring the Chinese tech company's first 10,001 mAh battery.

Realme describes it as the "world's first 10,001mAh Titan Battery". If you're only considering popular consumer models, it takes the capacity crown from phones like the Oppo Find X9 Pro and Honor Magic 8 Lite with their 7,500mAh cells – and is almost double the 5,088mAh capacity of my iPhone 17 Pro Max! Although Apple has proven that through tight hardware and software integration, bigger capacity batteries don't necessarily mean better longevity.

If you expand your search to "rugged" smartphones, then you'll find devices that are capable of nearly 25,000 mAh – although not in as svelte a design as the P4 Power.

Nonetheless, Realme's achievement with their new Titan battery looks very impressive indeed. By utilizing silicon-carbon anode technology and an advanced C Pack and F Pack protection design, the P4 Power 5G should be capable of delivering even longer-lasting performance than what we've seen yet. And the fact that this battery is contained in a 9.08mm, 219g body only increases the kudos.

The P4 Power 5G supports 80W fast charging, which, despite its huge capacity, means it can be recharged to 50 per cent in just 36 minutes. Beyond that, the phone can also be used as a power bank to power accessories and other devices, thanks to a speedy 27W reverse charging feature.

Impressive battery specs continue with the device able to handle temperatures ranging from –30°C to 56°C. That's a greater range than I could physically survive in, not that I'm up for trying. Long-term battery health is also good, with the battery allegedly retaining more than 80% capacity after eight years.

It's not all about the battery

Aside from battery specs, the P4 Power 5G aims to combine flagship-level performance and a bold 'Visible Power Design'. It utilizes the Dimensity 7400 Ultra 5G chipset, which promises faster image recognition, enhanced HDR processing, and reliable 4K recording.

Then there's the HyperGlow 4D Curve AMOLED display, which features a 144Hz refresh rate and a peak brightness of 6500 nits. That means the phone is clearly visible in bright outdoor conditions and has a refresh rate that is ideal for fast-paced mobile gaming.

Aside from the internal hardware, the P4 Power 5G has a rear panel that is split into two zones, with the lower section containing the battery, and the upper transparent area reveals the internal circuitry.

Beyond aesthetics, the device features IP69, IP68, and IP66 protection, ArmorShell Protection, Corning Gorilla Glass, 400% UltraBoom high-volume audio, and the latest Realme UI 7.0.

Price and Availability

Realme likes to focus its efforts in India, Southeast Asia, and China, so we're pretty doubtful that this smartphone will ever be released in the US or UK. What we do know is that it'll be available in India from today (January 29th). Available in Flash Orange and Power Silver. The final pricing is yet to be confirmed.

You might also like...

Discover the best camera phones and Android phones for photography in our comprehensive guides.

Xiaomi has officially opened a new flagship store in London, marking another step in its expansion across Europe, and giving UK shoppers their best chance yet to get hands-on with some of the brand’s best camera phones.

Located in Westfield Stratford, the new Xiaomi Store is open from today, and it’s clearly designed to raise the brand’s profile in a market still dominated by Apple and Samsung. But, for photography fans in particular, this new store could be a big deal.

Xiaomi’s recent camera phones have been among the most exciting I’ve tested, but they still feel like niche picks rather than mainstream hits. Take the Xiaomi 15 Ultra. In my experience, it’s one of the most capable camera phones on the market right now, delivering a Leica-tuned flagship-level imaging performance, yet it still flies under the radar for most everyday consumers.

The timing of the new store also feels very deliberate. Xiaomi is expected to bring the Xiaomi 17 Ultra and a 17 Ultra Leica Edition to Europe soon – models that could push Xiaomi even further as a photography brand. If Xiaomi can back up its hardware with a strong retail presence, it could start to look like a serious threat to established flagship brands.

But the big question is, will Xiaomi's physical retail presence move the needle in a market so dominated by a few big players? Certainly being able to walk into a store, handle the devices, compare them side-by-side, and test the cameras for yourself can make a huge difference. Xiaomi’s new London store gives shoppers exactly that opportunity, but it might have its work cut out to tempt anyone to consider ditching Apple, Samsung, or Google.

For now, this new flagship store represents a definite statement of intent. Xiaomi clearly wants to be seen as a genuine competitor. Whether this is enough to make Apple nervous is another question, but Xiaomi is certainly becoming harder to ignore.

You might also like...

Check out more of the best camera phones or best Android phones for photography in our guides

The Honor Magic 8 Lite is an affordable handset with a massive battery, a durable design, a big, bright OLED display, and a 108MP main camera. We've been impressed with the cameras on Honor's flagship devices, so there's plenty of potential to explore here.

On paper, it sounds like an incredible bargain, but what compromises were made to hit such a budget-friendly price? I've been using the Honor Magic 8 Lite as my main device for the past couple of weeks in an effort to find out.

Specifications

Price & Availability

The Honor Magic 8 Lite with 512GB of storage and 8GB of RAM (and microSD card expansion) launched for £399, although as ever with Honor, there are early bird discounts on the phone, alongside a series of bundled accessories. The phone is launching in the UK and most European regions, but it won't be available in the US.

Design

The last few Honor Magic Lite models have featured curved-edge designs, which served to make the phones feel extremely slim, but also made them look a little dated. With the Magic 8 Lite, however, Honor has adopted the boxy flat edges that we've seen on most of 2025's flagship handsets.

Personally, I much prefer the way the newer model looks and feels. It may not create the same illusion of slimness, but it looks a lot more premium. Plus, the flat display means better compatibility with screen protectors and no accidental edge-touches.

The circular camera halo in the centre of the rear panel remains largely the same, and I'm quite fond of it. It makes a change from the usual camera layout, and it makes the Magic 8 Lite immediately recognisable in a crowded market.

I'm especially fond of the Forest Green colourway that my sample came in. It has a velvety matte finish that's highly fingerprint resistant, and the colour shifts slightly when the light hits it. It's also available in Midnight Black and Reddish Brown, but since I haven't seen those in the flesh, I can't comment on how they compare.

The Magic 8 Lite has been awarded the highest IP-rating available, IP69K. This means it's effectively immune to dust and can withstand dunks in water. Apparently, it'll even survive a run through the dishwasher, as it can withstand blasts from jets of hot water. That's not something I fancied trying myself, though.

The phone has a plastic frame, and you can immediately feel the difference between this and a more expensive device. That said, it doesn't seem to have a negative impact on durability.

