“We had so much news in store that we had to divide our event into two parts”. Lei Jun, the founder of Xiaomi, thus opens today’s special event, the second in two days, with which the Beijing company presented a stack of new tech products, confirmed the launch of the Mi Mix Fold and above all, it officially announced its intention to enter the electric car market.
Before announcing new products, however, Lei Jun showed a new version of the company logo, rethought by Japanese graphic designer Kenya Hara. The “master” – as Lei Jun defined it – has redefined the logotype according to complex parametric calculations that soften the lines, to the point of best interpreting the concept of “alive”, symbolizing the need to instill a breath of life in objects technologies used by humans.
The result is the same orange logo with the word “mi”, but slightly rounded.
Today’s event was a great zibaldone, in pure Xiaomi style, which however in terms of products had very little to offer to the Western public. All the gadgets presented today, from the smart vacuum cleaner, to the air conditioner, from the new generation air purifier, also passing through a laptop, are in fact destined for now only for the Chinese market.
Even the intention to enter the automotive market with investments in car electrification is for now a deal that concerns China, even if the impact of the announcement is inevitably global. Xiaomi in fact anticipates with this move competitors of the caliber of Apple, whose interest in the electric car market has been rumored for years.
Beijing Automobile Factory
A Xiaomi-branded car already exists. It is a sort of compact utility car for just over € 8,000, made by the Bajoun brand and announced last September for the Chinese market. The one unveiled today, however, is a further step that expands the company’s interest in sustainable mobility far beyond scooters and microcars.
Xiaomi’s automotive division, Lei Jun explained, will operate as a real subsidiary of the company. The initial planned investment is 1.5 billion dollars (10 billion Yuan), but over the next ten years Xiaomi already plans to invest another 10 billion dollars in total in the sector.
No, Xiaomi’s first electric car is not a Caravan, but Lei Jun showed one all the same.
With a long inspirational speech, the Xiaomi founder has in fact justified the expensive bet that Xiaomi is preparing to place. “Everyone told me that the automotive market is complex, that we have a very high probability of failing,” Jun said at the event. “It’s the same thing they told us a little over ten years ago, when we decided to start producing smartphones in a market that already seemed dominated by a few large companies”.
Net of heavy entrepreneurial rhetoric, Lei Jun’s intentions are clear: to bring the experience of a great technology company into a sector – the automotive one – which is experiencing an upheaval and an epochal transition. “Someone said that an electric car is nothing more than a smartphone with four doors,” said Lei Jun, “and we know how to make excellent smartphones”. The intentions are clear, the optimism is not lacking, the direction a little less: to date it has not yet been understood what the first concrete result of this new investment will be, nor when we will see the first Xiaomi brand vehicle.
But in conclusion Jun said one important thing: what his company is investing is money that Xiaomi can afford to lose. Either it goes or breaks it, in short: if it breaks it, never mind, there will always be many smartphones and smart products to produce and a large audience ready to buy them. If it goes well, however, in ten years we will probably be talking about Xiaomi as one of the largest electric car manufacturers in the world.
Mi Mix Fold
Among the myriad of products presented today by Xiaomi there is also a new smartphone from the Mi Mix series with a folding display, the MI MIX FOLD. It is a device with high-end features, which is very (perhaps too much) reminiscent of Samsung’s Galaxy Fold. It has the same shapes, more or less the same size (it’s a bit bigger) and also the same desktop backgrounds with a colorful blooming flower.
However, it costs much less, that is 9999RMB (about 1200 € at the current exchange rate) and the characteristics are very good. The foldable display is an 8.01 “4: 3 OLED, while the external display is a 6.52” AMOLED, with 90Hz refresh rate and HD + resolution. Among other features stand out the quadruple speakers for panoramic sound and the new Surge C1 chip made by Xiaomi, a proprietary chip for image processing. The main camera is 108MP, flanked by a 123 ° super wide angle with distortion correction. The battery is double, for a total of 5020mAh, and supports the 67W fast charging technology presented yesterday by Xiaomi.
A Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 chipset, 12GB of LPDDR5 RAM, 256GB of UFS 3.1 memory (in the basic version), 5G, and a hybrid cooling system to avoid overheating even when the device is operating at maximum speeds complete the picture of the specifications.
Mi Mix Fold is a great device, but it seems to arrive out of time. It might have made sense in the middle of last year, to compete with the first or second versions of the competitor’s folding models. Xiaomi has managed to bring it to the market only today because so far, in all likelihood, it would not have been possible to make such a product in this price range (even with the famous 5% margin that allows the company to aggressively price all its gadgets).
If the price is attractive and the product technologically valid, however, the impression remains that of looking at an already dated device. An advanced and shiny object that, however, does not yet answer – like all the foldables of the competition – to the fundamental question: but what problem do folding smartphones really solve?