It’s been just a few days since the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5 shipped to eager buyers, and now Xiaomi has announced a foldable phone that might make Samsung fans look a little less fondly at their purchase, as the new Xiaomi Mix Fold 3 could have the Z Fold 5 beat in a number of ways.
For one thing, this is a great looking phone. While subjectively we don’t love the camera design, the rest of it looks as good as we’d hope a premium foldable would, and you can get it either with a glass or composite fiber back – the latter being a more unusual option. Plus, it’s incredibly slim at just 5.3mm thick when unfolded (beating both the 6.1mm Z Fold 5 and the 5.8mm Google Pixel Fold).
The Xiaomi Mix Fold 3 also sounds impressively durable, as it’s rated to survive up to 500,000 folding cycles, compared to just 200,000 from the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5 and the Pixel Fold. Though notably Xiaomi’s phone has no IP rating, meaning it’s unlikely to be anywhere near as water resistant as those two rivals.
Still, there’s plenty more to like here, including a quad-lens camera on the back. That’s one more camera than the current best foldable phones, with the Xiaomi Mix Fold 3 including a 50MP main snapper, a 12MP ultra-wide with a 120-degree field-of-view, a 10MP telephoto with 3.2x optical zoom, and a 10MP periscope camera with 5x optical zoom.
This is a big deal, because one criticism we have of most foldable phones is that their camera setups can't match the top non-foldable phones. It's something we specifically highlighted in our Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5 review, in fact.
Big screens and a beefy battery
And we haven’t even talked about the screens yet. The Xiaomi Mix Fold 3 has a large 8.03-inch 1916 x 2160 foldable OLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate, while the cover screen is a 6.56-inch 1080 x 2520 OLED with a 120Hz refresh rate. Both of those are bigger than the displays found on Samsung and Google’s foldables.
The Xiaomi Mix Fold 3 also has a top-end Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset, up to 1TB of storage, up to 16GB of RAM, and a 4,800mAh battery, with 67W wired charging and 50W wireless charging.
So this is a phone with impressive specs and features across the board, but sadly this unveiling was just for China, and the Mix Fold 3 is unlikely to be made available in most other places. That’s all the more of a shame because in China at least it undercuts much of the competition, starting at CNY 8,999 (around $1,240 / £975 / AU$1,910).
If the Xiaomi Mix Fold 3 ever does get a global launch, we'll be sure to let you know. But either way, we hope Samsung and Google are taking note.