Just a few days ago, Xiaomi confirmed that it will launch its next foldable smartphone, the Xiaomi 18 Fold, in September. While the company has yet to give us a proper look at the device, Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun has already teased the phone in his hands. Now, alleged images of the upcoming foldable have surfaced online.
The images were shared on Weibo by a user named Peter, who claims that the device shown is an engineering prototype rather than a final retail unit. The post also jokingly suggests that the final version will not look this “ugly”, although the wording is based on a machine translation of the original Chinese post.
Arbitrary and subjective beauty standards aside, the images depict a wide foldable with a dark red hue. Sources online say that the colourway is called “Dark Cherry” and that it will allegedly be the hero colour of the foldable.
The images revealed the device’s rear, which shows three camera lenses and an LED flash housed within a horizontal camera bar. Barring the recent Galaxy Z Fold8, more and more wide foldables appear to be adopting this horizontal camera arrangement. This could perhaps be to make room for built-in magnets and subsequent MagSafe accessories, but that is purely speculation on our part.
We also got a top-down image of the device, which suggests that the phone is actually thinner than we initially thought. That said, we still do not know its official measurements at the time of writing, so we can’t say for sure just yet.
It’s worth pointing out that the original Weibo poster did not mention any of the device’s specifications, so we still do not know what’s in store for us just yet. The only detail we do know, which Xiaomi itself confirmed, is that it will come with the XRing O3 chipset. In case you missed it, the sources reported that the SoC is “the world’s first mobile chipset to support LPDDR6 and delivers speeds up to 10,667Mbps with a memory bandwidth of 113.8GB/s.”
With all that said, do keep in mind that these hands-on images are still considered leaks and should be taken with a grain of salt. After all, the poster himself claims that the model in question may just be an engineering prototype. In any case, with the Xiaomi 18 Fold slated to launch this coming September, it won’t be long before we start receiving more details about the device.
(Source: Sumaho Digest, Weibo, via GSMArena)