Honor says the phone can withstand drops from up to 2.5 metres, thanks to a 6-layer internal drop-resistant structure. In addition, the glass coating on the screen has a 31% deeper tempering depth, to help protect it from drops and scratches. If you're the adventurous type, this phone should be able to keep up.

The display punches well above its weight, and it's one of the nicer panels that you'll find in this price bracket.

It's a spacious 6.79-inch OLED panel with a 120Hz refresh rate, and it peaks at 6000 nits brightness, outperforming many flagship devices. It also has slimmer and more symmetrical bezels on all sides, compared to its predecessors.

The pill-shaped cut-out is gone this time, too. You now get a smaller circular punch hole for the selfie camera, which means more of the screen real estate is actually functional. It also works well in the rain, as it supports Honor's AI Heavy Rain Touch feature, which is very handy at this time of year.

Camera Performance

The Honor Magic 8 Lite has the same camera hardware as the Magic 7 Lite, and the Magic 6 Lite before that. Unfortunately, that's not the best news for mobile shooters.

In terms of specifications, there's a 108MP main camera and a 5MP ultrawide on the back, and they're joined by a 16MP selfie snapper on the front.

As you might expect, the 108MP main camera is the best performer, and it's the lens that you should stick to in most situations. It performs well in the daylight, and it's decent at night, too, but there's only so much you can expect from the relatively small 1/1.67-inch sensor.

You might think, given that this is such a high-resolution sensor, that it'll be great for digital zooms. And while it might be marginally better than other phones, you can still see a pretty sharp drop off in quality at around 3x zoom, and it gets worse from there on - as heavy-handed AI processing tries to fill in the blanks.

The 5MP ultrawide, meanwhile, is as unimpressive as it sounds on paper. Images lack detail, there's no autofocus, and the tiny 1/5.0-inch sensor means low-light photos are either noisy or blurry, depending on the situation.

The 16MP selfie camera fares better, but it's nothing too special. It can take a decent selfie in good lighting, but it's not too great in the dark. Portrait mode effects are a little lacking on this camera, too. You can only toggle the blur on and off, there's no strength slider, and I noticed a few errors in the cutout from time to time.

On occasion, you can get really nice photos from the Honor Magic 8 Lite, and I appreciate the amount of editing tools available for tweaking your images. At the end of the day, though, it's not as reliable as some similarly priced alternatives, and it doesn't hold a candle to Honor's pricier flagship devices.

When it comes to video capture, the main lens works at up to 4K 30fps, while the other cameras max out at 1080p. Stabilisation isn't great, and the microphones aren't the best, either. If you fancy yourself the next YouTube star, you may need to look elsewhere.

Phone Performance

The real star of the show here is the battery. It has a 7500 mAh capacity, meaning it's one of the largest you'll find in any mainstream phone. It matches the size of the Oppo Find X9 Pro, but for a fraction of the cost - and with a less powerful and more efficient chip inside, it should last even longer.

With my typical use, which involves spending a lot of time in the office, the phone was only using about 25% of the battery per day. This meant I could go four full days on a charge, which is something I don't think I've done since phones had number pads on them.

Of course, battery life varies wildly depending on how you use your phone. If you're out and about using 5G, taking loads of photos and playing games, expect it to die much quicker. But still, even if you're glued to your phone all day, you should be able to get 2 days on a charge without trouble.

The super-efficient Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 chipset is a double-edged sword, though. The phone feels quick enough most of the time, and it's by no means difficult to live with, but you can expect to see animation stutters from time to time, and you'll sometimes be waiting slightly longer than you'd like for an app to load.

If you're into gaming, you might not have the best time with this phone. It was able to run Wuthering Waves, which is one of the most challenging Android titles around, but it was only really playable on the lowest preset, and the framerate dipped from time to time.

As for the other specs, you get an ample 8GB of RAM as standard, and it's paired with either 256GB or 512GB of storage. I'm happy to see that even budget-focused phones are ditching the paltry 128GB version - take notes, Google.

You also get speedy 66W charging support, which takes the phone from dead to 50% charged in about half an hour. A full charge takes just over an hour, with the right charger, but you don't get one included in the box.

The Magic 8 Lite runs the same software as the rest of the Honor lineup, Magic OS. However, it's still on Magic OS 9, while some of the brand's other phones have already been updated to Magic OS 10. That said, Honor promises six years of updates and security patches in Europe, so it will receive the update sooner or later.

Magic OS is one of the more divisive Android skins, but I quite like it. It takes some styling cues from iOS, and the layout is quite similar, too. Stock Android fans may be rubbed the wrong way, but the most important thing is that it runs smoothly, even on lower-end hardware like this.

There's loads of useful stuff baked in, like Magic Portal, which lets you drag text and images from one app to another, and Magic Pill, which is essentially Honor's take on Apple's Dynamic Island. The image editing tools are extremely comprehensive, too, with plenty of AI tricks to play about with.

Final Verdict

Whether the Honor Magic 8 Lite is worth buying all depends on what you expect from a phone. Its key strengths are its insanely long battery life, its durable design and its lovely OLED screen.

If you're looking for an affordable phone that you'll rarely need to charge and don't need to be careful with, but you don't fancy carrying a specialist rugged phone, then you'll fall in love with this one. It's an excellent alternative.

It's the other aspects of this device that let it down. The cameras aren't very impressive, and the processor won't keep up with demanding tasks like 3D gaming and video editing, either.

It's not a great choice if you want to take incredible photos with your phone, but if you're into shooting landscapes and wildlife, for instance, this could be a great companion device for multiple days in the wilderness (without needing a charger).

Alternatives

The new Redmi Note 15 line is here, hoping to breathe new life into the series, with the Redmi Note 15 Pro+ 5G sitting at the top of the pile.

If choosing between five near-identical looking Note 15 models wasn't confusing enough, there are also regional differences to consider. The global model being reviewed here is a different beast compared to the Chinese Note 15 Pro+ – which debuted earlier in 2025 – most notably thanks to its cameras.

Unlike the Chinese version's 50MP Light Fusion 800 primary sensor (found across numerous other Xiaomi, Poco and Redmi phones), the international variant plays host to "the global debut of the 200MP HPE sensor."

Detailed specs on the HPE are pretty thin on the ground, but with key hardware details seemingly identical to the Samsung-made HP3 sensor used by the previous Pro+, on paper it's unclear what renders this "new 200MP ultra-clarity camera," truly 'new'.

However mysterious Xiaomi intends to be with the camera hardware the new Note 15 Pro+ is bringing to the table, only by putting it to the test can we really know whether this affordable mid-ranger is worth picking up.

