Xiaomi Mix Fold 3 review

Top-tier foldable display, the outer one is nice too

The Mix Fold 3 comes with some properly impressive display hardware. Both panels are Samsung-made E6 OLEDs with advertised peak brightness of 2600nits, Dolby Vision support and up to 120Hz refresh rate.

The internal display has an 8.025-inch diagonal and a resolution of 2,160x1,916px in a squarish 10.1:9 aspect ratio (pixel density works out to 360ppi). This panel is the Eco2 Plus variety and it doesn't have a polarizing layer, which improves light transmittance and, in turn, power efficiency. It's also an LTPO panel that enables continuously adaptive refresh rate in the 1 to 120Hz range.

In our testing, the Mix Fold 3's internal panel was good for 1277nits of maximum brightness with the auto brightness toggle enabled and the device placed under bright light. Not quite the 2,600nits of peak brightness from the promo materials, but it's not like we expected that with our standardized 75% patch of white. By all accounts, it's looking like the same panel as the one on the vivo X Fold2 - the diagonal and brightness numbers point in that direction.

When adjusting brightness manually, we got a little under half that - 593nits, and that's more or less the ballpark of what we'd call standard. Samsung has started enabling a manual boost up to around 800nits in recent years, and the Z Fold5 manages 741nits when you're operating the slider yourself, but the Xiaomi is easily good enough.

The cover display isn't quite as fancy - it's not an LTPO panel and its refresh rate is only modestly adaptive. At 6.56 inches in diagonal and with a fairly standard 21:9 aspect ratio it offers a vastly more comfortable smartphone experience than the Galaxy Z Fold5's outer screen. The resolution here is 2,520x1,080px for a pixel density of 418ppi.

On this panel we measured 1165nits of maximum brightness, about 100nits short of the vivo and the Honor, but right on par with the Galaxy. In manual mode, the Xiaomi was good for 550nits.

Color accuracy

The Mix Fold 3's display color handling is the same as what we saw on the 13 Ultra, which is sort of like it is on global Xiaomi's but not entirely. The default mode is Original color PRO and you also get Vivid and Saturated options, as well as three extra ones under the Advanced settings submenu.

In Original color PRO mode we got okay results for accuracy for our set of sRGB test swatches on both displays - with the usual bluish whites and grays, of course. It's the Warm temperature preset that fixes that shift, and gives you virtually perfect sRGB rendition - we measured an average dE2000 of 0.7 on both panels.

Vivid mode (targeting DCI-P3) was similarly a little off in its default state on both display. The Warm temp helped a lot on the internal display and improved the white and grays, making for an average dE2000 of 2.0. The Warm treatment wasn't quite as helpful on the cover panel where the average deviation was 2.9 and the white and grays remained shifted some 5 units towards blue.

There are specific sRGB and P3 modes in the Advanced settings menu, but as we've experienced before, those didn't get us accurate readings for the respective color swatches on the Mix Fold 3. Maybe we're doing something wrong.

HDR and streaming

The Dolby Vision support that the Mix Fold 3 offers isn't all too common but most welcome (it's mostly high-end Xiaomis that have it). Netflix didn't serve us HDR content, which is normal since the streaming platform doesn't usually play well with phones that are China-only releases. It did happily stream at FullHD resolution, thanks to the Widevine L1 certification. YouTube, on the other hand, did play HDR videos just fine.

Refresh rate

Both displays support up to 120Hz refresh rate, and there are two refresh modes in settings - Custom (where you can choose between 120Hz or 60Hz ceilings), and Default (automatic switching behavior).

The adaptive behavior works differently on the two panels with the internal one being truly adaptive and cover panel only partially so. The foldable screen drops down to 1Hz when the it's showing static content and can be incredibly dynamic (constantly changing between 10Hz and 120Hz with no apparent fixed steps) in games or browsers. The few scenarios where we saw it go for fixed refresh rates, besides 1Hz for static picture, were 24Hz for 24fps videos, 30Hz for 30fps clips, and 60Hz for HFR clips and apps that are incompatible with dynamic refresh rate adjustments. You can expect more or less the same thing whether you're in Default or Custom 120Hz mode, and the dynamic adjustments works the same way in Custom 60Hz, only capped at 60Hz.

The cover screen, on the other hand, supports fixed refresh rates and not a super wide selection of them - 30Hz, 60Hz, 90Hz, and 120Hz. If you've set Default or 120Hz, then you'll get 120Hz when interacting with the phone, with a drop to 60Hz for idling or video playback, and 30Hz for the always-on display.

