Samsung may have gotten there first, but Xiaomi just put a big smile on the faces of wide-style foldable phone fans who are holding out for a true hardware hero. The Xiaomi 18 Fold squeezes a triple lens rear camera setup and a significantly larger battery into a compact, passport-sized foldable – and crucially also the upcoming Apple iPhone Fold with a full 24 hours.
It was first revealed to the public at the Berlin IFA show, but strictly behind glass. Xiaomi saved the launch right for China, where the phone is mainly sold. I managed to get my hands on it ahead of time; after just a short demo session, I wonder if this is now the wide-style folding phone to beat.
The Xiaomi 18 Fold is surprisingly small, being shorter than even the stubby Galaxy Z Fold8. I thought it looked gorgeous in cherry red, with sharp corners on the side near the hinge and rounded edges on the outside that reminded me of the original Google Pixel Fold. Except here the wheels are impressively slim, allowing the 5.38in OLED panel to fill almost the entire front face.
Just like Samsung’s foldable, the 18 Fold is passport-sized when closed, but opens up into a multimedia-friendly 7.58in form factor. Both panels have the same 2:1 aspect ratio, which should make the transition between the two that much smoother. A 4000 nit peak brightness should make it both perfectly readable under strong sunlight and the 1-120Hz LTPO refresh rate should be silky smooth at all times. An RGB sub-pixel structure is also a first for all foldables.
The hinge felt strong and secure, opening and closing with a satisfying snap. There’s a fingerprint sensor built into the power button and stereo speaker grills at the top and bottom – although both are on the left half of the phone, which could make media playback feel a bit lopsided. I will have to wait for a full review to confirm. At 219g, it didn’t feel heavier than my current non-folding flagship phone.
At 5.02mm when unfolded, it’s slightly thicker than the Galaxy Z Fold8, even before you factor in the phone’s camera bar. Xiaomi opted for better battery life over a slimmer chassis, making room inside for a 6000mAh cell that should comfortably outlast anything Samsung or Google currently has on sale. It will also support 67W wireless charging for quick top-ups.
Photography fans will be very happy to hear that Xiaomi has added a dedicated telephoto lens – something the Galaxy Z Fold8 lacks and the iPhone Fold is rumored to skip. Here you get portrait-friendly 3.5x magnification on a 50MP sensor, which is then able to manage almost lossless 7x snaps through sensor crop.
The main snapper has a 200MP sensor, which at 1/1.56in is one of the largest available in any foldable. There is also a 50MP ultrawide support. As usual, the lenses and image processing algorithms were developed with the help of Leica.
I can’t vouch for the image quality yet, but Xiaomi has made some of the best phones for photography in recent years, so I’m hopeful that it can compete with non-folding flagships for clarity.
Inside, the 18 Fold is powered by Xiaomi’s home-made X-Ring 03 chipset. It is built on a 3nm process with ARM cores – ten of them, in a 6+4 configuration – and has a 4.35GHz clock speed. Without a chance to run benchmarks or play games, I can’t vouch for its performance yet, but Android 17 felt perfectly responsive. My demo handset was equipped with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, but there will almost certainly be higher variants for those willing to part with more cash.
My demo was with a handset destined for the Chinese market, filled with apps I didn’t recognize and lacking the floating app bar found on most Android foldables sold in the West. Split View multitasking was done via gestures that I couldn’t always get to work the first time – maybe the pre-release software still had a few kinks. It will do two-way and three-way split.
As there is a version sold in other territories, a global version of HyperOS run? That remains to be seen. The Xiaomi 18 Fold is currently only available for pre-order in China, where it costs 10,999 Yuan (around $1,650/£1,200) for the base 12GB/256GB variant. There’s also an exclusive ceramic model that swaps the glass rear panel for one made of silicon nitride ceramic – it’ll ship exclusively with 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage for 15999 Yuan (around $2400 / £1750). If it makes its way to Western countries in some form, I would expect the retail price to be even higher.