Specifications

Price

Redmi is a sub-brand centered around value, and buying from the bottom of the Note 15 line still grants you a pretty complete smartphone package, for less than £180.

At the other end of the range, however, the Note 15 Pro+ 5G starts at a more considerable £429, while more RAM and double the storage (topping out at 512GB) demands an asking price of £479. For comparison, at launch its predecessor cost £399 and £449 for the same 256GB / 512GB options, respectively.

This puts the 15 Pro+ up against an entirely different assortment of affordable mid-range smartphones than both its predecessor and the more modest members of the Note 15 line; meaning greater consideration is needed before buying.

The silver lining to this stiff competition conundrum is that Xiaomi loves an Early Bird discount (offering around 18% off both models – at £329 and £399 – for a short time after launch), not to mention launch prices tend to fall on Redmi phones relatively quickly after release; especially from third-party retailers.

Design

Building on Redmi's previous-generation Notes, the 15 series has a defined enough look that you can pick them out in a crowd. Perhaps not from one another, but at least against the competition; most obviously thanks to their distinct squircle rear camera module.

As well as swapping out its main sensor, the global version of the 15 Pro+ also ditches its predecessor's (admittedly ineffectual) macro snapper, and the Chinese version's 2.5x telephoto camera. As such, of the four black circular elements within the phone's camera bump, only two are actually cameras. The third is a single LED flash, and the fourth is the autofocus laser module.

Despite being a large-screened device – bigger than its predecessor, moving from a 6.67 to a 6.83-inch display – the Pro+ is still a pleasingly comfortable phone to handle. This comes thanks, in part, to a polycarbonate – instead of metal – frame, helping keep weight down under 210 grams; impressive for a phone of this size.

You get a marginally thinner, lighter device if you opt for the fiberglass-backed Glacier Blue or black finishes, but the fractionally thicker, heavier Mocha Brown colorway featured in this review is the real head-turner.

The light brown faux leather back and pale gold accent work might not be to everyone's taste but they make for an unquestionably different looking phone; especially outside Xiaomi's wider portfolio.

Unlike the majority of phones from the past 12 months, and even the Note 15 Pro 5G that sits just beneath the Plus model, the line's top entry also opts for curved edges front and back, rather than on-trend flat sides all the way around. While the form means this phone is more comfortable to hold and elegant to look at than many rivals, the material choices do rob the it of a truly premium feel, though.

The tagline for the Note 15 series is "Titan strong" and, design-wise, that's made most evident in the 15 Pro+'s flagship-class IP66/68/69/69K-certified dust and water resistance, paired with SGS-certified drop resistance (having been tested at up to 2.5 meters), and Corning's premium Gorilla Glass Victus 2 defending the display.

In practice, this feels like a solidly built device, but if you are a little butterfingered, there's also the benefit of a pre-fitted screen plastic protector (which I have found is pretty easy to scratch up but nonetheless appreciated) and the brand's signature dark gray flexible TPU case, included in the box.

Display

The premium Xiaomi 15T from late 2025 (which starts at £120 more) offered up a superb display, and despite the Pro+'s differing curved-edge design, it looks like it's using essentially the same 6.83-inch panel.

That makes this Plus model notably larger than its 6.67-inch predecessor, but I'm all for it. As the phone doesn't feel overtly heavy, you're simply getting a bigger viewfinder and a better canvas on which to multitask, game and stream video.

Like the 15T's screen, the Note 15 Pro+'s 'CrystalRes' AMOLED lacks the more dynamic and power efficient LTPO tech seen in higher-end phones, meaning its refresh rate can only scale in large increments, between 30Hz (such as with the Always-On display), 60Hz, 90Hz, and up to its peak of 120Hz. In testing, swiping around the phone's homescreen and first-party apps, you're treated to that peak refresh rate practically all of the time; meaning a consistently responsive and fluid user experience.

Its promised 1800-nit panel-wide and 3200-nit peak brightness are pretty impressive in this corner of the mid-range market, ensuring great-looking HDR content (bolstered by 12-bit color depth, HDR10+ and Dolby Vision compatibility), as well as usable outdoor brightness.

Despite getting helpfully dim in low light scenarios (ideal for reading in the evening or checking your phone in the cinema one last time before the movie starts), other devices can dip even lower.

Xiaomi's flavor of user experience makes getting at supplementary accessibility tools – like Extra Dim – frustratingly trickier than other versions of Android, but it otherwise serves up a pleasing amount of control over the Note 15 Pro+'s viewing experience; particularly with regards to controlling the display's color balance.

The company's Wet Touch 2.0 tech goes some way to keep you typing coherently – even when raindrops hit the phone's display, but droplets running down the screen still cause the touchscreen to misinterpret interactions more often than not. This isn't an issue unique to Xiaomi's phones, however, with the likes of OnePlus' Aqua Touch algorithm proving similarly temperamental.

When it comes to smartphone displays, one of the telltale signs that this is a more affordable device comes with its use of an optical in-display fingerprint sensor. Unlike more advanced ultrasonic sensors, which employ smaller components, the use of an optical sensor has pushed Xiaomi's engineers to place it awkwardly close to the bottom bezel. It's functionally fine and responsive (working even when the display is off), but will prove a stretch for most people's thumbs.

Camera Performance

Despite Xiaomi's long-standing partnership with Leica, the efforts of this collaboration haven't yet trickled down to the camera experience offered up by the company's Redmi devices.

That headline 200MP 'ultimate-clarity camera' is the first example of the mysterious HPE sensor, but it comes backed by promising specs: namely a large 1/1.4-inch sensor size, a wide f/1.7 aperture and OIS (optical image stabilization). Whilst unconfirmed at the time of writing, it's potentially the same sensor behind the new Xiaomi 17 Ultra's telephoto camera system too.

Although this global model lacks a dedicated telephoto snapper, it instead uses the additional pixels of that higher resolution main sensor to give you lossless telephoto shooting via pixel binning. Xiaomi frames it as offering five dedicated focal lengths (in reference to its 1.2x / 28mm and 1.5x / 35mm equivalent 'lenses' when tapping the '1x' button within the camera UI), but I'd say there are three that really count: 1x, 2x and 4x lossless zoom.

By default, the main sensor bins down to capture 12.5MP stills, while the ultrawide and front facer capture images at their native 8MP and 32MP, respectively. You do also have the option to switch to 'Ultra HD' shooting, which lets you snap full-resolution 200MP stills too, but you'll want to keep hand shake to a minimum to reap any of the benefits the added resolution brings to the table.

