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Yeah. Xiaomi's just done it again. Except this time it's even more blatant. Do you remember last year when Apple released the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max and then 2 weeks later Xiaomi released their 17 Pro and Pro Max? How they literally skipped the number 16 so the names would match? Well, this year they are coming for Apple's throat. Clearly they didn't paying attention to the iPhone duo and clearly this Xiaomi 18 fold is designed to destroy it. But what I'm curious to see is obviously the Xiaomi's going to obliterate Apple on specs. But having used both phones, have they also managed to deliver a better overall experience? So first things first, in classic Xiaomi fashion, you get everything you need with the phone.
So unlike the iPhone duo, which will literally ship with just the phone and a cable, here you get that plus the charging brick and an official phone case. Imagine that. Oh gosh, I swear these boxes are all opening up the wrong way. But look at this. This isn't some cheap clear plastic afterthought that's just been thrown in. Let's get that phone open. So if there was any doubt in your mind that this Xiaomi is built to go up against the iPhone duo, let me fix that for you. It's the same size and I mean literally the same size. Height-wise we are talking bang on to the 10th of a millimeter as the duo. And on this same size body is a same size 5.4-in cover display. So you get all the pocketability benefits of
the duo, but also because it's so wide, it's just as much of a stretch when you're trying to single thumb your way through. And this display is not just the same size, it's the same outline. Same flat edge on the left, same really large radius corners on the right. And I think this is great. It uses all the available space that you have and more importantly stops it looking like a Google Pixel Fold. God, I hate those corners. But here's where it gets funny. The phones even share the exact same 1.421 aspect ratio, which I think is one of the best things about the new iPhone because it's the same ratio as a sheet of A4 paper, which is specifically designed to scale perfectly when you fold it in half into A5 so that you can
print the same document in any size and nothing is going to get misaligned or cropped out, which means that just like the Duo, this 5.4-in cover display opens up to a 7.6-in inner display. That's basically the exact same rectangle, just bigger. So, any Apple game that's optimized for one of your screens is in theory optimized for both of your screens. And I can't quite believe I'm saying this, but the crease is also like 98% erased from existence. You absolutely will forget that it's there most of the time. So, now that we've established how uncannily similar the two devices are, what has Xiaomi done to actually top Apple? I know I said it's not just about specs, but they're a pretty good place to start. You'll enjoy this. We'll keep
score. The Xiaomi's thinner, 5.02 mm compared to the iPhone's 5.2. So, it's still not like a razor-thin phone, but the difference adds up when it's folded because then we're talking 10.7 mm against Apple's 11.3. But what I'm noticing even more is the weight. I shouldn't be doing this. I literally have one of these. This is 219 g versus Apple's 254. That's huge. That's the difference between Xiaomi being one of the lightest foldables of the year and Apple being the heaviest. And it's lighter while carrying a 6,000 mA hour silicon carbon battery. That's more than any iPhone, any Galaxy, any Pixel, including the ones that don't have to fold themselves in half. So, it absolutely slaughters the 700-ish of the iPhone. And this
delivers. This is the longest-lasting foldable I've ever used with faster charging, too. 67 watts against Apple's 60. And really, that Apple number deserves an asterisk because the charger they sell you to hit that is not a true 60-watt charger. It's a 40-watt that can, for a few minutes, scale up to 60 to speed up the beginning. There's brighter displays. Xiaomi calls them super sunlight panels because of their 4,000 nits of brightness versus Apple's 3,000. They've got a similar-looking horizontal camera array, which serves to highlight the fact that there is a whole extra third camera here. So, we've got a 200-megapixel main, and resolution's not the most important spec, but it can
actually let you take 200-megapixel selfies, which is enough detail to make any human alive pretty insecure. There's a 50-megapixel ultrawide, and then the key thing that the other passport-sized folds have skipped, a telephoto camera, which is also 50-megapixel with a 3.5x optical zoom. And it's all topped off with space for two physical SIMs instead of Apple's zero. An IR blaster to use as a TV remote. Pre-installed screen protector on the cover display. And they've done a heck of a better job than I would have done. Face unlock, which is not Face ID levels of secure, so you won't use it for banking, but just for getting into your phone, it is less hassle than the Touch ID that
you're going to have to resort to on the Duo. Oh, yeah, and it's less expensive. I was going to say cheaper. It definitely ain't cheap, starting at the equivalent of $1,640, which is still a pretty big saving compared to Apple's straight-up two Gs. So, if we were just talking about on-paper hardware, then as every single person watching this probably expected, it is a total whitewash for Xiaomi. But, the software might actually be their bigger flex. Apple was very proud at the launch event of the iPhone Duo that they could now finally offer two-app multitasking on a smartphone. Wow. The future is now, folks.
