Lei Jun’s company has announced in China Xiaomi 18 Fold, the foldable model in the 18 lineup that previews the launch of the other models in the family. The device arrives over two years after Xiaomi MIX Fold 4 and becomes part of the brand’s main series: the result is a smartphone refreshed on the design front, with an internally developed chipset by the company and a top-tier camera system (co-engineered with Leica).
Xiaomi 18 Fold features an external AMOLED display of 5.38″ with a 1.5K resolution, a refresh rate up to 120 Hz, touch sampling up to 300 Hz, a P3 color gamut, a minimum brightness of 1 nit and a peak brightness of 4,000 nits. To protect it there is the Xiaomi Shield Glass 3.0, already seen on board of Xiaomi 17 Ultra.
The inner display is instead a 7.58″ unit, still AMOLED but with Pol-less technology, 1.5K resolution, refresh rate up to 120 Hz, touch sampling up to 240 Hz and the same minimum and peak brightness values, but in this case protected by a flexible UTG foldable glass.
Both panels support HDR10+, HDR Vivid and Dolby Vision, as well as touch input with wet hands.
Xiaomi 18 Fold adopts a defined “mid-fold” shape with large-radius elliptical corners and a flat bezel, a Series 7 aluminum alloy frame and Shield Glass 3.0 to protect the chassis. On the back, the horizontal bar housing the camera is designed to reduce the device’s wobble when placed on a surface.
The device has a thickness of 5.02 mm when open and 10.68 mm when closed, for a weight of 219 grams. Xiaomi claims drop resistance up to 1.2 meters, the result of 492 structural optimizations based on environmental tests and simulations.
The fingerprint reader is integrated laterally in the power button. Additionally, the phone has obtained IP58 certification for dust and water ingress resistance while the available colors are three: black, white and red.
There is also a special pink ceramic edition, designed to reduce weight and increase surface hardness compared to the standard chassis, offered only in the 16 GB/1 TB cut and limited to 1,500 units.
Under the hood debuts XRING O3, the flagship AI processor developed directly by Xiaomi with a 3 nm TSMC process. The CPU is a 10-core entirely “Big core” with a maximum frequency of 4.35 GHz and would, according to Xiaomi, offer a 60% increase in multi-core performance with a 25% reduction in power consumption in mid-to-low loads compared to the previous generation.
The 16-core G2-Ultra NX GPU would instead guarantee an 85% jump in graphics performance, with a 64% reduction in power consumption.
Completing the chipset is a 4-core NPU capable of 200 TOPS of tensor computation and 3.13 TFLOPS of vector computation, for a total score claimed to exceed 5 million points in benchmark tests.
In terms of memory, Xiaomi 18 Fold offers up to 16 GB of RAM and 1 TB of storage, with LPDDR5X and UFS4.1. The flagship 16 GB/1 TB variant is the only one with LPDDR6 RAM provided by ChangXin Memory or SK Hynix.
Xiaomi 18 Fold integrates a dual-cell 6,000 mAh battery, based on silicon-carbon chemistry with 20% silicon content and an energy density of 920 Wh/L. The phone supports 67W fast charging and 50W wireless charging.
The camera system is co-engineered with Leica, covering the entire focal length range. The main Leica sensor is 200 MP, with f/1.7, a 23 mm equivalent focal length, OIS optical stabilization and ultra-transparent glass lenses.
The Leica periscope telephoto is also 50 MP, with f/2.8, 3.5x optical zoom (7x in optical quality) and OIS, while the Leica ultra-wide is 50 MP with f/2.4.
On the video front, the rear camera can record up to 8K at 24 fps, 4K at 30/60 fps and slow-motion up to 960 fps in 1080p and 720p; the selfie camera is 16 MP with f/2.2 and a 90° field of view, identical on both the external and internal displays.
On the software front, Xiaomi 18 Fold runs HyperOS 4, paired with the brand’s new AI assistant, Super Xiao AI 2.0, which introduces the “Inspiration Ball” feature designed to trigger workflows via voice command.
The system can interpret what appears on the screen, recognizing addresses, products, times, images, chats and posters, proposing contextual actions such as starting navigation, adding an event to the calendar, searching for a product or editing a photograph via AI.
Multitasking has also been revised to handle up to six windows in split screen simultaneously, taking advantage of the space offered by the inner display. The smartphone also includes the Xingchen (literally Starlight) communication system, designed to guarantee connectivity even in areas with limited signal.
Xiaomi 18 Fold is already in pre-order in China, with sales across all channels scheduled to begin on September 10. The device is offered in five configurations:
At the moment the phone has been announced for the Chinese market only and will surely remain an exclusive in the homeland. We just have to wait for the launch event dedicated to the Xiaomi 18 series, which this time should arrive in Global version in full (thus with Pro and Pro Max models featuring a rear display)!
For all the latest on the brand’s ecosystem, you can find our most recent articles in the Xiaomi section of GizChina.it.
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