Xiaomi 18 Fold · The first foldable built around Xiaomi's own silicon

• A wide fold, not a book fold. Closed it is a 5.38-inch phone; opened it becomes a 7.58-inch landscape panel.
• XRING O3. The first foldable anywhere to run Xiaomi's in-house 3 nm flagship processor.
• 4,000 nits on both panels, inside and out, at 120 Hz each.
• A 200 MP Leica main camera, backed by a 50 MP periscope and a 50 MP ultrawide.
• 6,000 mAh in a body that measures 5.02 mm unfolded, with 67 W wired and 50 W wireless charging.
• A new folding architecture with double-layer UTG glass and an all-new hinge.
• A ceramic special edition tops the range at 16 GB and 1 TB.
• From ¥10,999, about €1,410, with Chinese sales opening on 10 September.

Xiaomi closed its autumn keynote on 7 September with the phone the whole event had been building towards. The Xiaomi 18 Fold is the company's first foldable in this shape and, more to the point, the first foldable from anyone to be built around silicon the phone maker designed itself.

The shape matters as much as the chip. Almost every foldable sold today is a book fold: a narrow phone that opens into a nearly square tablet. The 18 Fold hinges along its short edge instead, so it closes into an ordinary-width phone and opens into a wide, landscape screen. Huawei got there first with the Pura X Max, and for six months it had the format to itself. It no longer does.

What makes this one different is XRING O3. Xiaomi has spent years buying its flagship processors; this is the first fold to run one it drew up in-house, on a 3 nm process, with ten large CPU cores and a sixteen-core graphics part. A first is exactly the kind of thing that puts a phone at the top of the market, and it is why this one is here.

There is no previous Xiaomi model to measure this against, so the useful comparison is the only other wide fold on sale. Both launched at exactly ¥10,999, which makes the differences unusually easy to read.

• Screens. Xiaomi opens to 7.58 inches against Huawei's 7.7 inches, and closes to 5.38 inches against 5.4 inches. Effectively the same phone in the hand; Huawei's is a hair bigger on both counts.
• Brightness. Xiaomi claims 4,000 nits peak on both panels. That is the clearest specification gap between the two.
• Thickness and weight. 5.02 mm unfolded against Huawei's 5.2 mm, 10.68 mm closed against 11.2 mm, and 219 g against 229 g. Xiaomi wins all three, narrowly.
• Battery. 6,000 mAh against 5,300 mAh, a 700 mAh advantage in a thinner body, with the same 50 W wireless charging and 67 W wired against Huawei's 66 W.
• Main camera. Xiaomi fields a 200 MP sensor at a fixed f/1.7; Huawei fields 50 MP with a genuine ten-stop variable physical aperture. Two different bets, and the Huawei approach still has no equivalent here.
• Ultrawide. 50 MP against Huawei's 12.5 MP, a four-fold jump in resolution.
• Telephoto. A wash: both use a 50 MP periscope at 3.5× optical.
• Sealing. Huawei carries IP58 and IP59; Xiaomi carries IP58 alone.
• Software. HyperOS 4 runs Android apps. HarmonyOS NEXT does not, which remains the single biggest practical difference between the two phones.

On hardware the 18 Fold is the more modern device almost everywhere that can be counted: thinner, lighter, brighter, longer-lasting, with far more pixels on two of its three cameras. Huawei keeps the better main-camera idea and the tougher sealing. Neither of them, though, is a phone you can walk into a shop and buy outside China.

Closed, the 18 Fold measures 117.8 by 83.6 mm and 10.68 mm thick. Those are the numbers that make the format work: 83.6 mm across is a wide phone but still a phone, and the 5.38-inch cover screen is a real one rather than a strip. Open it and the body goes to 163.8 mm across at 5.02 mm thick, weighing 219 g in total.

Xiaomi describes the mechanism as a new-generation folding architecture with an all-new hinge and double-layer ultra-thin glass under the inner panel. The cover glass is Xiaomi Longjing Glass 3.0. The body is rated IP58, tested to 1.5 m for 30 minutes, which covers rain and a dropped-in-the-sink accident but is a step below the dual IP58 and IP59 rating Huawei puts on its wide fold.

The camera island is an elongated pill set into the top-left corner of the back, carrying the Leica Vario-Summilux marking. That placement has a small daily cost: an off-centre module gives the phone a pivot, so left flat on a desk it rocks when you tap the side away from the island. Phones with a centred island lie still; this one does not.

Three standard colours: Black, Warm Gold White and Xiye Red. A ceramic special edition sits above them, sold only in the 16 GB and 1 TB configuration.

The inner panel is a 7.58-inch AMOLED at 2364 by 1672, built Pol-less, which removes the polariser layer and buys back some brightness and a little flexibility. The cover panel is a 5.38-inch AMOLED at 1712 by 1168. Both run at up to 120 Hz and both reach 4,000 nits at peak in the brightest conditions, and Xiaomi's phrase for it, matched flagship panels inside and out, is for once literally true: the pair share resolution class, refresh rate, colour gamut and peak brightness. On most foldables the cover screen is visibly the cheaper one.