This being a mid-range mobile photography experience, there are some expected shortcomings which rear their head when assessing the shots the Note 15 Pro+ delivers, but Xiaomi has nonetheless worked to offer up a consistent shooting experience here.

In well-lit conditions, imagery from the main sensor delivers pleasing color rendition, accurate white balance, good contrast and – when shooting subjects closer to the lens – natural-looking bokeh. It's only under scrutiny you'll notice softness in the fine details, most evident around higher contrast elements.

The consistency – particularly with regards to color rendition – surprised me, when capturing the same shot between the main and ultrawide, however, weaker dynamic range and less pixel data to work with does lead to a marginally warmer, higher contrast ultrawide image, under the same shooting conditions.

The promise of lossless zoom also delivers, but in spite of the phone's "200MP AI Engine," shots taken beyond the phone's 4x telephoto crop suddenly nosedive is quality, with the Note desperately trying to salvage useable details with little success. As the camera samples of the pier (below) highlight, such results take on an almost painterly artificial finish, as a result.

As for shooting in Ultra HD mode, 200MP shots yield greater center-frame detail than equivalent 12.5MP photos, as you might expect, but also sport softer contrast and weaker detail capture towards the edge of frame.

Unlike some of Xiaomi's more premium phones, the Redmi's standing and the ultrawide's lack of autofocus mean there's no dedicated macro shooting mode to speak of, but experimentation reveals that you can get respectable close-ups by shooting using the main sensor's 2x crop.

The phone appears to assess autofocus based on the entire frame, meaning close-up subjects it can't seem to focus on at 1x, can suddenly be pulled into sharp focus when shooting at 2x.

With low light performance, the main sensor still retains good white balance and accurate color rendition, but the further available light drops, the more dynamic range and detail retention suffer.

Even with OIS, artificial lighting is enough to challenge the Note 15 Pro+'s camera, and in side by side tests with the Galaxy S25 Ultra's flagship 200MP sensor (see above), it's clear where work needs to be done; in terms of both light gathering and detail capture.

If you're a selfie fanatic, you'll likely like the 32MP front-facer on the Note 15 Pro+. There no autofocus and – like the ultrawide – detail and dynamic range suffer in low light, but you're otherwise getting serviceable shots for the price. Tricks like Portrait Mode still do a decent job of subject separation and generate pleasing looking bokeh too, even under dim shooting conditions.

Flip to video and the front camera's 1080p / 60fps capture feels a little limited, with weaker color reproduction and obvious jitter from the EIS (electronic image stabilization) when walking and the like, but the rear camera's peak 4K / 30fps capture is comparatively great. Image fidelity is pleasing, primarily thanks to fast autofocus and exposure adjustment, as well as an impressively smooth zoom transition; mainly due to the fact the phone doesn't readily need to switch sensors as you increase magnification.

There's pleasant enough stereo audio capture, which was able to maintain clear voice pickup against the coastal winds in my test footage. Better bass performance from the microphones is needed for a fuller sound, though. The OIS system grants smoother footage than what's possible from the front camera, but as with stills, a lack of natural light will quickly degrade definition and dynamic range in your recordings.

Phone Performance

It shouldn't come as much of a surprise that, as the Note 14 Pro+ used Qualcomm's Snapdragon 7s Gen 3, the Note 15 Pro+ is powered by its successor: the Snapdragon 7s Gen 4.

There aren't many phones on the market using this new silicon at present, but in practice it ensures the new top Note 15 can keep pace about as well as last year's model did.

Artificial benchmarks – like Geekbench 6 – cite an incremental 8% single-core and 3% multi-core improvement, alongside 7% better GPU performance. Not taking into account the newer, more efficient process the chip is built on, the 7s Gen 4 delivers about as much power as a five year-old flagship Android phone.

That's paired to – again, like its predecessor – serviceable, but not cutting-edge LPDDR4X RAM and UFS 2.2 storage. Mid-range competitors have started to embrace faster and more power efficient LPDDR5 and UFS 3.1 memory and storage standards, though.

How does this all translate into the real-world use? While those benchmark scores aren't anything to write home about, it's a liveable, fluid and responsive phone to use most of the time. Aside from the occasional stutter, wait times are the most consistent performance hiccup; left waiting a second or two longer then you might expect when opening more demanding apps (in terms of performance, data load, or both). Flipping between the phone's camera sensors can also take longer than expected, which could lead to you missing a fleeting shot.

Using the phone's Game Boost feature, high-end titles like Call of Duty Mobile are wholly playable at a solid 60fps, anything above that, however, is inconsistent at best. Prolonged play (more than 30 minutes) does result in a little warmth, but the phone's IceLoop vapor chamber seems to keep performance dips in check.

As with its memory standards, the phone's software experience is also a little dated out the gate too. HyperOS 2.0 (atop Android 15) is the company's previous-generation user experience, with more premium entries – like the Xiaomi 15T series – already running the latest HyperOS 3.0 (atop Android 16).

Thankfully, there isn't a gaping divide in functionality between these particular releases, but paired with Xiaomi's middle-of-the-pack commitment to four years of OS and six years of security updates, longevity could be better.

HyperOS is a feature-packed take on Android, but if you're coming from a more traditional entry – like a Pixel or Motorola – Xiaomi's heavier skin has a steeper learning curve than you might expect.

Highlights include interconnectivity and AirDrop-style convenience with MacOS and an impressively robust set of image editing tools built right into the phone's native Gallery app. Paired with RAW capture support (only at 12.5MP, not 200MP), you can get more out of pictures taken with the Note 15 Pro+ if you're willing to take the time to experiment.

There are also a wealth of AI-backed image editing features too, like competent object and reflection removal (see below), outpainting and more. Collectively, HyperOS lets you get extensively creative with your images, thanks to a toolset you're unlikely to find elsewhere from phones at this price point.

On the flip side, Redmi's affordable standing in Xiaomi's smartphone hierachy is directly proportional to the number of baked-in ads you'll encounter throughout the user experience. They appear in the notifications shade, when opening certain first-party apps, and even on the lock screen. It's easily the worst part of HyperOS and while you can take steps to mitigate their prevalence, I've been unable to avoid encounters with ads completely.

Networking is handled by Xiaomi's own T1S Tuner, but the Redmi Note 15 Pro+ is also among the first of the company's phones to support Xiaomi Offline Communication, which means cell network-free calls and messaging with other compatible Xiaomi devices, at a range of up to a kilometer.

As well as its hardy construction, one other area where the Note 15 Pro+ demonstrates impressive endurance is with its battery longevity.

