Xiaomi debuted the Xiaomi 15 series in China months ago and is set to bring both that phone and the line-leading Xiaomi 15 Ultra to the global market shortly. While that remains the company's focus at this stage, development of the next-gen Xiaomi 16 series looks to have begun already, with a new leak now revealing what could be a spicy improvement for the base model device in the lineup.
As shared by leaker Digital Chat Station, Xiaomi could be set to equip the non-Ultra Xiaomi 16 series models with periscope cameras. To be exact, the vanilla Xiaomi 16 and its more premium Xiaomi 16 Pro could arrive next year with periscope zoom lenses in tow. The Xiaomi 15 Pro already sports a periscope lens for 5x zoom, so this would be only an upgrade for the standard Xiaomi 16.
While periscope lenses can hardly be considered groundbreaking technology these days, they perform better than standard zoom lenses and indicate the presence of long-range zoom capabilities. The Xiaomi 16 could well see an improvement on the 3x optical zoom of its predecessor, the Xiaomi 15. Most importantly, however, periscope lenses have remained somewhat exclusive to the most premium devices, and fans of Xiaomi's flagship series will likely be pleased to see one on the rather attainable entry-level model in the series.