Xiaomi just put a 6.4-inch phone on stage that is almost entirely screen. The display covers 91.3% of the front, the highest screen-to-body ratio anyone has ever shipped, and to get there, the company deleted the earpiece speaker and the front proximity sensor, because there was simply no room left for them. The Mi MIX is billed as a concept phone, except it is real and going on sale, and it quietly reframes Xiaomi from the cheap-flagship outfit into the company doing the most interesting industrial design in the building.
The way they cleared the bezels is the fun part. The front camera shrank by about half and got exiled to the bottom chin. The earpiece is gone entirely, replaced by a cantilever piezoelectric ceramic driver that turns the phone’s own frame into the speaker that carries your calls. The proximity sensor went ultrasonic, sitting behind the glass instead of poking through it. For scale, the iPhone 7 Plus has about 67.7% of its front be screen, and the Pixel XL manages 71.2%. The MIX is not an improvement on that. It is a different category of object.
The body is full ceramic, back, frame, and buttons, designed in collaboration with Philippe Starck. Ceramic is miserable to machine, and it is going to throttle how many of these Xiaomi can actually build, but it is also the material that makes the acoustic and ultrasonic tricks work cleanly. Inside sits a Snapdragon 821 at 2.35 GHz with the Adreno 530, up to 6 GB of RAM, 256 GB of storage and a 4,400 mAh battery, for around 3,499 yuan, roughly $510. The specs are flagship. The front is from the future.
What gets me is that this is Xiaomi’s spending margin, which it does not have on a halo it does not strictly need. The company that spent years being accused of copying Apple just shipped the most distinctive-looking phone of the year, a good two years before the rest of the industry starts hacking its own bezels off to chase the same look. The Chinese design race is already fierce, with OPPO winning on cameras and offline retail across China, and the MIX is Xiaomi’s answer in a completely different key: not a better camera, a better silhouette.
I will not oversell it. The piezo earpiece sounds thin in the early hands-on time, the ceramic supply means almost nobody is actually going to own one of these, and the word “concept” carries real weight in the marketing. I am not getting into whether Xiaomi can manufacture ceramic unibodies at any kind of scale, because the answer right now is plainly no. But scale was never the job of a halo product.
The Mi MIX will not sell in big numbers, and the call audio is a genuine compromise. It does something more valuable than sell, though, which is to drag the whole industry’s idea of what the front of a phone should look like forward by a couple of years, and it does that coming from the brand everyone had filed under “price-cutter.” The bezel is dead. Xiaomi just held the funeral before anyone else admitted there was a body.