While the global model loses out on the Chinese version's gargantuan 7,000mAh power pack, it still sports a sizeable 6,500mAh cell of its own (for comparison, the likes of the Galaxy S25 Ultra has a 5,000mAh cell). That comes backed by the latest silicon-carbon tech – helping to keep the physical dimensions of the battery down – and impressively fast 100W fast charging (up from 90W on the Chinese model).

As well as offering the fastest wired charging in the new Note 15 line, the Pro+ also boasts faster 22.5W reverse wired charging, making it an excellent back-up power bank in a pinch.

Whether your device comes with a power adapter in-box will vary by region. I was able to test the Note 15 Pro+ 5G with an included 100W Xiaomi charger, and after enabling Top Speed mode in the phone's battery settings, I was able to refill the device from flat in just 39 minutes. The battery also made it back past 50% charge after only 15 minutes. Impressive stuff.

Compare that to similarly-priced Pixels and Nothing's latest a-series phones, and the Note 15 Pro+ leaves them in the dust in this regard.

As for longevity, despite the huge Si-C battery, Xiaomi's cells often seem to lag behind other high-capacity rivals. That said, the Note 15 Pro+ can happily be a two-day phone, without requiring too much thought; based on around eight hours of screen-on time per charge.

If we're talking long-term longevity, Xiaomi claims the battery is also rated to withstand operation in temperatures as low at -20ºC, and will retain 80% of its total capacity after 1,600 cycles; equivalent to around six years of charging.

Verdict

The Redmi Note 15 Pro+ is, for the most part, a by-the-numbers incremental upgrade; littered with small improvements across the majority of its feature set, when compared to its predecessor.

The global model's reworked camera system makes for a more seamless shooting experience than its Chinese counterpart, but is ultimately still best suited to social media; despite the odd neat trick. If you like to get creative with your photography, there are few phones at this price point with as robust a set of native editing tools to play with, though.

A hardy design and decent battery performance (particularly its fast-charging), will appeal to those after a long-lasting, durable, affordable mid-ranger, but HyperOS' ad-riddled user experience may be a little too challenging to live with for some.

Perhaps the biggest challenge the Note 15 Pro+ 5G faces isn't like-priced competition from big-name rivals – like Samsung and Google – but rather from within Xiaomi's own ranks. The Poco M8 Pro just arrived less a month after the Note 15 Pro+ and brings to the table a near-identical design and spec sheet, save for the camera system, which mirrors that of the Chinese Pro+ instead.

If the explicit fluidity and versatility of the 15 Pro+'s 200MP main snapper aren't essential to your photographic needs, the newer Poco M8 Pro is otherwise the same phone but for significantly less. In the UK, the M8 Pro starts at £299 (before any discounts), that's 30% than the baseline Note 15 Pro+, making Redmi's latest and greatest global release a tricky recommendation, despite its strengths.

Alternatives

Just days after renowned tipster Ice Universe suggested the Galaxy S27 Ultra will have mostly new camera hardware, we've got a new leak from the same source with more detail about exactly what this hardware may be.

The latest rumor claims the S27 Ultra will use a new Samsung 200MP sensor for its primary camera, named ISOCELL HP6, which is 1/1.3-inch in size.

I've previously speculated about the possibility Samsung might switch to rival Sony's new Lytia LYT-901 200MP image sensor, but that now seems unlikely.

If the rumored specs are correct, the ISOCELL HP6 would be the same resolution and physical size as the ISOCELL HP2 that's been used in every flagship Samsung phone since the S23 Ultra (and looks as though it'll also feature in the S26 Ultra). However, the leak claims "there are more new technologies being added" to the HP6, which presumably will help it produce better image quality than the HP2.

It's also speculated that the S27 Ultra may get a new ultrawide camera, though the telephoto modules could be carried over from the S26 Ultra. This would potentially mean the S27 Ultra would get a 50MP 5x telephoto camera, along with a 10MP 3x module. This could well be a decent enough telephoto system, but it still looks a little weak when compared to a phone like the Vivo X300 Pro, which boasts a 200 MP, 1/1.4" sensor for its periscope telephoto module.

Obviously we're still a long way off the official S27 Ultra launch, so any rumors about its possible camera specs should be taken with a handful of salt. The S26 Ultra is of course coming much sooner, with February 25th being the most likely launch date.

Story credit: IceUniverse / X

I'll be honest: when I first started reviewing rugged phones, I thought they were a bit of a joke. These massive, industrial-looking beasts that weigh more than a bag of sugar? Who needs them? Well, construction workers and the like, I guessed. But as for ordinary people…

As it turns out, though, I did need them. And after lugging either my Ulefone Armor 29 Ultra or Tank 4 Pro on countless press trips this year – from the Isle of Wight to Milan, Bilbao to Malaga, Kristiansand to Glasgow – I've had something of an epiphany.

These aren't phones. They're problem-solvers. And they've changed how I work.

The camera that fits in my pocket (sort of)

My Ulefone Armor 29, for example, has become my go-to phone camera. That 1-inch Sony IMX989 sensor allows in a ton of light and delivers genuinely impressive results that rival dedicated compact cameras. And yet I can chuck this beast in my bag without worrying whether it'll survive the journey.

Yes, it weighs 688g. Yes, it's 33.8mm thick. Yes, my jacket pocket looks like I'm shoplifting a brick. But when I'm on a press trip and need quick, quality shots without dragging around a proper camera setup, it's perfect.

The dedicated camera button means I can actually take photos like a human being rather than fumbling with touchscreen icons while my subject wanders off.

The ultrawide is brilliant for cramped hotel rooms and crowded events, while the infrared night vision has proved genuinely useful for shooting in museums and galleries where flash photography is banned.

Hotel room cinema

Here's another problem I've encountered (albeit the archetype of a "first-world problem"). I'm in a supposedly fancy hotel and want to watch something before bed to wind down. But the live broadcasts are all in a language I don't speak, and the "smart" TV is about as smart as a particularly dim houseplant.

Enter my Tank 4 Pro and its built-in 720p projector. I can now project my own content onto the hotel room wall – or ceiling, if I'm feeling decadent – without wrestling with incomprehensible TV interfaces or trying to work out which HDMI port might actually function.

The projector only works in the dark, mind you, and it'll chomp through about a quarter of your battery per hour. But for evening entertainment, it's absolutely brilliant. I've used it on camping trips, too, where it provides that cinema experience without having to pack anything particularly bulky.

The battery life of both these phones, by the way, is genuinely transformative.

At Glastonbury and Green Man festivals this summer, while everyone else was queueing desperately at charging stations or rationing their phone use, I was snapping photos, checking set times, recording interviews and calling mates without a care. Five days in a muddy field and my Armor 29 still had juice left.

