No, really. What is the point?
IN A YEAR WHERE phone manufacturers’ idea of innovation is throwing more and more camera lenses at a phone, Xiaomi has decided to plough its own batshit-crazy furlough. Meet the Xiaomi Mi Mix Alpha: a phone with a screen-to-body ratio of 180.6 per cent.
Yes, that means the screen goes all the way around the phone, onto the back with just a strip of non-screen area for where the camera array sits.
We’ll get back to how ludicrously pointless this is in a moment, but first some specs: a Qualcomm Snapdragon 855+ processor is backed by 12GB RAM and 512GB storage. It’s 5G-enabled and has a frankly ludicrous triple-camera array led by a 108MPcamera, capable of taking pictures with a 12,032×9,024 resolution. A 4,050mAh battery keeps everything ticking along – though possibly not for all that long, given all the screen it has to power. It’s a “small-scale production” launching in December in China for 19,999 yuan – or around £2,250.
But let’s get back to the silliness of a screen that wraps all the way around. Firstly, you’re twice as likely to smash the screen by dropping it – and you probably won’t want a case on this for obvious reasons.
Then there’s the more fundamental problem: you’re not a snail, and therefore you probably don’t have eye stalks. That means that you can only look at one of these glorious screens at once. The other side will be for the person sat opposite you on the Tube to gawk at, so you might want to put an offensive message up, just to see if they’re sneaking a peek.
And then there’s that price, which is even more than the ludicrously expensive Galaxy Fold which, for all its problems, does at least have a sensible use case. If you really want to spend this much on something wholly impractical, then you may as well buy two iPhone 11 Pros, and stick them back to back for a similarly pointless way of burning money. µ