Just two days before Apple unveiled its own foldable iPhone, Xiaomi launched the Xiaomi 18 Fold in China — and it’s not holding back on specs.
The phone uses a wide, “passport-style” foldable design, similar in shape to Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold8. It measures just 5.02mm thick when unfolded and weighs 219g, with a 5.38-inch outer display and a 7.58-inch inner screen. Xiaomi says the hinge uses a three-stage lever system built into a 7-series aluminum alloy frame, and the phone can reportedly survive drops from up to 1.2 meters (though that’s Xiaomi’s own claim, not independently verified).
The bigger story, though, is what’s inside: the 18 Fold is the first phone to run Xiaomi’s own XRing O3 chip, built on a 3nm process. It’s Xiaomi’s biggest step yet toward reducing its reliance on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips. The 10-core processor is paired with a 16-core G2-Ultra NX GPU, and Xiaomi claims AnTuTu benchmark scores above 5.2 million — a 60% CPU and 85% GPU improvement over its previous in-house chip. The NPU is rated at 200 TOPS, built specifically to run Xiaomi’s AI models locally on the device rather than relying entirely on the cloud.
Camera-wise, the 18 Fold features a 200MP Leica main sensor alongside ultrawide and periscope telephoto lenses, backed by a 6,000mAh battery — a notably large capacity for such a thin foldable.
Pricing in China starts at 10,999 yuan (about $1,640) for the 12GB/256GB base model, climbing to 14,999 yuan (about $2,235) for the top 16GB/1TB configuration. There’s no confirmed international release yet, but if Xiaomi follows its usual pattern, a global launch could follow in early 2027.