It used to take a ton of legwork to get a smartphone to behave like a Leica camera. It meant either buying the German company’s $329 “LUX Grip” accessory, which added a manual camera button to an iPhone, or buying one of the two “Leitzphones" that Leica released in the last half-decade. The issue with the latter is that those phones were exclusively available in Japan. 

Now, Leica is taking its smartphones global. Well, almost. 

The latest Leica Leitzphone is produced by the Chinese tech company Xiaomi, while the prior two generations were produced by Japanese company Sharp.

The good news: the next Leitzphone makes use of the computing power of the third-biggest smartphone maker in the world. The bad news: it blocks this Leitzphone from releasing stateside where Xiaomi has yet to hit the market.

But for everyone else, this is easily the most accessible Leica phone to date, available everywhere else for £1,700/€1,999 (around $2,300).

The Leitzphone is, essentially, the top-shelf Xiaomi 17 Ultra with a large camera system on the back powered by Leica, maker of world-famous analog cameras. That system includes a 200 megapixel telephoto camera, a 120x digital zoom, 8K video recordings at 30fps, and a silver camera ring that spins to adjust the lens, focal length, focus, and bokeh. 

This is a level of performance typically reserved for digital cameras includes all the accessories you’d expect from them, like a lens cap, lens cleaning cloth, and a wrist strap. You won’t find any of those in your iPhone box.

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