2023 Author: Bryan Walter | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-05-21 22:24
Xiaomi has introduced the Mi Mix Fold smartphone with a flexible screen. This is the first smartphone to use a liquid lens in one of the cameras. It allows you to quickly focus on subjects, as well as use a telephoto lens for macro photography. The presentation was broadcast on the Xiaomi YouTube channel.
Screen and smartphone developers have shown prototypes of smartphones and tablets with flexible screens over the past few years. Moreover, for several years there have been serial OLED panels and devices with them, but until recently they were used only in a static form, for example, in a smartphone with curved screen edges. But for use in flexible smartphones, the screen must be able to withstand not only the initial bending during the manufacture of the device, but also repeated daily deformations over several years. The screens were brought to this level of reliability only a couple of years ago, and at the same time manufacturers began to produce the first smartphones with flexible screens: Royole became the first of them at the end of 2018, and less than six months later, Samsung and Huawei presented their flexible devices, as well as a flexible smartphone. Motorola has.
Back in 2019, Xiaomi showed a working prototype of a smartphone with a flexible screen, and with an unusual design: it folds the screen not in the middle, but on two sides. Now, the company has released its first mass-produced flexible screen smartphone, the Mi Mix Fold. It uses not a design from an early prototype, but a standard approach: the case is in two equal parts and has a large flexible screen on the entire inner surface, and on one of the two halves on the outside there is a second smaller screen that can be used when the device is folded.
Mi Mix Fold
The internal screen measures eight inches diagonally and has a resolution of 2480 by 1860 pixels, while the external screen is 6.52 inches and 2520 by 840 pixels. Both screens use OLED Martins, but the internal one has a refresh rate of 60 hertz, and the external one - 90 hertz.
The developers have adapted the operating system interface to work with a large screen. In addition to the standard Android capabilities for working with two applications at the same time, Mi Mix Fold also has a desktop mode, in which the interface becomes similar to Windows by the principle of organization: it has a desktop, freely movable application windows, a taskbar and an analogue of the Start menu … However, it is unclear if this mode will only work on the device itself, or if it can be used in conjunction with an external monitor and mouse like Samsung's DeX or Motorola's Ready For.
Desktop mode with an analogue of the "Start" menu
Another feature of the smartphone is the camera. It has three cameras on the back: a standard 108MP, a 13MP wide-angle, and a 13MP telephoto camera. In a telephoto lens, the developers for the first time used a liquid lens, the curvature of which can be changed. It consists of two films, between which there is a transparent liquid. The company does not specify the details of the lens design, noting only that a high-precision motor is responsible for changing the radius of curvature of the lens. Typically, in liquid lenses, the curvature is set by the applied voltage, but there is also a design with piezoelectric elements that mechanically move one of the lens surfaces to bend the other. The use of a liquid lens made it possible to combine in one lens a threex optical zoom for shooting distant objects (equivalent focal length of 80 mm) and a minimum focusing distance of three centimeters, which makes it possible to use it for macro photography.
The rest of the characteristics of a smartphone are standard for a similar device. It has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 processor, 12 to 16 gigabytes of RAM and 256 to 512 gigabytes of constant UFS 3.1 standard. The battery has a capacity of 5,020 milliampere-hours and supports 67-watt charging. In addition, the device has support for 5G networks, four speakers, an infrared port and a co-processor developed by Xiaomi for the primary processing of images from the Surge C1 camera.
The smartphone will go on sale on April 16, but will only be sold in China. The cost of the device is from 9999 yuan, which is about 115.5 thousand rubles at the exchange rate on the day of the announcement.
This is not the first time Xiaomi has offered to use unusual camera designs in smartphones. For example, at the end of last year, she showed a prototype of a telescopic lens for a smartphone, and before that she described in a patent application a smartphone that takes wide-angle pictures using a sliding module with two cameras.
