Why is the Xiaomi 17 Ultra getting a design downgrade?

The Xiaomi 17 Ultra has officially launched in China, and it’s going in a much less interesting direction than I had been hoping for.

And yes, the phone has been unveiled on Christmas Day. I could write a whole piece about how weird that is as a date for a major smartphone launch, but we kind of knew it was coming. Any astonishment would be wholly manufactured.

I have far stronger feelings about the Xiaomi 17 Ultra’s design, which was revealed ahead of time, as well as during a brief hands-on video posted to YouTube.

To be clear from the off, there’s really nothing to be outraged about with the Xiaomi 17 Ultra’s design. There was even some back and forth among the team about whether the word ‘downgrade’ should be used in the headline here.

But for me, it’s an inferior approach to the Xiaomi 15 Ultra, despite the new model being leaner and sharper.

Oh no, not another one

But while the Xiaomi 17 Ultra might well prove to be a feat of engineering in its own way, it’s also moving in a more familiar, less interesting direction, aesthetically speaking.

In his Xiaomi 15 Ultra review, Tech Advisor’s Chris Martin praised the phone’s striking looks and its beveled edges, which saw Xiaomi “avoiding the trend of completely flat sides”. While this was another beast of a phone, it managed to adopt an iPhone-like design while still looking distinctive in its own right.

While the OnePlus 15 has been getting rave reviews, my own view on it is a little less glowing. I find its new ‘me too’ design to be a depressing regression from the OnePlus 13. Which, whether you loved it or hated it, at least had its own signature look and feel.

I’ll need to go hands-on with the Xiaomi 17 Ultra before I can say for sure, but I fear something similar is happening here – the enblandonment (you heard it here first) of smartphone design.

Go pro or go home

I’d argue that there’s an even bigger case to be made for Xiaomi’s Ultra line retaining its full-on looks. These phones are photography specialists that seem to draw from a lineage of classic camera tech as much as they do smartphones, in function as well as form.

Indeed, the Xiaomi 15 Ultra and its predecessor were notable for offering a converter kit that effectively turned them into high-end point-and-shoots.

If anything, I would have liked to have seen Xiaomi lean into this ‘pro camera’ side of things (which the Xiaomi 14 Ultra arguably did even better), applying some of those elements directly to the phone’s body. Nothing too radical, just a liberal use of grippy material here, a landscape-friendly finger rest there. Perhaps a more pronounced shutter button, or an integrated lanyard anchor point.

You might argue that this would have made the Xiaomi 17 Ultra too niche a proposition. To which I’d respond: a (likely) £1,300 phone with a hulking great camera module is already a niche proposition. There’s always the Xiaomi 17 and Xiaomi 17 Pro if you want a more traditional flagship phone experience from this brand.

I’m still excited to get my hands on the Xiaomi 17 Ultra, when it hopefully launches globally in early 2026. It promises to be a powerful, well-built phone with epic battery life and (above all) a stunning camera.

It could be one of the very best phones you can buy. I just wish I was as excited by the way it looks.