What you need to know

• Xiaomi co-founder Lei Jun confirmed that the rumored successor to the Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra has been canceled.
• The Xiaomi 12 Ultra will not be released because the company shifted its focus to the Xiaomi 12S Ultra.
• The 12S Ultra appears to have a significant camera upgrade, owing to a new sensor co-developed with Sony.

Xiaomi will never release the Xiaomi 12 Ultra after all. The phone could have been the company's next flagship device, but that's no longer happening.

Xiaomi co-founder Lei Jun has confirmed that the rumored successor to the Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra has been canceled. He revealed that the phone was originally scheduled for debut earlier this year, but the company decided to scrap the plan in order to focus on improved experience for consumers.

He made the confirmation on Weido in response to a fan's question about the difference between the upcoming Xiaomi 12S Ultra and the 12 Ultra, as spotted by IT Home (opens in new tab) (via GizChina (opens in new tab)).

"The Xiaomi Mi 12 Ultra is equipped with Snapdragon 8, which was originally planned to be released in March and April, but was canceled," Jun said (via machine translation). "In pursuit of a better experience, we upgraded [to a] Snapdragon 8+, and Qualcomm and Leica continued to train for several months."

However, there's a silver lining to the cancellation. Jun's statement is confirmation that Xiaomi dropped the 12 Ultra to give way to the 12S Ultra. Yesterday, Xiaomi teased a major camera improvement for the 12S Ultra, thanks to its partnership with Sony. The phone will boast a new 1-inch IMX989 camera sensor from Sony. The sensor is touted for its ability to capture a greater amount of light, faster focus speed, and better dynamic range.

While the resolution is uncertain, the phone's camera will supposedly feature a 50MP resolution with 1.15µm pixels, giving it an edge over some of the best Android phones.

This is on top of Xiaomi's existing collaboration with Leica. In May, the Chinese phone maker entered into a "long-term strategic cooperation" with the German camera giant for Xiaomi's next flagship handset.

The phone was recently tipped to include a Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 SoC and 120W fast charging. It will also supposedly offer a 120Hz screen refresh rate, 8GB or 12GB of RAM, and up to 256GB of internal storage.

Xiaomi is set to unveil its next premium device on July 4, so we'll probably know by then what happened to the Xiaomi 12 Ultra.