When it launched the 17 and 17 Ultra in Europe on Saturday, Xiaomi bucked an industry trend: It didn’t actually talk that much about AI. and this In fact When it showed off the cameras of the two phones, including a special edition 17 Ultra co-produced with Huawei, it didn’t talk about AI. According to Angus Ng, the company’s director of communications and public relations, this is not a mistake.
“We’re still focusing on what the limits of the hardware are,” Ng told me at MWC 2026, when I asked why its photography approach seemed so different from Google and Samsung’s recent Pixel 10A and Galaxy S26 launches. “If it really comes to the point where we can’t innovate any more, we’ll start looking at the software side as well.”
“Obviously our existing imaging sensors and imaging systems have software and AI processing, but it’s not as obvious as Samsung’s,” he said. “When we used AI processing two years ago, a year ago, when we really focused on it, the response was not as positive.”
Ng has a personal theory for why Samsung has taken a different approach, and it’s not necessarily a flattering one: “Because their hardware wasn’t upgraded, they focused their strategy on software.”
