Xiaomi unveiled its first “wide-fold” smartphone, the Xiaomi 18 Fold, at its autumn flagship launch event in Beijing on September 7. The phone marks the debut of Xiaomi’s self-developed Xuanjie O3 chip and sits at the top of the company’s numbered flagship lineup.
The 18 Fold introduces a new “mid-fold” form factor that sits between a regular foldable and a wider “book-style” fold. Closed, it has a 5.38-inch cover screen; opened, a 7.58-inch inner display with an aspect ratio close to 4:3, which Xiaomi says reduces black bars when watching video and improves multitasking and reading. The phone launches in a new colourway called Xiwan Red, inspired by Pantone’s 2026 colour trends.
At the core is the XRING O3, Xiaomi’s most powerful self-designed chip to date. Built on a 3nm process with a ten-core all-big-core layout, it scored over 5.22 million points on AnTuTu, becoming the first flagship SoC to cross the 5-million mark, with CPU performance up 60% over its predecessor. The new G2-Ultra NX GPU delivers an 85% jump in graphics performance while cutting power consumption by 64%. The NPU was rebuilt to run Xiaomi’s own MiMo on-device large language model, offering 200 TOPS of tensor compute.
The XRING O3 is also the world’s first mobile chip to support LPDDR6 memory, and the 18 Fold is the first phone to pair it with mass-produced LPDDR6 chips from Chinese memory maker ChangXin (CXMT), reaching 113.8GB/s bandwidth — a 48% improvement over the previous generation. It’s the first time a Xiaomi in-house chip and domestically made memory have shipped together in a mass-market flagship, a pairing state broadcaster CCTV highlighted as a sign of progress in China’s semiconductor supply chain.
On imaging, the 18 Fold packs a 200MP main camera (1/1.56-inch sensor), a 50MP ultrawide, and a 50MP periscope telephoto with 3.5x optical zoom.
It runs a 6000mAh dual-cell battery with 67W wired and 50W wireless charging, on top of Xiaomi’s HyperOS 4 software integrated with the MiMo model.
Pricing was also confirmed at the event: the 12GB+256GB model starts at 10,999 yuan (约RM6,599), followed by 12GB+512GB at 11,999 yuan (约RM7,199), 16GB+512GB at 12,999 yuan (约RM7,799), and a top-spec 16GB+1TB version at 14,999 yuan (约RM8,999).
While earlier leaks had pointed to a starting price closer to 12,000 yuan, the actual entry price came in slightly lower — though every variant still crosses the 10,000-yuan line, making the 18 Fold Xiaomi’s first phone to do so.
It launched alongside the similarly XRING O3-powered Xiaomi Pad 9 Pro Max, as well as three new Xiaomi Chengcheng EV models: the N70 Pro, N70 Max, and N90 Max.
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Source: mi.com
