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After 3 years, Xiaomi finally released a real concept phone, Millet MIX Alpha.

Even if you are on the scene, no one really touches this phone. It is packaged in a special glass cabinet that can be viewed from a distance. You can only watch the inside of the machine through the glass and repeat the beautiful presentation animation.

But even then, the cabinet is still full of people, curiosity drives people to rub shoulders, and the crisp shutter sounds.

The same “glass cabinet treatment” was also seen twice at the MWC conference at the beginning of the year. The protagonist at the time was not Xiaomi, but Samsung and Huawei’s folding screen phones.

You can find common ground in these three things – they all adopt a very radical form design. For MIX Alpha, “surrounding screen” is the breakthrough that Xiaomi has found for himself in this differentiated competition.

Why use a flexible screen, but not a folding structure?

Millet MIX Alpha is still related to the screen. From the screen that covers most of the fuselage, it looks like a folding screen phone folded in half – if you remember Huawei Mate X, you should be familiar with this eversion screen.

However, the Xiaomi MIX Alpha screen doesn’t expand, but it’s closer to our common candy bar phone.

This one-piece structure has its benefits, meaning that the millet MIX Alpha does not need to consider the hinge or hinge structure and saves a portion of the valuable interior space.

At the same time, various components can basically follow the previous layout, instead of the Samsung and Huawei folding screen mobile phones, the motherboard chips, batteries, etc. need to be separated from the left and right, but also take into account the frequent folding of the flexible screen. loss.

Millet MIX Alpha removes the left and right physical buttons, but the borders can interact, and the machine also has built-in pressure sensing and tactile feedback

The biggest question is how to assemble this screen that covers most of the body. Unlike the previous “waterfall screen” on the Vene NEX 3 and Huawei Mate 30 Pro, the MIX Alpha is not only wrapped by the screen on the left and right sides, but also extends to the back of the phone.

The magnitude of such a large bend must change the structure of the screen itself. From the official website, it does use a multi-layered process, which is the most obvious feature of flexible OLED screens.

As for the assembly, Xiaomi officially said that MIX Alpha is the internal assembly of the whole machine, and then the screen is packaged like a “tweezers”, and the internal stress caused by the bending is released layer by layer.

The millet product manager also told Ai Faner at the press conference that MIX Alpha’s screen panel surface is the same as a folding screen phone, which is also covered by a flexible material.

We can’t determine whether this is a plastic substrate or other materials, but according to Lin Bin, president of Xiaomi, very few batches of Alpha will be laminated with glass in December, saying goodbye to plastic. As for the flatness and scratch resistance, we can’t make a conclusion before the real machine gets started.

In addition, the volume of the previous folding screen phone is bloated, it seems that the millet MIX Alpha can not be avoided, for example, the thickness of 10.4mm is significantly higher than the industry average.

But the hinges were removed, and the millet MIX Alpha was controlled to a weight of 241g, which is much lighter than Samsung’s and Huawei’s folding screen phones.

Generation of mass productionThe price is 20,000 yuan

Overall, in the current smart phone market, the shape design of Xiaomi MIX Alpha is indeed relatively fresh, and it is also a relatively mature answer given by Xiaomi under the folding screen.

This is indispensable to the cooperation between Xiaomi and upstream suppliers. As early as January of this year, Xiaobin President Lin Bin showed a double-folded mobile phone on Weibo high-profile. After that, the relevant person in charge of Vision has said that Xiaomi’s flexible screen was jointly developed by Visionox and Xiaomi.

Double-fold screen mobile phone displayed at the beginning of Xiaomi

Today, Lin Bin once again said that Xiaomi’s dual-folding mobile phone and MIX Alpha are “two simultaneous projects” to solve common technical problems. Therefore, it is not excluded that the surround screen of MIX Alpha is also the result of cooperation between Xiaomi and Vision.

In addition, Xiaomi MIX Alpha is also equipped with the world’s first 100 million pixel camera sensor, and the supplier behind it comes from Samsung.

As for more flagship components, such as the Opteron 855+, 12GB storage, TVOC gas sensors and nano-silicon negative batteries, as well as the use of sapphire, titanium alloys and precision ceramic materials, as well as customized MIUI systems, In order to increase the gold content and added value of this mobile phone as much as possible.

“19999 yuan”.

After Lei Jun released the pricing figures for Xiaomi MIX Alpha, many people gave a sigh of “wow”. Not to mention other products of Xiaomi, even in the existing mobile phone product lines of Apple, Samsung and Huawei, it is rare to seeProducts with a price close to 20,000 yuan.

Compared with the original millet MIX, which was also positioned in the concept machine, the pricing of the exclusive version was only 3,999 yuan, which was only about 1,000 yuan more than the Xiaomi Note 2 released in the same period.

The price is not part of what we should care about. After all, Xiaomi MIX Alpha follows the goal of Lei Jun “at any cost, not considering mass production”, not to mention the concept of a new technology that attracts people. It can reflect enough differentiation, and consumers will be much more relaxed about pricing.

The other two folding phones with a flexible screen structure are also expensive. The Samsung Galaxy Fold, which will be launched in the US market, is priced at about 14,000 yuan, while the Huawei Mate X is also estimated to be around 15,000 yuan.

But this time, Xiaomi pushed the price directly to 19999 yuan, which is still unexpected. This means that even those consumers who have a flagship budget can hardly add a little price to the millet MIX, and spend five or six thousand dollars to get started.

However, consumers have voices, and the concept of Xiaomi’s concept is still to be sold. Lei Jun also knows that a concept machine for energy production is far more meaningful than the concept itself. This is reflected in Xiaomi’s product definition capabilities and upstream supply chain. Control ability.

For Xiaomi MIX, Xiaomi did not plan to mass-produce at first. After the product team told Lei Jun that 4,000 pieces could be done, Lei Jun decided to put the product on the market and eventually sold 300,000-400,000 units.

Taste the sweetness of the millet, and then turn the MIX2 into a design suitable for mass production, such as reusing the structure of the earpiece, and replacing the ceramic material with very low yield with a metal frame.

In this way, Xiaomi MIX Alpha should also follow the script three years ago, first small-scale trial production, and then gradually evolve into mass production.

The meaning of the concept machine

Millet returned to the track of the technology, putting the pre-research technology that should have been hidden in the depths of the laboratory on the table.

It doesn’t have to be done this way.

After all, the current flexible screen products only have a very new look, but there are still many problems left undecided, such as whether it should be made into a folded form or a positive and negative double screen? Which solution can provide more usage scenarios? Which one is more suitable for mass production? No one has yet given a persuasive answer.

But Xiaomi has to do this too. This is the inevitable path for it to hit the high-end mobile phone market, and it is also determined by the highly competitive smartphone market.