You want to know how many this phone can do? Let's try, shall we? Let's start with YouTube. I'll watch a video of a phone that I don't need. All right, well, now I want to buy the phone I don't need. So, let's throw that to the side and pull open AliExpress. Ooh, I wonder what other shopping apps I could find it on. Let's get the Play Store open and every shopping spree also needs a soundtrack. Spotify, there you go. So, that is four apps all running at the same time. Are we done? No. No, we are not. Because a new phone also needs a new wallpaper, right? Pinterest is a pretty good way to find that. Ooh, wow, these car ones are really cool. But, then hm, just for science, of course, if any
of these cars happen to be available on AutoTrader, it might be worth finding out, right? That's six apps and it treats them as a single group, so I can swipe the whole lot away in one go and then bring them all back with one tap on the dock. All right, now I'm done. Or am I? Because then I need to figure out how much I'm actually spending. So, let's get the calculator. Stick that in a floating window. Ooh, yeah, that's a pretty large number. I guess I need the dial pad, too. Might as well apologize to Trisha before she sees the bank statement.
Six multitasking apps and two floating windows all running at the same time. You can flick between the apps by tapping at the edges like this. You can resize each individual window by just dragging. And if you swipe in with at least four fingers, you can see everything that's running at once. You can reorder it and even just jump directly into the app you want. Yeah, I mean, I guess you can have another point, Xiaomi. Now, clearly, this is an incredibly fiddly, niche maneuver that I don't expect many users will be maxing out. But, the point is you can and the phone keeps up and there's something
really mentally reassuring about the fact that the only limit is how much you can keep track of, not how much the company has decided you're allowed. And you're not even constrained to keeping your eight apps as half screeners, you can even just drag them all the way open and use them like they're tablet apps while retaining this ability to quickly dive in and out of them. So, Xiaomi's strategy is pretty clear here. Just like what they did last year, the goal with this 18-fold is to one, release something that looks very comparable to the new iPhone, and that's software just as much as it is hardware.
I mean, even Apple's liquid glass appears to have made it over. Two, release it right around when the new iPhone launches. Three, flex the visually obvious things that this can do that Apple can't. Clearly, there's plenty of those. And finally, just accept that you're going to make less money per unit and sell it at a lower price. Put all of this stuff together and it's a knockout combo for fast-tracking your way to the center of the conversation. However, there's a very important detail that gets skimmed over in that conversation. And it's a detail that Xiaomi doesn't really want you to think about. See, the thing that's actually impressive and unique about the iPhone Duo is not so much the hardware itself. It's mostly the way
that the software is custom built around that hardware. And that is the subtle ingredient that Xiaomi is very much still lacking. Like, we all saw that absolutely bonkers opening and closing animation on the Duo, right? It's a lot simpler here. You start opening and then about halfway through the inner screen will just sort of pop on. And more importantly, while we talked about how this screen takes very good advantage of the space, the apps don't take very good advantage of the screen. So, you know how Apple redesigned their dock and they put it to the side. They remade the status icons to display them in a more compact way that could fit just above that. And how they put search into the bottom corner,
so you don't have to stretch as much. Well, what you're seeing here feels a little bit like Xiaomi took their very typical smartphone/tablet software, they loaded it into this very unusual shape, decided that actually it translates pretty well, and then shipped it. That's why you have these margins on the side that are just empty. Nothing's using that space because on a normal phone that space doesn't exist. Now, that's not to say that there aren't good things going on here. It's really cool how the app icons rotate into a landscape view as they're being opened and then reverse back into position when you close them. I like how if you open settings, for example, on the front you get a typical phone view,
which will then morph into an expanded tablet view when you open the phone. Or how when I pull down the notification shade, I can dismiss notifications with a really easy tap from my right thumb. But the point is it's also very easy to find things that haven't been thought through. Like it feels pretty sloppy that Xiaomi's own camera app has not just black bars, but uneven black bars on the top and bottom. Xiaomi's own weather app looks great when it's closed, but when you open it you'll find the numbers look really low res because they're just being stretched. And third-party apps are worse. I mean, YouTube looks decent enough when it's full screened, but absolutely terrible as soon as you split screen it.
