It’s been a while since the company released its Xiaomi 15 series. The Xiaomi 15 Ultra was the last model to join the series in February. Surely, the brand has now started working on the next flagship lineup, and among the upcoming devices, Xiaomi 16 has already surfaced in a leak.
There were some rumors on the internet about the device getting a periscope telephoto, but it seems the latest report contradicts those earlier signs. Xiaomi 16 is allegedly keeping true to the same floating telephoto design that its 15 series counterpart introduced last year.
Xiaomi has been trying to build stable and consistent designs for its phones for the past few generations, and switching to a periscope telephoto for the standard Xiaomi 16 might bring some unwelcome changes, like an enlarged camera bump.
The latest Xiaomi flagship mobile’s floating telephoto lens is already great at “zoom” photography and preserves visual quality at high magnifications. So, why fix something that’s not broken? The entire industry is shifting to periscope technology, but Xiaomi continues to improve the floating lens system. This tech keeps the phone thin, allows slight variation in zoom without a digital crop, and the lenses tend to capture more light.
About the display: XiaomiTime believes it will be the same 6.36” panel as last time, but Xiaomi 16 will tweak the dimensions ever so slightly. The new aspect ratio for this model is reported at 19.5:9, which makes the phone a bit wider.
It appears that Xiaomi is also bringing back the focus on corner radii, more specifically, making the corners more round, as it did with the Redmi Turbo 4 Pro. If we had to guess, Xiaomi is going for a more Pixel-esque feel for its Xiaomi 16 devices.
Of course, with the new generation products, the SoC will be upgraded to the latest Snapdragon 8 Elite 2 for all the Xiaomi 16 devices. This chip was recently tipped to have around 3.8 million points on AnTuTu. That’s around a 41% gain over the existing 8 Elite 1 in synthetic benchmarks.
A better screen, some camera improvements, and the new flagship SoC probably spell major success for Xiaomi 16 as long as it keeps the pricing in check. We’ll keep an eye out for other details, so stick around to stay in the loop.