Xiaomi Mix Fold 3 battery life

The Mix Fold 3 gets a minor battery capacity increase, its two cells now totaling 4,800mAh as opposed to the older model's 4,500mAh. The vivo X Fold2 and the Huawei Mate X3 match the new Mix, while the Honor Magic Vs (and now the V2) goes for a 5,000mAh capacity. The Galaxy Z Fold5 is more modest, making do with just 4,400mAh worth of juice.

In our testing, the Mix Fold 3 proved rather frugal and a significant (and most welcome) upgrade over the previous generation. We clocked over 15 hours of Wi-Fi web browsing on the large internal display, more than 50% better than the Mix Fold 2's result. The video playback figure has nearly doubled and now stands at 19:13h. The voice call longevity is a respectable 38h, another solid improvement, if not quite as dramatic. Add to that the very reasonable standby battery draw, and we're getting a class-leading overall Endurance rating of 117h.

Comparisons against rivals reveal that the vivo just might be able to squeeze a few extra minutes in web browsing, and the Galaxy just about matches the Mix in voice calls, but the Xiaomi is the true marathon runner of the foldable bunch.

Video test carried out in 60Hz refresh rate mode. Web browsing test done at the display's highest refresh rate whenever possible. Refer to the respective reviews for specifics. To adjust the endurance rating formula to match your own usage - check out our all-time battery test results chart.

We repeated the web browsing and video playback tests on the cover screen and only got marginally better results - across two separate sets of tests. The best way we can explain the minimal difference is with the foldable panel's superior adaptive refresh rate behavior which tends to maintain lower values in both instances than the cover's 60Hz threshold for both of our tests. Either way, the Mix Fold 3 has battery life to spare.

Our battery tests were automated thanks to SmartViser, using its viSerDevice app. The endurance rating denotes how long the battery charge will last you if you use the device for an hour of telephony, web browsing, and video playback daily. More details can be found here.

Charging speed

The Mix Fold 3 ships with a 67W charger, same as the one on the Mix Fold 2 and a bunch of other Xiaomis. Xiaomi says the phone should charge from 1% to 100% in 40 minutes, and that was also their claim on the Mix Fold 2, which had a slightly smaller battery. We couldn't quite match their lab results in our lab back then (45 minutes in our testing), and we couldn't on the Mix Fold 3 either.

We clocked a full charge from empty on the Mix Fold 3 at 50 minutes - not the speediest of foldables, but certainly better than the Galaxy Z Fold5, at least. Thirty minutes into the process we were looking at 70% in the battery indicator - decent, but hardly impressive.

Somewhat of a major development this year is the addition of wireless charging to the large Xiaomi foldable. The company advertises a 50W maximum charging rate when doing it wirelessly and their numbers say that a full charge should take 55 minutes. However, we were not able to test that, though we're still mostly of the opinion that speed isn't of the utmost importance for wireless charging - it's enough that there is wireless charging. There also is reverse wireless charging too.

Speaker test

The Mix Fold 3 has a stereo speaker setup with one unit on the bottom and one up top, and both of them in the 'left' half when the device is unfolded - or both are in the cover, so to speak. The channel assignment is as usual - the top one gets the left channel in portrait and in landscape the channels are switched to correspond to the phone's orientation. The opposite speaker always plays some of the other channel's sound too, albeit at a much lower volume.

Bottom speaker • Top speaker • Earpiece

The Mix Fold 3 earned a 'Very Good' rating for loudness in our test (just barely), which puts it a notch above the old model (just barely). That's also the same rating as the Galaxy Z Fold5, itself only squeezing into 'Very Good' by a very thin margin, with the rest of the large foldable on the other side of the divide and into 'Good'. Either way, they're all basically equally loud, theoretically, except the Oppo Find N2, which is somewhat quieter.

Mind you, the fact that the top speaker is also used as an earpiece and as such directs some of the sound forward, means that the handset may sound lounder in the closed state than in tablet mode in which the earpiece is facing away. While in reality that may not make a significant difference, our testing equipment did pick it up and we recorded a -28.1LUFS value in tablet mode.

In any case, we do have give the nod to the Mix Fold 3 for sound quality in this group. It's got the most balanced output, with solid low-frequency presence, clean vocals, and lively treble.

Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal "0db" flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.