From CNET: Xiaomi is the latest player to enter the flip phone arena. The Beijing-based company showed off its inaugural flip phone, the Mix Flip, ahead of its launch in China on Friday. The Mix Flip adopts the large outer screen seen on recent flip phone offerings such as Samsung's Galaxy Z Flip 6 and Motorola's Razr Plus 2024. CEO Lei Jun said to expect a "highly functional" outer screen that "lets you do more without even flipping it open," in a Wednesday post on X.
The last two years have seen flip phones undergo a design transformation, with much of the changes happening on the front screen. This may have been kicked off by Chinese phonemaker Oppo, which shook up the cover design of flip phones in late 2022 by introducing a vertically oriented cover screen to its first-ever flip phone, the Find N2 Flip.
The 2023 Motorola Razr Plus was outfitted with a larger 3.6-inch cover screen. Samsung followed suit and expanded the Galaxy Z Flip 5's outer display, and did so once again with the Galaxy Z Flip 6. Xiaomi's move to adopt this expanded outer screen design indicates that makers have settled on the the look and feel of the clamshell-style phone.
"Larger cover screens make these clamshells both more useful and more deliberate -- sometimes you just want a piece of information without falling into a rabbit hole of app content," Avi Greengart, analyst at Techsponential, told CNET over email last April.
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