Xiaomi Mi Mix ‘Concept’ Phone Goes on Sale in China

The Mi Mix smartphone, which started as a concept phone for Xiaomi, is now the Chinese handset maker’s latest Android phone. It features a hardened ceramic body, frame and control buttons.

The richly styled Mi Mix concept smartphone has a 6.4-inch edgeless touch-screen display and a 2.35GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 processor, and is available in two versions, with 4GB of LPDDR4 memory and 128GB of on-board flash storage or with 6GB of LPDDR4 memory and 256GB of flash storage.

Designed by industrial designer Philippe Starck, the Xiaomi Mi Mix has an all-ceramic body built using special technologies that produce ceramic parts with incredible hardness. The rear cover of the phone, the chassis, the buttons and sides are made from the special ceramic material.

The Mi Mix also features a 16MP phase detection autofocus rear-facing camera and a 5-megapixel compact front camera module, which is mounted in a unique location on the front of the phone, in the bottom right corner.

Instead of a traditional earpiece speaker, the Xiaomi Mi Mix smartphone uses cantilever piezoelectric ceramic acoustic technology, which allows users to listen to calls without a traditional earpiece.

With a 6.4-inch touch-screen rounded-edge display, the Xiaomi Mi Mix has a screen that is 23 percent larger than the 5.5-inch display on the Apple iPhone 7 Plus smartphone, despite having similar overall dimensions to the iPhone 7 Plus.

The Mi Mix also features HD audio quality with 192KHz/24-bit audio resolution for playing streaming music, as well as a 4,400mAh battery and Quick Charge 3.0 capabilities. The handset also includes full Near Field Communication (NFC) capabilities, as well as Mi Pay electronic payment services.

The standard Mi Mix handset with 4GB of memory and 128GB of storage is priced at $516, while the exclusive 18-k version with 6GB of memory, 256GB of storage and 18-karat gold details sells for $590.

The Mi Mix smartphone comes with an included leather case out of the box and features a built-in rear fingerprint scanner for device and data security.

Also recently released was the Xiaomi Mi Note 2 smartphone, designed to be a world phone for use around the globe. The Mi Note 2 is the sequel to the company’s original Mi Note, which debuted in 2015 with a screen with curved edges on both sides of the display. The Mi Note 2 has a 5.7-inch flexible OLED display and will come in three versions with 4GB to 6GB of memory and 64GB to 128GB of on-board storage. The handsets also include NFC capabilities. Pricing ranges from $413 to $516 each, but the company has not yet announced where the multi-band world phones will be sold.