Rethinking tech

So here's the broader point that's been brewing in my mind: maybe we've been thinking about tech spending all wrong.

Some people obsess over getting the latest, shiniest, flagship device. The newest iPhone. The fastest laptop. The thinnest tablet. We're convinced that one perfect device will solve all our problems, so we throw thousands at it.

But what if – hear me out – spending just a few hundred on multiple, more specialized devices would actually improve your life more?

When it comes to laptops, say, you might save more time overall with a two-screen setup like the Asus Zen Duo, rather than focusing on getting the fastest processor. While buying a cheap e-reader for the beach is much more practical than nervously clutching your expensive iPad, worried about sand and splashes.

The bottom line

Even the best rugged phones won't be for everyone. If you rarely leave your house, work in an office and primarily use your phone for social media, you probably don't need one. The bulk and weight will just annoy you.

But if you travel regularly, work outdoors or just want tech that won't spontaneously combust if you drop it, I reckon they're worth serious consideration. They've changed how I work and travel, solving problems I didn't even realize were problems until I found solutions. And really, isn't that what good technology should do?

Honor has spent the past few years reshaping its flagship phone into both a photography and AI juggernaut. But while last year, the headline features were all about AI-powered camera improvements, this time around, it's back to basics, with hardware again the star of the show.

The Magic 8 Pro joins the 200MP sensor club, with the telephoto camera getting not just a resolution upgrade, but also features the first CIPA-rated optical stabilisation system on a phone. These come alongside the latest Snapdragon Elite chip, and a bigger silicon-carbon battery with absurdly fast charging.

Of course, AI is still a huge influence, and Honor has built new AI color-matching tools, AI editing features, and system-wide smart functions that aim to make the Magic 8 Pro feel more productive.

I’ve been using the Magic 8 Pro as my daily phone – shooting in daylight, night, macro, zoom, video, and everything in between – and it's clear that Honor has created a phone deserving of the flagship moniker.

The Magic 8 Pro is positioned directly against some of the best camera phones available today – the Pixel 10 Pro XL, iPhone 17 Pro Max, Vivo X300 Pro, and Oppo Find X9 Pro – but how does it compare?

Honor Magic 8 Pro: Specifications

Honor Magic 8 Pro: Price

This is another Chinese phone that won't see a release in the US, but in the UK, the Magic 8 Pro lands at £1,099 for the 12GB+512GB version. This puts it squarely in the middle flagship territory, but it feels very competitive, matching the Oppo Find X9 Pro’s price while undercutting the Pixel 10 Pro XL (although the Pixel is heavily discounted often) and iPhone 17 Pro Max – and it does so while offering more storage as standard.

Would I call it reasonable? I do think it’s fairly priced for the hardware you’re getting, especially if your main considerations are more about battery life and telephoto photography.

Honor Magic 8 Pro: Design

The Magic 8 Pro has the premium style and solid build quality to belong at the top of Honor’s lineup. My review unit was the Sunrise Gold version with a slightly metallic sheen, although it often looked more silver than gold, depending on the light. The phone is also available in Sky Cyan or Black.

Where last year's model has sort of an oil-slick gloss to it, this year's finish is more subtle, with a single uniform color. I did prefer the finish to last year's a little more; it just had a bit more uniqueness to it, but this time around, it's still a classy design. The matte brushed metal frame feels solid and premium, and the phone sits comfortably in the hand despite its size, with a slight taper to the rear.

Honor has bucked the square trend of 2025 and stuck to a rounded camera island. In a year where it seems more manufacturers are suddenly obsessed with squared-off, iPhone-inspired camera bars, the circular bump might almost become distinctive again.

However, the more central and larger camera island creates a more tangible everyday problem – my finger constantly strayed over the lenses while using the phone. The result is an endless battle with greasy fingerprints on the glass. It did make me appreciate why so many brands have moved their camera modules into the corner or top; it’s simply more ergonomic, and my fingers rarely touch the glass of my Pixel or iPhone.

The overall design hasn’t really changed all that much from last year, which, on one hand, the Magic 7 Pro already looked good and felt great in the hand, so Honor hasn’t fixed what wasn’t broken. However, it is marginally disappointing that this thousand-dollar flagship phone doesn’t visually scream "new generation" in the way some rivals do.

Around the edges, you’ll find the usual power and volume buttons. There are also dual SIM slots, with the option to use an eSIM instead of the second physical SIM – a small but welcome touch for travellers and work-phone users.

A new addition to the right-hand side of the frame is a dedicated AI button. This is a shortcut to access a number of the Honor AI features built into the phone, like AI suggestions based on on-screen content, or a quick way to change settings with your voice. Although it is quick, you are limited to one setting at a time, and it is just faster and easier to use Google's Gemini assistant baked into the OS to do the same tasks.

You can also use this AI button as a camera button. In theory, I love the idea of a tactile hardware camera making a comeback, and I love accessories like the Oppo Hasselblad teleconverter or Xiaomi’s camera case. But in practice, I didn’t find Honor’s implementation of the camera key particularly useful.

I have the same criticisms for every camera button from Apple to Oppo. The button has limited functionality in portrait orientation, and sits too low for my thumb to reach naturally anyway. I rarely ever shoot in landscape, and even in landscape, the zoom is finicky to use, and it's much quicker to tap on the screen. Sometimes the things Apple does aren't good and don't need to be copied.

A lot of what the camera button does can already be done more quickly by double-tapping the power button or using the volume rocker to fire the shutter. It’s an idea that I think simply doesn’t earn its space on the side of the phone yet. I am happy to be proved wrong, but brands still need to figure out a way to make me want to use this button.

Screen

The display is undeniably beautiful. It’s a 6.71-inch LTPO OLED panel running at up to 120Hz, with a sharp 1256 x 2808-pixel resolution and full 100% DCI-P3 wide colour coverage. Brightness is also impressive, pushing up to a claimed 6,000 nits. It’s rich, contrasty, and color-accurate enough that I felt comfortable using it for both photo and video editing – something I don’t say lightly about phone screens.

Honor’s continued commitment to curved edges is more of a disappointment. Although this is the shallowest curve they’ve used yet, but flat screens, in my humble opinion, just look and feel better. And judging the industry widely ditching the curved screen, a lot of people seem to agree – I hope Honor joins the new status quo next year.

