The foldable scene is heating up now with Xiaomi the latest manufacturer to introduce their flagship foldable. Dubbed the Xiaomi Mix Fold 3, their 3rd generation foldable smartphone features a slew of improvements across the device that should make it an interesting challenger to the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5—if you can get one that is.
Among the number of upgrades Xiaomi is bringing to its latest foldable is a new hinge design. The new hinge is now lighter and slimmer than before, with the Xiaomi Mix Fold 3 also able to stop midway through the folding process. While its predecessors could only be used fully open or fully closed, you can use the Mix Fold 3 in a ‘Flex Mode’ like configuration. The new hinge is also stronger than before, with Xiaomi rating it for 500,000 folds.
As for the screens themselves, you’ll be staring at a 6.56-inch, FHD+ OLED display on the cover display. It comes in a 21:9 aspect ratio and pushes a 120Hz refresh rate, with an 8,000,000:1 contrast ratio, a peak brightness of 2600nits and coverage of the DCI-P3 colour gamut. There’s also a layer of Corning Gorilla Glass Victus 2 over it for scratch resistance. Open the Mix Fold 3 up and you’ll get a large 8.03-inch OLED display with a 2160 x 1916p resolution that also pushes a 120Hz refresh rate, a contrast ratio of 8,000,000:1 and peak brightness of 2600nits.
Under the hood, Xiaomi has packed in an overclocked Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 similar to the ‘for Galaxy’ editions found in Samsung’s flagship smartphones. This gets mated to up to 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM and up to 1TB of UFS 4.0 storage. It comes with Android 13 out of the box, skinned with MIUI Fold 14 over it.
In the camera department meanwhile is a quad rear camera setup tuned by Leica. Unlike other foldable smartphones that sacrifice camera capabilities, Xiaomi has gone all out here with a main 50MP, f/1.77 camera using the Sony IMX800 sensor, flanked by a 12MP, f/2.2 ultrawide, a 10MP, f/2.0 telephoto offering a 75mm equivalent 3.2x zoom and a 10MP, f/ 2.92 telephoto offering a 115mm equivalent 5x zoom. There’s also a 20MP selfie camera on both the cover and main displays.
Other features of note include a 4,800mAh battery with 67W fast wired charging and 50W wireless charging, as well as stereo speakers, a side mounted fingerprint sensor and support for NFC, 5G, WiFi 7 and Bluetooth 5.3 wireless connectivity; there’s no official IP rating here though.
Available in China only, the Mix Fold 3 starts at CNY8,999 (~RM5,730) for the base model with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, rising to CNY9,999 (~RM6,366) for 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage while the top configuration with 1TB of storage goes for CNY10,999 (~RM7,003).
