Xiaomi 18 Fold arrives on Xiaomi's own XRING O3 silicon, China first

The Xiaomi 18 Fold is the first of the company's flagship phones to run on a chip Xiaomi designed itself, and for now it is a China purchase: preorders open from CNY 10,999 (about $1,638), with sales starting September 10th.

That chip is the XRING O3, built on a 3nm process, pairing a 10-core all-big-core CPU with a 16-core GPU. Xiaomi says it delivers Snapdragon 8 Elite-level performance, and claims the chip combination handles on-device decoding on the NPU 45 percent faster than its previous-generation flagship processor. The graphics side is a debut too, Arm's Mali G2-Ultra NX, which brings mobile-first support for Arm's DLSS-style graphics acceleration to Android.

Both screens are OLED, both hit up to 4,000 nits peak brightness, both run at 120Hz, and both are the first to use Xiaomi's HyperRGB panel with what the company calls a full RGB subpixel structure. The outer display is 5.38 inches. Hands-on reports differ on the inner one, which has been given as 7.58 inches with a 2364x1672 resolution and as 7.68 inches, and the aspect ratio is described variously as roughly 1.4:1, as A4, and as 2:1.

The rear camera bar is printed with a 17-80mm focal range. Behind it sit a 200MP main camera on Samsung's ISOCELL HP5 1/1.56-inch-type sensor, a 50MP periscope telephoto at 80mm for 3.5x optical zoom that also does a 160mm 7x in-sensor "lossless" crop, and a 50MP ultrawide. The camera UI offers 0.7x, 1x, 2x and 3.5x, with digital zoom running up to 100x. There is a 16MP selfie camera on each screen.

Software is HyperOS 4, based on Android 17.

Storage tiers climb from 12/256GB at CNY 10,999 through 12/512GB at CNY 11,999, 16/512GB at CNY 12,999 and 16GB/1TB at CNY 14,999. At the top is the ceramic special edition, 16GB and 1TB only, CNY 15,999 (about $2,383). It uses silicon nitride rather than the usual zirconia ceramic, which Xiaomi says resists bumps and scratches better while weighing about 50 percent less, and the pink version is limited to 1,500 units.

Xiaomi brought the phone to IFA 2026 as part of a very large stand: more than 3,300 square meters, over 380 products across phones, smart home gear and cars, under a "Human x Car x Home" banner.