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One of Xiaomi’s many crazy ideas is this Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra. It has a screen in the camera bump.
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Yes. That’s a screen.
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Here the screen shows the camera interface. It just seems to mirror the front display.
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I choose to believe that Xiaomi’s designers stared directly at the Nokia 808 while designing the Mi 11 Ultra.
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It comes in black and white.
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That camera bump looks really long.
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It would be interesting to cut off the front camera, but this device still has one.
Xiaomi is gearing up to launch the Mi 11 Ultra as its next flagship smartphone, and one of the more interesting design details is a tiny postage stamp-sized display in… er, the camera bump? Filipino YouTuber Tech Buff brings us an exclusive leak of the device, which has some pixels where there are normally no pixels. If you sit there asking “why?” the answer is “attention”. The answer is always ‘attention’. We’re writing about it now, so it totally works!
Tech Buff eventually removed the video, but XDA Developers has a mirror of the video on YouTube.
We don’t have any official specs, a launch date or marketing information yet, but the phone appears to be a pretty standard 2021 flagship with a Snapdragon 888 SoC. The back features what must be the world’s largest camera bump, with two large lenses, a “120x” periscope camera (that’s not the actual optical zoom) and an LED flash. In addition to all that normal camera stuff, a small display, which appears to have the same aspect ratio as the front display and seems to simply mirror the front display at all times. The video shows the rear screen keeping pace with the front screen as the user navigates a few apps. Hopefully you can turn it off too, for privacy reasons.
Again, without marketing materials to consult, it’s hard to know exactly what the point of the extra screen is. It could work as a viewfinder when taking a selfie with the rear camera, but it’s hard to imagine using it for much more than that – it’s just so ridiculously small. The phone has a front-facing camera, so you can still take old-fashioned selfies.
Squeezing a screen into the camera bump gives the Mi 11 Ultra one of the biggest camera bumps ever. The camera bump is obviously super tall and extends across the entire width of the phone. An advantage of this is that it means that the phone is really stable on a table. Phones with high camera bumps often rock back and forth when you try to use them on a desk, but this looks like it will be rock solid.
The white version of the Mi 11 Ultra with a full-width black camera bump is a dead letter for the Nokia 808. That phone, from 2012, used its giant camera bump for a giant camera hardware, and can therefore still withstand modern flagship smartphone cameras. If we continue with these giant camera shots, I wish someone would copy the 808 strategy instead of… whatever this is.