Xiaomi Enters Flip Phone Market with Mix Flip, Challenging Samsung's Dominance

Xiaomi launches first flip phone at just over $800, with a $70 portable printer

BEIJING -- Xiaomi on Friday launched its first flip phone with the ability to print pictures instantly using a separately sold portable printer. The Mix Flip starts at 5,999 yuan ($825), the company announced. Preorders start Friday with deliveries beginning Tuesday. The portable printer costs 499 yuan ($68), including photo paper. The Chinese company also released the latest version of its folding phone, the Mix Fold 4, at the same price as the prior version at 8,999 yuan. At the product launch, Xiaomi founder Lei Jun described how the Mix Fold 4 could handle simultaneous translation with one language on each side of the screen. But he did not otherwise emphasize artificial intelligence capabilities. He also warned that supplies of the portable printer were tight.The company in late March released its first electric car, the SU7 sedan, at a cheaper price than Tesla's Model 3.Lei said as of Friday that cumulative deliveries had exceeded 30,000 vehicles, and that he expected to deliver 100,000 cars by November, a month earlier than previously announced.The company last month doubled the shifts to 16 hours a day at its factory in southern Beijing to meet higher demand, according to a staff member. The factory has about 2,000 human workers and about 700 robots. Lei said updates to the SU7 in August would allow it to be voice controlled from the outside. He spent the first part of the three-hour product event giving his fifth annual speech. This year's speech played up how U.S. sanctions on the company in January 2021 prompted Xiaomi's board of directors to ask Lei to think about options, such as building a car, in the event they could no longer sell smartphones. He said after much consideration he decided to do so, and warned the board it would require $10 billion in spending. He said he turned down early investment offers from venture capitalists that valued a standalone car business at $10 billion. Lei said he tried driving more than 170 different cars in three years, and even got a race car license along with more than 100 company executives and engineers. "Three years ago an accident allowed me to join such an interesting industry," Lei said in Mandarin, translated by CNBC. Xiaomi appealed the U.S. sanctions in 2021 and was removed from the blacklist in May that year. Lei announced Friday that Xiaomi aimed in the next decade to have the fastest four-door electric car to drive the Nurburgring race track in Germany, with tests of a new SU7 race car version starting in October. Geely-owned Zeekr in October 2023 launched a limited F1-inspired version of its 001 electric car.

Xiaomi Mix Flip and Mix Fold 4: What We Know About Xiaomi's Foldables

Xiaomi's first flip phone comes on the heels of the the Galaxy Z Flip 6 and the Razr Plus 2024. And just like its competitors, it has a large cover screen. Xiaomi announced the Mix Flip at an annual event in Beijing alongside the skinny book-style Mix Fold 4. Both phones are reserved for a release in Xiaomi's native China for now, but Xiaomi didn't share pricing information at the time of this writing. Like Samsung and Motorola's flip phones, the Mix Flip has a large outer screen, measuring 4 inches. Xiaomi says you'll be able to meet most of your daily needs without needing to flip open the device. The Mix Flip's outer screen partition design, along with dynamic widgets, gives you quick access to the cameras. You can also check the time, weather and other notifications. Xiaomi says the outer display also offers an AI experience, which adapts to your habits and provides a personalized experience. The last two years have seen flip phones undergo a design transformation, with much of the change happening on the front screen. This may have been kicked off by Chinese phone-maker Oppo, which shook up the cover design of flip phones in late 2022 by introducing a vertically oriented cover screen to its first-ever flip phone, the Find N2 Flip. The 2023 Motorola Razr Plus was then outfitted with a larger 3.6-inch cover screen. Samsung later followed suit, expanding the Galaxy Z Flip 5's outer display -- a design it retained with 2024's Galaxy Z Flip 6. The reason behind the growing size of these outer screens was to help create a more useful and interactive cover screen compared to the ones of years past. Previously outer displays on flip phones such as the Galaxy Z Flip 4 were useful for cursory checks, but not much else. The Mix Flip may also have one of the brightest outer screens around, with a peak brightness of 3,000 nits -- the same level as the Razr Plus 2024. By comparison, the Z Flip 6 has 2,600 nits. On the cover screen, you can see a pair of Leica-branded cameras in a vertical layout. They consist of a 50-megapixel main camera and a 50-megapixel "floating" telephoto lens, which should dynamically adjust its internal elements to optimize image quality across various shooting distances. (A regular telephoto lens maintains a fixed focal length.) Xiaomi says the cameras offer various photography modes, including hover mode, to help take stable shots without a tripod. Within its chassis, the Mix Flip runs on Qualcomm's top-of-the-line Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset and has a 4,780-mAh battery with support for 67-watt wired charging. Unlike the Z Flip 6 and Razr Plus 2024, the Mix Flip lacks an official IP rating for water- and dust-resistance. Xiaomi also debuted its next-gen Mix Fold 4, which is 9.47mm when folded close, making it one of the thinnest book-style foldable phones sold commercially -- second only to the Honor Magic V3. The Mix Fold 4 has a 6.56-inch outer screen that opens up like a book to reveal a 7.98-inch inner screen. Both screens have a refresh rate of up to 120Hz. Xiaomi credits the Mix Fold 4's "all-carbon architecture" for reducing its weight and thickness. It also reduced the hinge's total volume. According to the company, the hinge floating plate, screen backing plate and middle plate battery compartment are all precision-molded from carbon-fiber materials. Carbon fiber is a strong and lightweight material, but it comes at a cost and has been reported to suffer from brittleness. Despite the thinner design, Xiaomi says it's expanded the Mix Fold 4's battery capacity by 260 mAh, bringing the total capacity to 5,100 mAh. It has a silicon carbon battery instead of the now-traditional lithium ion ones, following in the footsteps of Honor's Magic V2. The use of silicon-carbon batteries in mobile phones is an emerging trend that's drawn attention due to its potential advantages over lithium-ion batteries. Those benefits include a lower environmental impact and reduced risk of overheating. The long-term reliability of silicon carbon batteries is still being researched, and adoption in the smartphone industry is still in its early stages. The Mix Fold 4 has four cameras, consisting of a 50-megapixel main camera, a 50-megapixel floating telephoto lens, a12-megapixel wide-angle camera and a second periscope-style telephoto lens. The announcements wouldn't be complete, especially in 2024, without mention of AI features. Xiaomi said the Mix Flip can offer AI-driven language translations in real time even when you're not connected to the internet. Those translations show up on both the inner and outer displays. Xiaomi introduced a so-called Travel Assistant feature, which Xiaomi says provides reminders of travel information during flights and train journeys as well as a feature that helps with text generation. Xiaomi says the Mix Fold 4 has been tested to withstand 500,000 folds. It has an IPX8 for water resistance, which means it can survive submersion in water, but it cannot protect against dust ingress.