Xiaomi Mi Mix Alpha Impressions: The Wraparound Display!

Hello, what's up guys? mkbhd here, so this is fun. A couple of days ago, Xiaomi gave me a first look at a prototype smartphone they've been working on, very similar to some things we saw at CES. This is not a real phone. a price tag that has a shipping date or something like that. This is just a working prototype to show a cool idea they had and that idea is what would happen if you took those curved edge

display

s and just curved them all the way around the back. around the back of the phone so you're just looking at the full 110 screen and that's how we get to this

alpha

prototype of the

xiaomi

me mix too before we get into it, shameless plug, the merchandising is now back permanently, so a lot of the stuff you can now get whenever you want, which is awesome: shop.mkbhd.com, the first link under the like button, that's pretty cool, okay, let's get into the phone, so this is The Xiaomi Mix Alpha is unlike any other phone.

I've seen it before and I've seen a lot of phones, so you might remember that their mixed line for a while has been that line of phones where they really pushed the design to the limit. The first mix was one of my favorite phones. for that reason, that's why this one got the name me mix and it's definitely no exception, the materials, the specs and of course the screen are on the next level, so there's the frame of the phone which is This titanium alloy which is harder than stainless steel and all the camera covers are made of sapphire and the camera strip on the back is ceramic.

I don't have a Mohs pick on hand or anything, but I tend to believe that because this phone is heavy, clearly dense, and has a lot of extra. additional glass material for screen, etc. and the specs don't matter but they are pretty high end which shows that they didn't have to sacrifice too much to achieve this form factor so snapdragon 855 plus 512 gigs of ufs 3.0 storage 12 gigs of ram and a 4050 battery milliamp hour which is pretty good anyway, you might want to see the battery even bigger, but a lot of that space, as you can see, will be taken up by the screen that wraps inside the phone and has 40 watt fast charging, a which I'll definitely come back to in a second, so clearly the focal point of the phone here is this screen.

I mean, imagine seeing someone in person using this screen where you can see from the front from the sides. and from the back, this is a 2088 by 2250 OLED

display

with very thin top and bottom bezels that wrap around to meet the camera strip on the back, which is what I'll call it. It contains a few things, including 108 megapixels. main camera, the 20-megapixel ultrawide with macro capabilities and the 12-megapixel telephoto camera and dual LED flash, and this phone also has an impressive in-display fingerprint reader, it's 5g enabled and there are a ton of optimizations in

xiaomi

miui

alpha

software like The battery and status bar icons and notification counter are on the side of the phone here instead of the top, so clear the top so it's just a dropdown menu of notifications and not have to show all that stuff all the time, which is It's pretty neat and it's also crazy, no matter what angle you look at it from, it just doesn't look right, it doesn't look like a real phone, it looks futuristic even before that you think of any type of practical trade.

I also told you I would mention loading again. I think probably the best part about having an immersive screen like this is the charging animation, so go ahead and plug this phone in with the screen off and everything lights up and animates the battery. beginning to fill everything like liquid, as if liquid energy was flowing into the phone. I love this and it doesn't stay on the entire time you're charging, that would be a little annoying at night but it's great. I admit that the notifications will also do the same - they will glow around the entire screen which is great, so seeing this phone on video is very nice and that's one thing, but holding it in person and considering using it is something else entirely. and it raises a lot of questions, so now that I've held it and used it, I'm here to answer those questions, so first of all, what does it feel like to hold and use it?

So as I mentioned before, I will say that it is heavy, but the funny thing is that it is not as slippery as some of those other glass phones, my finger seems to grip the screen glass better than other materials. and overall it feels like you're holding the entire screen, so the immersion factor is very real and then you'll wonder, wait a second, where are the speaker and selfie camera on the front? Great question, two different answers, so there's a normal speaker at the bottom of the device still, but for your phone calls, that earpiece is replaced with an electromagnetic speaker that basically vibrates through glass to create sound.

