Xiaomi unveiled the Mi 11 Ultra, Mi 11 Pro, Mi 11 Lite 5G, and Mi Band 6 on the first day of its product launch event. Today, the Chinese giant has taken the wraps off the new Mi Mix Fold smartphone. It’s a successor to the Mi Mix 3 (or Mi Mix Alpha) and the first foldable smartphone from Xiaomi.
Mi Mix Fold: Specifications
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Design & Display
The Mi Mix Fold has the same design and form factor as the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 2 and the recently launched Huawei Mate X2. It means Xiaomi also offers an inward-folding design with the Mi Mix fold. You have a tall outer display and a huge tablet-like display on the inside.
The device includes a 6.52-inch AMOLED display with a 90Hz refresh rate and 180Hz touch sampling rate on the outside. The panel has a 27:9 aspect ratio, 2520 x 840-pixel resolution, up to 900 nits of peak brightness, and HDR10+ certification. You also have a tiny punch-hole 20MP selfie camera at the top right corner.
The inner display is a huge 8.01-inch flexible OLED panel with a 4:3 aspect ratio and WQHD+ resolution. The display has a standard 60Hz refresh rate and a 120Hz touch sampling rate. It supports Dolby Vision, MEMC, DCI-P3 color gamut, up to 900 nits of peak brightness, and HDR10+ certification. It is a full-screen display with no cutouts, punch-holes, or notches. You don’t have any cameras on the inside.
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Internals
Under the hood, Mi Mix Fold is powered by the flagship Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 chipset. You will also find up to 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM and up to 512GB of UFS 3.1 storage. There’s dual-mode 5G network support, Bluetooth 5.2, and Wi-Fi 6 to round up the connectivity options.
The foldable also has a new Butterfly cooling system. It includes a “large-area VC liquid cooling, thermal gel, multilayer graphite sheets, and other heat dissipation methods” for efficient heat dissipation. Mi Mix Fold runs Android 11-based MIUI 12 out-of-the-box. The device also supports a desktop-like PC mode that you can activate with a three-finger swipe on the internal display.
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Triple Cameras with Liquid Lens
The Mi Mix Fold features a triple camera system that looks similar to the camera setup on the Mi 10 Ultra. It includes a 108MP primary camera, a 13MP ultra-wide lens with a 123-degree FOV, and an 8MP liquid lens. Yeah, as you may already know, the device is equipped with a liquid lens that acts as both the telephoto and macro lens. So essentially, you have a quad-camera setup on the Mi Mix Fold.
How is a liquid lens different from an optical lens? The liquid lens “uses the principle of human eye bionics, forming a lens-like structure with a transparent fluid wrapped in film.” The lens includes a high-precision motor that changes the radius of curvature of the spherical liquid surface. It allows you to switch between 3x optical zoom, 30x digital zoom, and click macro shots with a minimum focus distance of 3cm.
Mi Mix Fold is the world’s first smartphone with Liquid Lens technology, opening the era of bionic photography.
The Mi Mix Fold includes an in-house Surge C1 Image Signal Processor onboard as well. It is soldered on the motherboard and helps improve the 3A algorithm (AF, AWB, and AE) and low-light focus capabilities. You get a “more accurate auto-focus, auto exposure, and auto white balance, significantly improving image quality,” as per the official blog post.
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Battery Life
The Mi Mix fold comes equipped with a massive 5,020mAh battery with 67W wired fast-charging support. There is no wireless charging support here. Xiaomi claims that you can fully charge your foldable phone in around 37 minutes.
Mi Mix Fold: Price and Availability
The Mi Mix Fold is priced at CNY 9,999 (~Rs. 1,11,745) for the 12GB+256GB base variant and CNY 10,999 (~Rs. 1,22,900) for the higher-end 12GB+512GB variant. It has been priced aggressively and will give tough competition to Huawei and Samsung in China.
Xiaomi has also launched a Mi Mix Special Edition with a ceramic back panel, where the company has tried to simulate a kevlar design. It is priced at CNY 12,999 (~Rs. 1,45,275) with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of built-in storage. This is the first Xiaomi smartphone with 16GB of RAM. It goes up for pre-order starting today and will be available to buy from 16th April in China.
