Xiaomi has been teasing details about its new foldable smartphone, the Mi 18 Fold, for weeks. Now the manufacturer has officially launched the device. The new product will compete with Apple’s foldable smartphone, which is expected to be released on Wednesday.
Image source: Xiaomi
The Xiaomi Mi 18 Fold is technically a wide-screen foldable smartphone, but the manufacturer calls it a “mid-fold” because its form factor is somewhere between a small foldable flip phone and a larger flip phone. The device comes with a 5.38-inch external display and a 7.58-inch internal screen. Both feature an aspect ratio of approximately 2:1, inspired by the proportions of standard paper. The external screen is designed for easy one-handed use. Xiaomi claims the display’s keyboard is 8% wider than a typical 6.9-inch phone.
Xiaomi Mi 18 Fold is only 5.02 mm thick when unfolded and 10.68 mm thick when folded. The weight of the device is 219 grams. The smartphone has a flat frame with curved edges, along with rounded corners and a racetrack-shaped camera module on the back.
Xiaomi has been working on improving the durability of its foldable devices. Xiaomi Mi 18 Fold is designed to withstand drops from a height of up to 1.2 meters. New keel hinges, 7 series aluminum alloy frame and Dragonite Glass 3.0 ensure durability. The phone passed 492 rounds of stress tests and the foldable display is protected by double-layer UTG glass.
Xiaomi 18 Fold is equipped with Xiaomi’s own Xring O3 chip. The company says this is the first flagship AI processor with an AnTuTu score of over 5 million. Compared with the previous generation, multi-core processor performance is increased by 60%, and power consumption is reduced by 25% under medium and low loads. GPU performance has also been improved by 85% and power consumption has been reduced by 64%.
The on-chip NPU provides 200 TOPS tensor performance and 3.12 TFLOPS vector performance. The machine also uses Changxin Memory (CXMT)’s new generation memory – LPDDR6, which was mass-produced for the first time. This makes Xiaomi Mi 18 Fold the first phone to adopt the new memory standard.
Xiaomi Mi 18 Fold is equipped with a 6000mAh battery with high silicon content and an energy density of 920Wh/L. It claims to support 67W wired charging and 50W wireless charging. The company has partnered with Leica to equip the device with cameras. Xiaomi Mi 18 Fold features a 200-megapixel main camera, a 50-megapixel periscope telephoto lens with 3.5x optical zoom, and a 50-megapixel ultra-wide-angle camera.
The company has also launched a special edition of Xiaomi Ceramic Special Edition at 12% off. It uses a different silicon nitride backplane, which Xiaomi says is lighter and stronger than the standard version. The special version only comes with 16 GB of RAM and 1 TB of storage. Xiaomi will only release 1,500 devices for this version.
Xiaomi 12% off ceramic special edition
Xiaomi Mi 18 Fold will be available in red, gold white and black colors. Pricing starts at 10,999 yuan (approximately $1,639) for the model with 12/256 GB of memory. The version with 12/512 GB memory is priced at 11,999 yuan (approximately $1,788), and the model with 16/512 GB memory is priced at 12,999 yuan (approximately $1,937). The highest configuration with 16 GB of LPDDR6 RAM and 1 TB of persistent memory is priced at 14,999 yuan (approximately $2,235), while a special ceramic version also equipped with 16 GB of RAM and 1 TB of permanent memory is priced at 15,999 yuan (approximately $2,384). Pre-orders for the smartphone are already open in China. The public sale will begin at 10:00 local time on September 10.
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