Xiaomi’s Leica Leitzphone mostly earns the name

The long-running phone partnership between Xiaomi and Lenovo has now become even closer. With the new international release of its 17 Ultra flagship, Xiaomi has been tasked with the creation of a separate edition, which is the first Leica Leitzphone to be released outside Japan, following three Sharp-made models made exclusively for the country.

In fact, the Leitzfone 17 Ultra is the same with Leica branding and a rotatable camera ring, and apart from a few design changes, it’s mostly the same as the Leica version of that phone already available in China. But branding is a big deal: Leica hasn’t let Xiaomi use its red dot logo on hardware until now, even though the companies have partnered on Xiaomi flagship cameras through 2022. The leap towards a fully Leica-branded phone is a vote of confidence from the camera company.

After two weeks of using the LitezPhone version of the 17 Ultra, it’s clear that confidence was well founded. This is my favorite phone of 2026 so far, with or without the Coca-Cola logo, though most buyers will be better off saving money with the standard 17 Ultra.

The 17 Ultra and its original Ducati version launched in China on December 25, 2025. The international variant and the Letzphone were launched alongside the regular Xiaomi 17 at Xiaomi’s pre-MWC press conference in Barcelona on February 28. Pricing for the 17 Ultra starts at £1,299 / €1,499 (about $1,750) with 512GB of storage, which increases by £400 / €1,499 (about $1,750). €700 for the Leica version. It’s a hefty premium, but there are a few differences from the regular 17 Ultra.

Let’s start it all with the Leica. This is evident first and foremost in the design: a very glossy black finish on the back, an industrial touch in the knurled aluminium-alloy edges, and Leica’s red dot logo in one corner. It has a slightly different design from the 17 Ultra Leica Edition released in China in late December, which has a two-tone finish and orients the Leica logo the other way. It also comes with branded accessories, including a faux leather case with a Leica lens cap, a microfiber cleaning cloth, and a bright red wrist strap.

Other changes go through software. While both versions of the 17 Ultra run Xiaomi’s HyperOS 3 based on Android 16, the Leitzfone’s interface has been customized. There are dedicated Leika widgets, including a photo gallery and a golden-hour timer, and custom monochrome app icons for the most popular apps from Xiaomi and third parties – which look great when you first turn the phone on, but once they’re mixed in with all the non-monochromatic apps you’ll inevitably download from elsewhere.

Most of the customization is in the camera. There’s a wide range of Leakea filters, and the interface uses the Leakey font and red as its accent colour, rather than Xiaomi’s usual yellow. A new Leica Essential shooting mode lets you choose between two camera simulations: a color recreation of the M9 and a monochromatic take on the M3. Litzfone also adds the option to enable C2PA content credentials on every shot you take.

None of these are as novel as the Letzphone’s unique hardware feature: a rotatable camera ring. The edge of the camera island can be rotated round, with a satisfying haptic buzz to simulate the sensation of a gear clicking. It’s an excellent fidget spinner, although its real purpose is to control the zoom in the camera app, or cycle through exposure settings or filters if you prefer.

This sounds like a nice idea, and it’s something I’d like to see on more phones since seeing it on Nubia’s Focus 2 Ultra. In practice, this is not that useful. The camera island may be huge by phone standards, but it would be tiny on a real camera, and it’s too close to the body to hold comfortably. I have had to Force I use the camera ring to zoom, which makes the onscreen controls faster and more natural every time. Perhaps with persistence I could imprint it in my muscle memory; At the moment, I mostly rotate it by mistake and get irritated when I do.

The addition of a zoom ring makes sense given the 17 Ultra’s headline photography feature: a telephoto with continuous optical zoom. While Xiaomi’s 15 Ultra had two telephoto cameras, the 17 Ultra combines them into one. (The company gave up 16 to catch Apple.) A 1/1.4-inch type 200-megapixel sensor is paired with a Leica APO zoom lens that covers 3.2-4.3x magnification – equivalent to a 75-100mm – with apertures adjusted from f/2.39-2.96.

The obvious criticism is the same we leveled at Sony’s Xperia 1 IV, which claimed a continuous 3.5-5.2x zoom: it’s too small a spread to make much of a difference. It’s rare that the framing of the photo changes drastically as you move out of range, and outside those ranges you’re back to the same digital zoom and sensor cropping offered by every other phone.

The pictures are excellent. The large sensor provides macro support as well as natural Bokeh at a minimum distance of 30cm. It can handle challenging lighting situations, with good results in dim light – although once it had to struggle with contrast, highlights blow out, especially on a bright day. Mostly I’ve shot exclusively on the Leaky Authentic mode – the other option is the Leaky Vibrant – which I like for its filmic qualities, preserving more highlights and shadows than most phones and avoiding the flattened glare of extreme HDR.

The other lenses are equally impressive, although I find myself defaulting to telephoto. The main camera has a large 1-inch-type sensor, and the same 50-megapixel resolution as the ultrawide and selfie cameras. It’s also one of the first phones to include a LOFIC (Lateral Overflow Integration Capacitor) sensor, which extends the dynamic range for highlights, helping me take some of the most dramatic skyline shots I’ve managed on a phone, and contributing to excellent performance in night shots with bright light.

Despite the LEICA logo, it is not Now! A camera. The Letzphone has all the key features you’d expect: Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset, 16GB of RAM (in this economy?!) and 1TB of storage (with a 512GB option on the regular 17 Ultra), a 6.9-inch 1-120Hz LTPO OLED display, and IP68 protection.

The battery is another standout feature. The 6,000mAh silicon-carbon cell isn’t the largest, and is smaller than the Chinese version of the phone, but it’s still impressive. Even when powering a demanding phone with a large display, I’m typically only able to use it for about two days between charges, even though there’s very little left in the tank afterward. 90W PPS wired charging and 50W wireless top up give it fast backup, although you’ll be limited to slower Qi speeds on third-party wireless chargers, and there’s no support for the magnetic Qi2 standard.

The biggest problem with the Letzphone is that it’s mostly just a more expensive version of the 17 Ultra, which shares most of its best features. I like the look of the Leitzfone, and I like some of the Leica-specific shooting styles and the included case. But they don’t cost £200, and neither do the rotatable camera rings. Unless that little red dot is very dear to your heart, there’s not enough reason to spend extra for it – but mostly because the 17 Ultra is such a good phone in its own right.

Photography by Dominic Preston/The Verge