When it launched the 17 and 17 Ultra in Europe on Saturday, Xiaomi bucked an industry trend: it didn’t really talk about AI all that much. And it really didn’t talk about AI when it showed off the two phones’ cameras, including a special edition 17 Ultra co-created with Leica. According to Angus Ng, the company’s director of communications and public relations, that’s no mistake.
“We’re still currently focusing on what is the limitation of hardware,” Ng told me at MWC 2026, when I asked why its photography approach seemed so different to Google and Samsung’s recent Pixel 10A and Galaxy S26 launches. “If it really comes to a point where we cannot do any more innovations, then we’ll also start looking at the software side.”
“Obviously we do have software and AI processing within our current imaging sensors and imaging system, but it’s just not as obvious as Samsung,” he added. “When we did use AI processing two years ago, a year ago, when we really focussed on that, the feedback wasn’t that overwhelmingly positive.”
As for why Samsung has taken a different approach, Ng has a personal theory, and not necessarily a flattering one: “Because their hardware did not upgrade, they focused their strategy on software.”
