The Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra Review: Big and Fast, but Inefficient

Battery Life - Only Average

The Mi 11 Ultra’s battery life is certainly one of the weak points of the device. Although the phone features a 5000mAh battery which is 8.6% larger than the 4600mAh unit of the Mi 11, it’s also a device that has more internal hardware, and we don’t know exactly how features such as the secondary rear display affect the phone’s power consumption.

Going forward, I’ll be presenting our battery results both in 60Hz and high refresh rate charts, in order to simplify the admittedly quite messy results over the various new HRR display phones over the last year or two.

Starting off at 60Hz, the Mi 11 Ultra really doesn’t do well at all given its hardware specs. The phone landed in nearly identically longevity as the Mi 11 sibling with a smaller battery, which is quite perplexing due to the seemingly identical display. Besides the display, the only thing that is different and should impact the Mi 11 Ultra over the Mi 11 is the different camera setup, the rear screen, and a WiFi 6E module from Qualcomm. The cameras and rear screen should be generally irrelevant in our battery test as long as power management is properly implemented. The WiFi is also hard to single out.

What’s clear is that the Mi 11 Ultra is falling in 27% behind the Galaxy S21 Ultra – or better said, the latter lasts 35% longer than the Mi 11 Ultra. While superior display of the S21 Ultra certainly gives it a unique efficiency advantage, the Mi 11 Ultra also fares worse than the S20 Ultra. We know that the Snapdragon 888 is more power hungry than the Snapdragon 865, but this is still a large discrepancy in battery life.

At 120Hz mode, the Mi 11 Ultra this time at least manages to slightly outlast the S20 Ultras, although it still falls notably behind the S21 Ultras which are still 20-27% ahead.

I’m still in the process of re-running new the PCMark 3.0 figures on various devices and missing some 60Hz figures for now, but again the important comparison is the Mi 11 Ultra against the S21 Ultras. The Mi manages to outlast the Exynos S21 Ultra due to having a more efficient SoC, but falls behind the Snapdragon S21 Ultra.

In 120Hz mode, unfortunately the Mi 11 Ultra falls back in the rankings, this time even falling below the battery life of the regular Mi 11.

As with many other non-Galaxy devices this year, there’s a very weird level of inefficiency tied to the Mi 11 Ultra. The fact that the phone barely manages to differentiate itself, and even in one test lasts less than the regular Mi 11 is perplexing, and makes you question as to what’s actually going on. The Mi 11 Ultra is certainly aggressive in its performance metrics, but it’s still somewhat disappointing in how it ends up. It’s certainly not showcasing itself as what you’d expect from a 5000mAh battery class phone.