We've seen this on previous combo phones and there's no selfie camera on top. When you press the selfie button, you rotate the screen to take a selfie with the 108-megapixel main camera. Now, strangely, the selfie mode doesn't let you switch to ultra-wide or do nearly as many things as the main camera modes, which is a shame, but in theory all this flipping action takes your selfies to the next level because they come from of the high-end main camera, so how good are those virtual side buttons on the screen? Well I'll start by saying it's a prototype but they're pretty bad, I mean the idea is fine in theory so there's a power button and a volume button on the right side of the screen on the side and when you press that volume button, you do it just while It's rejecting the palm touch on the entire rest of the screen, but realizing that you press the volume button, this slider appears and then you can adjust the volume on the front, no there is problem swiping it, but it really only works for me sometimes, like maybe. there's a trick to keeping it right where you learn over time how to get familiar with palm rejection, whatever that is, but I didn't get around to this so it was a bummer, but then there's the power button on the side that literally just says For Sleep, one worked more often for me which is nice and there is also a physical circular power button on the top of the phone for sleeping and waking up which always works but is also more accessible as it is high up on the top.

The phone is fine, so how good is the palm rejection or recognition on a crazy screen like this? It's unpredictable, as you'd expect, so Xiaomi left a little info sheet with this phone and in it they say they're using a combination of accelerometers. Gyroscopes, pressure sensors and software algorithms to be able to tell when you're holding it and when you're actually using it and to correctly reject the palm of your hand, this seems to me to be the biggest challenge for a phone with a

wraparound

screen, there were definitely moments. which worked impressively well but also on many other occasions when using the phone I had tons of accidental presses not including the software volume button so it's hit or miss, it's awesome when it works but it's really annoying when it doesn't work and then, that? the rear screen is even good, what's the point?

Well so far you've come up with a couple of cool things, number one is the loading animation that I already told you about, I think it's pretty cool, maybe number one cool factor and then there's the fact that it takes the top bar stuff where it normally is and put it on the sides to keep the front even cleaner at the top, that's fine, the camera viewfinder is also a legitimate benefit as we've seen. Before that, using the main camera as a selfie camera usually gives you better selfies, so you still get that benefit and then there's the special software mode where it detects when you turn the phone over and activates this panel with some widgets that are kind of of of a quick access kind of thing, so there's a timer there, weather stuff like that, that's really cool too and then it just looks cool, that's mostly it, it's just really nice to look at, oh, also another one question, is there a case for it?

Yes, I forgot to take a video of it, but I can show you this photo. It literally just has a camera strip to anchor it and then it protects the outside, but not really, I don't even know why you would put that on. To be honest, this phone in one case just accepts that you have a super delicate phone and then I want to point out that this screen is not perfect, not to disappoint, but it's like when you work with a prototype that you naturally find. There are a lot of things that could be improved and this was the biggest factor that broke the illusion of the whole thing, was the edges of the screen, so right at the apex of those sides, where it rounds, there is a space in the coverslip for that is not seen. a whole curved piece of glass, there are actually three pieces that connect together, but when you run your finger over that vertex you can feel it, so it's not perfectly smooth and then from certain angles it even catches the light and arc iris a little and you can actually see it, so that definitely takes away from the illusion of the

wraparound

screen.

There is also a bit of yellowing on the edges that you can sometimes notice. If you're looking for it, the camera doesn't pick it up as well as your eyes. Also, this sucker wobbles like crazy on a desk, but I guess that's inevitable, there's no other place for it to lay flat. The camera bump is literally just a stripe down the middle overall, although I have to say I'm very impressed with this working prototype. From the numbers on the paper, I don't know if I can really give them full credit as they say it's a 180.6 screen-to-body ratio, but there are still bezels on the top and bottom of 2.15 millimeters to be exact , so I don't know if just because you wrap it around the sides you can tell that it has a screen to body ratio of over 100 and also the funny thing is that on paper, the spec sheet again they mention, they say it's a screen 7.9 inches diagonally, but it's not that big, they're measuring it. from the back corner to the corner of the screen but it's actually more like the size of a pixel 4 or an iphone 11 pro max but yeah that's all in this world where we have crazy concept cars I'm glad that too We can get around to having these smartphones with a wild concept of form over function and maybe that idea will become a thing one day, so let me know what you think of the wraparound screen concept in the comments section below.

Would you take something like this? Do you want a phone that is as crazy or is? this completely over the moon form over function no reason to exist let me know what you think thanks for watching guys in the next peace