Xiaomi Mix Flip is on the way

Xiaomi's "book-style", "large style", "horizontally folding", "phone turns into a tablet" type of foldable is on its third generation already with the recently launched Mix Fold 3, but so far the company has stayed out of the flip style foldable market, even while many of its Chinese competitors took the plunge.

As it turns out, Xiaomi won't stay out of the flip space for long. The Xiaomi Mix Flip moniker has been spotted in an IMEI database in China today, confirming such a device is on the way, with model number 2311BPN23C.

According to a previous rumor, the Mix Flip will be launched alongside the Mix Fold 4 next year, in which case the wait would be far from over, but at least we now know that Xiaomi is in fact working on a flip style foldable too. On the other hand, other sources are speculating (based on the model number starting with 23) that the Mix Flip will actually be out before the end of this year. The alleged design of the Mix Flip has been leaked too, take a look for yourself below.

When opened, the screen side looks like any other flip out there, but the camera island stands out - and looks a bit like a Pixel's in this sketch, but could turn out to be very different in real life. There are three sensors which means there will be a telephoto, and it's rumored to offer 3x optical zoom.

The phone will unsurprisingly be powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC which is due to become official next month. Since the Mix Fold 3 is very thin and light for a foldable, perhaps the Mix Flip will have those attributes too in order to feel like it's part of the family.

One final note: all of the Mix Folds have so far been confined to China, and the Mix Flip might share the same fate unfortunately.

Via 1 (in Chinese) | Via 2 | Image source