Both also drop to 1 nit at the bottom of the range and use DC dimming across the whole brightness range rather than only at the top. HDR10+, HDR Vivid and Dolby Vision are all supported, and touch sampling runs to 300 Hz on the cover panel and 240 Hz inside.

On the crease: Xiaomi makes no claim about it either way, and the fold line does not show in the company's own press renders of the open panel. Press renders are not retail hardware, so that is worth exactly what it is worth. We will say something firmer when there are units to look at.

XRING O3 is made on TSMC's 3 nm process and skips the usual efficiency cluster entirely: ten CPU cores, all of them large, with a top clock of 4.35 GHz. Graphics are handled by a sixteen-core G2-Ultra NX part, and there is a four-core NPU alongside for on-device AI work.

Memory runs from 12 GB of LPDDR5X to 16 GB, and the top 16 GB and 1 TB configuration moves up to LPDDR6. Storage is UFS 4.1 across the range, from 256 GB to 1 TB, with no card slot. Wired data is unusually quick for a phone: the USB-C port runs USB 3.2 Gen 2 at up to 10 Gbps, though Xiaomi notes the cable in the box is not the one that does it.

The cell is 6,000 mAh typical, 5,875 mAh rated, split into two parallel high-density cells. Getting that into a foldable that measures 5.02 mm unfolded is the more impressive half of the achievement; for scale, plenty of ordinary non-folding flagships carry less.

Charging is 67 W wired and 50 W wireless, both under Xiaomi's HyperCharge branding, and the phone also takes 50 W PPS and PD 3.0 from generic chargers. A power adapter, a cable, a case and a pre-applied screen protector are all in the box, which is no longer a given at this price.

The main camera is a 200 MP sensor at f/1.7 behind a 23 mm-equivalent lens with optical stabilisation and what Xiaomi calls an ultra-clear glass element. Beside it sit a 50 MP Leica periscope at f/2.8, stabilised, good for 3.5× optical and a claimed 7× at optical quality, and a 50 MP ultrawide at f/2.4. The lens ring is engraved Leica Vario-Summilux 1:1.7-2.8/17-80 ASPH, which puts the system's range at 17 to 80 mm equivalent.

A 50 MP ultrawide is the specification most worth pausing on. Ultrawides are where foldables usually save money, and 12 MP remains common on phones costing this much.

Video tops out at 8K and 24 fps, with 4K at 30 or 60, and slow motion to 960 fps at 1080p. Dolby Vision capture is supported. The selfie camera is 16 MP at f/2.2 with a 90-degree field of view, which is the one modest number in the set, though on a phone that opens flat the rear cameras will take most of the portraits anyway.

The phone ships on Xiaomi HyperOS 4 with Super XiaoAi 2.0, the assistant layer built on Xiaomi's own MiMo model. A landscape screen changes what an assistant can usefully do, and the software leans on that: two apps side by side is the default posture rather than a party trick, and Xiaomi's own demonstrations run a desktop-style video editing timeline across the open panel.

Outside the AI features, the hardware list is unusually complete. There is UWB, used for digital car keys that unlock and start selected Xiaomi, XPeng and Audi models and open a boot as you walk up to it. NFC covers transit cards in over 300 cities, Mi Pay, door cards and bank cards. Wi-Fi 7 with MLO, Bluetooth 6.0 with dual-Bluetooth and LDAC and LHDC 5.0, an infrared blaster, and a full navigation stack including dual-band BeiDou, GPS L1 and L5, Galileo, GLONASS, QZSS and NavIC.

Xiaomi has not published an update-support commitment for the phone. When it does, we will add it here.

Four configurations. Pre-orders opened on announcement night; Chinese sales start on 10 September at 10:00 local time:

• 12 GB + 256 GB – ¥10,999, about $1,640 or €1,410
• 12 GB + 512 GB – ¥11,999, about $1,790 or €1,540
• 16 GB + 512 GB – ¥12,999, about $1,940 or €1,670
• 16 GB + 1 TB – ¥14,999, about $2,235 or €1,925

The ceramic special edition, also 16 GB and 1 TB, is ¥15,999, roughly $2,385 or €2,050. Conversions are at today's rates and before any local tax.

Those euro figures are a conversion, not a price you can pay. Imported into a market where Xiaomi does not sell this model, the phone also picks up customs duty and local VAT, so the real cost outside China lands noticeably higher than the arithmetic suggests.

And that is the catch. Xiaomi has announced no international version of the 18 Fold. Xiaomi does sell phones in Europe, unlike Huawei's wide fold, which makes a later global release more plausible here than it ever was for the Pura X Max, but plausible is not announced. For now this is a Chinese phone, and the only ways to hold one elsewhere involve an importer.