Xiaomi is the latest player to enter the flip phone arena. The Beijing-based company showed off its inaugural flip phone, the Mix Flip, ahead of its launch in China on Friday. The Mix Flip adopts the large outer screen seen on recent flip phone offerings such as Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip 6 and Motorola’s Razr Plus 2024. CEO Lei Jun said to expect a “highly functional” outer screen that “lets you do more without even flipping it open,” in a Wednesday post on X.
Read more: Samsung’s Flip Phone Highlights the Clamshell’s Comeback
The last two years have seen flip phones undergo a design transformation, with much of the changes happening on the front screen. This may have been kicked off by Chinese phonemaker 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 outfitted with a larger 3.6-inch cover screen. Samsung followed suit and expanded the Galaxy Z Flip 5’s outer display, and did so once again with the Galaxy Z Flip 6. Xiaomi’s move to adopt this expanded outer screen design indicates that makers have settled on the the look and feel of the clamshell-style phone.
Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip 4 from August 2022 has an outer screen that takes up less than half of the device’s cover.
“Larger cover screens make these clamshells both more useful and more deliberate — sometimes you just want a piece of information without falling into a rabbit hole of app content,” Avi Greengart, analyst at Techsponential, told CNET over email last April.
The 2024 Motorola Razr Plus shows how much flip phone outer screens have expanded.
Xiaomi’s flip phone comes mere days after Samsung took the wraps off its flagship Galaxy Z Flip 6. The Chinese company didn’t reveal any specs about the Mix Flip, but released a series of promotional images. Apart from the large outer screen, one of the images shows a vertical layout for its two camera bumps on the cover, which also use circular housing. Samsung and Motorola opted for a horizontal orientation lining an upper corner of the cover. Another image indicates that the Mix Flip will run on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor and have a Leica-branded camera module.
Xiaomi has cultivated a reputation for offering good value, and it’ll be interesting to see how the Chinese firm decides to price its Mix Flip — if it gets an international launch. Samsung increased prices of its Galaxy Z Flip 6 this year by $100 to $1,100, and the Razr Plus 2024 starts at $1,000.
Watch this: First Look: The 2024 Motorola Razr and Razr Plus Come With Colorful Upgrades