Honor has also gone all-in on eye-comfort tech. Alongside 4320Hz PWM dimming, there’s Circular Polarized Display 2.0, chip-level AI Defocus Display, dynamic dimming, a Circadian Night Display, and even motion sickness relief and natural tone modes built in. While I can’t scientifically measure eye strain, I did find the Magic 8 Pro comfortable over extended periods.

Honor Magic 8 Pro: Camera Performance

Honor gives you three main colour profiles for the camera – Natural, Vibrant, and “Authentic”, the first two fairly self-explanatory, while the "Authentic " profile tries to mimic the colors and contrast of street photography with limited success; my photos were mostly just excessively vignetted.

I mostly shot in the natural profile, which provides a good balance of vibrance and contrast. Although either by design or due to a bug, the camera kept reverting back to the vibrant profile, which was a little irritating.

Alongside these are a selection of film-style looks, which aren’t based on any specific film stocks, and they feel more like early-Instagram filters than genuine film simulations. They’re fun to play with, but I wouldn’t want all my photos looking like that.

However, I love this idea and want Honor to take it further. I shouldn't say this as a photographer, but I hate editing. I have bought Fujifilm cameras just for the film simulations and recipes so I can use JPEGs straight from the camera. If Honor could build this out into a tool to create fine-tuned custom profiles based on genuine-looking film stocks, this could be a real winning feature.

Or perhaps the answer lies with Honor's AI Magic Color. This is a new feature that allows you to sample the colour style of one photo and apply it to another. You can also apply this style to any new images you take with the camera. Effectively, this tool lets you “borrow” the looks of your favorite creators and replicate them in your own images.

In practice, the results showed some promise. I managed to transform a boring street scene with a Wes Anderson-inspired color palette (see below), but this was sometimes a little inconsistent, producing strange color shifts between different scenes.

Overall, I have mixed feelings; it's a great tool for casual photographers with no editing knowledge to instantly grade photos, which I am sure is the intent, but for professionals, it demonstrates AI's continued march on what was years of built-up knowledge and experience and a marketable skill, and will surely lead to photography becoming more homogenised.

Putting my AI quibbles aside for now and getting back to the task at hand – how do the Magic 8 Pro's cameras actually perform?

When it comes to image quality, the Magic 8 Pro is excellent – dynamic range is strong, colors are generally accurate, and detail is great from all three cameras. However, stylistically, it's not all perfect. I still find Honor’s photos are lacking a little x-factor. Honor’s processing can be overly aggressive, oversharpening is far too common, HDR can flatten scenes too much, and bright blue skies are often exaggerated.

Out of the three cameras, the main wide camera and telephoto cameras are the best performers. Zoom performance is a highlight. Results up to around 230mm are genuinely outstanding, and I would be very comfortable using images up to 340mm (10x) on social media. Detail holds up remarkably well, and I was especially impressed by even minute details like hair and feathers.

You can zoom all the way up to 100x using AI processing, with the AI kicking in after around 10x. The highest ranges inevitably show smoothing and artificial sharpening, with photos taking on a distinct AI-generated look from around 30x onwards. Honor leans harder into generative AI than other brands, where Google or Samsung tries to clean up an image, Honor is happier to let the AI run riot and reinvent images a little, which can produce some pretty quirky results, and honestly, it's not for me.

Macro photography is handled by both the telephoto and ultrawide lenses, but the telephoto is almost always the better choice as it delivers a far more flattering perspective. There isn't any separate macro mode or toggle; the camera just jumps in and out of macro focusing depending on distance, which speeds up the process.

Macro performance is outstanding, producing excellent sharpness in focused areas, although it again suffers a little bit from strong digital sharpening. The only weaknesses here are a slightly softer peripheral sharpness and a depth-of-field fall-off, which can be abrupt. I found it often cut off insects' legs or antennae despite them being on the same focal plane. It would be great to have a bit more control over in-focus areas either in the moment or in editing, similar to portrait blur.

Night photography – especially with the telephoto lens – is where I found the Magic 8 Pro really shines. Low-light images are very clean, with little visible noise, yet still retaining a good level of detail. Honor’s optical image stabilisation is genuinely remarkable – I captured sharp handheld shots on a moving boat, with the telephoto lens, at night with barely any motion blur at all. The company claims a CIPA-rated 5.5-stop OIS system, and based on real-world use, I’m inclined to believe it.

Unsurprisingly, the ultrawide camera is the weakest of the three. It's respectable in good light, with decent detail and colour, but its low-light performance drops off much more sharply than the other lenses, especially when you start cropping into images, with detail quickly being lost to processing.

Video is the Magic 8 Pro’s biggest missed opportunity. On paper, it ticks a lot of boxes: 4K at 120fps, HDR, Pro mode, and CIPA-rated stabilization all sound impressive – but video quality lacks the polish and consistency I’d expect from a flagship camera.

Colors from the Magic 8’s video can be washed out, there are occasionally inconsistencies in lighting, HDR can look flat, and low light performance isn’t up to the phone’s night photography skills. Video quality is fine, but overall quality is lacking compared to the gold standard of the iPhone or, indeed, Vivo (Android’s best video).

There are also a few slightly baffling quirks. For some reason, I couldn't find a way to use 4K/120p in the Pro video mode despite it being supported in the normal video mode, and I also couldn't combine 4K120p with HDR in any mode – a feature that is available on rival devices. The end result is a video system that feels a little restricted and one that lags behind the competition for hybrid content creators.

Portrait mode is very good on the Magic 8 Pro. Honor has continued its partnership with Parisian photo studio Harcourt for tuning, and faces are rendered with pleasing detail, with skin tones generally looking natural. Edge detection, while not the best I've used, I still found it to be reliable, with hair and finer details handled well. Subject separation and bokeh balls look pretty good, although it doesn't have the creative flair of Vivo's selectable Zeiss lens bokeh.

Honor Magic 8 Pro: Phone Performance

Powered by the latest Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, the Magic 8 Pro never once felt short on performance. Whether I was editing photos, trimming video clips, or jumping between multiple apps, the phone handled everything effortlessly.

However, for most users, primarily content creators and photographers likely reading this review, it certainly isn’t night and day between this chip and the prior generation (or even vastly underpowered options like the Tensor G5 in the Pixel 10). Unless you’re a hardcore gamer, you’re unlikely to notice, so I wouldn’t base too much of your purchase decision around this chipset.

However, the efficiencies of this new chip are a huge boon to battery life. Although the Magic 8 Pro’s 6270mAh silicon-carbon battery can’t quite match the whopping 7,500mAh found in the Oppo Find X9 Pro or 7,200mAh in the OnePlus 15, I consistently got well over a full day of real-world use, even on heavier shooting days. Standby time is excellent too – I’ve had it last for several days while sitting idle on Wi-Fi.

When it does run low, charging is impressive. You can plug it in for 100W wired charging with compatible chargers. I got from 0-50% in around 25 minutes, and full in around an hour. Up to 80W wireless charging is also supported, with the right charging kit (which, unfortunately, I don’t have access to to test).

This super-fast wireless charging does mean this is another Android flagship with no Qi2 magnetic support in the style of Apple’s MagSafe or Google’s PixelSnap ecosystem, so you’ll need to rely on a case. I appreciate that Honor has probably put a lot of R&D into achieving an 80W wireless charge speed, but I’d still take a lower 25W speed with compatibility with MagSafe accessories any day.

The Magic 8 Pro comes with the latest version of Honor’s OS – MagicOS 10, which clearly takes some inspiration from Apple's latest Liquid Glass aesthetic. It’s not my favourite Android skin visually; that said, it’s smooth, stable, and easy to live with, and I never encountered any performance hiccups or stability issues during daily use.

Magic Capsule is Honor’s take on Apple’s Dynamic Island (one of my favourite iPhone features). It works surprisingly well here, providing genuinely useful shortcuts and live activity information. Gesture controls using the dual front cameras are neat, although I had to force myself to use them rather than it ever coming naturally.

Honor also includes a wide range of AI features – some of which feel gimmicky, but others that genuinely add value. Honor has jumped on the AI screenshot bandwagon with AI Memories Space, which uses AI to analyze screen grabs and pull out useful information. It is useful, but I wish there were tighter integration with ChatGPT or Gemini, as my preferred AI tools.

In the Photos app, Honor includes an AI Eraser, Upscale, Cutout, and Outpainting (generative expand) tools, along with an image-to-video generator. That last feature is limited to five-second clips and doesn’t use the latest Imagen models, but it’s still a fun addition.

Honor’s AI editing tools are decent. I had the most success with AI outpainting, which did a pretty believable job recreating scenes that weren’t too complex. However, the AI eraser tool came unstuck quite frequently when removing people from images, with the filled-in areas sometimes coming out absolutely wild.

The AI beauty filters are also on the extreme side, with skin-smoothing looking unbelievable and skin lightening an issue in auto mode, although you can tweak all the settings. I could definitely find some use out of these AI tools, but Google, Samsung, and Oppo/OnePlus right now are still more consistent.

Lastly, a shout-out to the built-in Honor Clip video editor is one of the better mobile editors I’ve used (it’s essentially a CapCut clone), but it made quick social-media edits far easier than I expected without having to pay for another app.

Honor Magic 8 Pro: Verdict

The Honor Magic 8 Pro is a camera phone that gets so many of the fundamentals brilliantly right. Its CIPA-rated stabilisation and 200MP telephoto deliver some of the best night photos I’ve taken on a smartphone, while the increased resolution gives even more detail to telephoto and macro shots, and is a clear improvement over the prior model. Battery life is excellent, charging is lightning fast, the screen is beautiful, and with the latest Snapdragon processor, day-to-day performance flies.

But it’s also a phone that doesn’t quite get out of its own way. Image processing is not my favorite among the best camera phones. Images too often suffer from aggressive sharpening and HDR. And despite headline 4K/120p specs, the video is not as good as the class leaders, and feels oddly restricted compared to the flexibility offered by rivals.

If your priority is night photography and telephoto reach (with the added bonus of all-day endurance for long days of shooting), then the Magic8 Pro is an excellent choice. But it just falls short of being the most refined all-round camera phone you can buy.

Alternatives

When Honor first teased the Robot Phone last October, most people assumed it was either a concept that would never ship or clever CGI. At CES 2026, journalists finally saw a physical prototype, and the consensus is clear: this thing is real, and this could change the game for a lot of people.

The Robot Phone looks relatively normal at first glance, aside from a chunky camera module. But press a button, and a protective panel slides aside to reveal a three-axis gimbal with a camera that extends from the phone's body. 

Think of it as having a DJI Osmo Pocket 3 built into your phone. The gimbal camera can rotate, tilt, and track subjects autonomously while providing professional-grade stabilization. For anyone who's ever lugged a gimbal through an airport or tried to set up a tripod on uneven ground, the appeal is clear. This is a stabilization kit that lives in your pocket and requires no assembly, balancing, or extra batteries.

How it works

The gimbal tracks moving subjects automatically, transforming content creation. Set the phone down, walk away and the camera follows you. No assistant needed, no fixed angle, no expensive tracking equipment. For anyone who creates video content, this could eliminate several pieces of kit.

The stabilization works in any orientation. Hold the phone normally, and the gimbal compensates for shake. Set it face-down on a surface, and the gimbal extends upward, automatically leveling itself. Honor suggests this enables features like star tracking for astrophotography.

Anyone familiar with DJI's Pocket series of pocket gimbal cameras will recognize the concept. The Pocket 3's been hugely successful as a standalone gimbal camera for vloggers and content creators. Now Honor has essentially taken that three-axis stabilization technology and made it small enough to fit inside a smartphone camera bump.

In practical terms, this could be a huge boost for content makers. With a DJI Pocket, you're carrying a separate device with its own screen, battery and storage. But with the Robot Phone, the gimbal shares the phone's processor, display and cellular connection. That should make it easier to livestream directly, edit immediately and share without transferring files.

Where we are now

Admittedly, the prototypes shown at CES weren't operational – the gimbal had to be moved manually. But the mechanism works, and the engineering is clearly functional rather than aspirational. Seeing the camera extend and retract smoothly, then disappear almost flush with the phone's body, has convinced sceptics that Honor has solved the fundamental challenges.

The phone also houses two additional fixed cameras alongside the gimbal, likely covering wide and telephoto focal lengths. These operate like standard smartphone cameras for everyday photography, while the gimbal camera handles stabilized video and tracking shots.

The trade-off for all this technology? Thickness. The Robot Phone has a substantial camera bump and won't be competing in the ultra-thin category. But for photographers and content creators, that's a reasonable compromise. If Honor can deliver on the promise of professional stabilization in a pocketable device, they may have created something genuinely useful rather than merely novel. Whether it tempts iPhone users away remains to be seen, but it certainly offers capabilities Apple hasn't even attempted.

Honor will fully reveal the Robot Phone at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this March, where journalists will be able to handle working units. Full specifications, including sensor details and battery life, will be announced then.

The device will initially launch only in China, though this suggests Honor is testing the concept in its home market first. Watch this space as we bring you all the latest news on this intriguing phone as it happens.