Parts of the Netflix UI get messed up anytime you rotate the device. Pokémon Champions puts its menu button underneath my selfie camera. Even the Google Play Store doesn't quite know how to behave on this screen. Sometimes the text will randomly jump around, it's weirdly laggy, and this is genuinely a fraction of the oddities that I've experienced. At the start I thought, "Maybe this is because it's only launching in China right now, so the Chinese apps will be fine, right?" Uh nope. Genuine, even many of the pre-installed ones they open like this. It's not good. Now, in fairness, we don't know yet how third-party apps are going to behave on the Duo either. That's like the first thing I'm going to
test when I get my own. But what I can say is that at least everything that was pre-installed on that phone did use the screen space well, and that is just not the case here. Oh. Literally as I say it, what on earth is it doing here? But the thing is, if you think about the economics of it, all of this kind of makes sense. Apple is expecting to sell many more units of their duo than Xiaomi's going to sell of this. So, there's a much bigger payoff from them investing in building a truly unique software experience for that phone. Apple makes far fewer models in a year than Xiaomi does. So, they can give each phone more time. And most
importantly, Apple's charging more per phone. So, it's worth it for them to do that. But even with this, if software optimization was the only compromise, I still think Xiaomi's got enough going for it to say that it is outdoing Apple. Because don't forget, software gets better over time with updates. Apple can't exactly patch the fact that their smartphone weighs about as much as a baby hippo. Don't fact-check me on that. Unfortunately for Xiaomi though, that is not the only issue. See, the more complex a smartphone has become, the less that I would say just reading the specs is actually telling the full story. Like the main reason that this phone is so much lighter is
that this entire frame is aluminum instead of titanium. So, there's an immediate trade-off in durability and particularly scratchability. I would expect this to look worse for the wear in a few years time. I mean, just like every other aluminum phone I've used. Now, to be honest, I wouldn't have minded this at all since aluminum does have the upside of getting heat out of your phone. Except this phone also seems to have a thermal problem. So, fun fact, there's actually a Xiaomi-designed chip in here. It's their second ever chip and they're quoting enormous numbers like a 60% faster CPU and 85% faster GPU while drawing 64% less power compared to their first. Not to mention that the top
storage model of this thing is the first smartphone in the world to come with LPDDR6 RAM, which can transfer data faster than the DDR5 that you'll get on everything else. And in normal use, it's okay. You can play games in 30-minute stints without any kind of issue. It's just when pushed, when I opened up a 3D Mark stress test, it actually couldn't finish. The phone didn't just throttle, it specifically overheated, had a panic attack, and force closed the test barely 10 minutes in. And this wasn't a one-off, I did this twice with the exact same result. So, I whipped out my thermal camera just to be sure, and what's really interesting is that can you see the side of the phone where the chip is was searing hot. The other barely heated up
at all. Or to put this another way, this phone is doing an incredibly poor job at redistributing the heat that's coming from the chip to the rest of the phone, which can lead to a whole menu of longevity issues. And even the cameras are pretty caviated. Like 200 megapixel on the main camera sounds fancy, right? But it starts to sound a little less fancy when you realize that as far as sensor size is concerned, which is much more important, this main camera is the same size as that of a base iPhone 17. And as far as the output's concerned, it looks a lot worse, but you'll see that in a minute. And the ultra-wide camera is just quite bad. When you record videos with it, you can absolutely tell that this is a
compromised camera with grain creeping in even in well-lit scenarios like this. And then I guess you got the final sprinkles, where Xiaomi's also missing a bunch of the small but important foldable refinements that Apple made with the Duo. Like there's no stylus support here on either one of its two screens. The hinge does not feel as high quality. It's got a slightly scratchy sound, and at certain points you'll also hear a very random click. Like just compare the way that this sounds when opening versus a Samsung Z Fold 8. Oh, that's good. There's none of that nano texture goodness that we got on the iPhone, which is a bit of a triple L, to be honest, because it means that you
don't get the immensely powerful anti-reflectiveness of it. You do get in its place fingerprints everywhere, all the time. And then the crease, which while it is about the same depth as Apple's, is a little less hidden here because you don't have this extra layer above it that is designed to disguise it. Oh, yeah, and the speakers, too, are quite grating to the point where I actually find myself turning them down lower than I otherwise would to reduce the harshness. So, back to the question. Has Xiaomi built then a better phone than the iPhone dual? I don't think so. This feels like a tick boxer of a phone and it's definitely ticked a lot of boxes, which do create some undeniable advantages here versus
the iPhone that it is so clearly trying to take on, like its weight and price and whole extra camera. But, I think in focusing so much on trying to tick those boxes, the company's forgot to zoom out and make sure that the overall experience feels well-rounded and optimized. Like the main camera I was talking about. So, one of these is a Xiaomi, one of them is an iPhone, and while you decide which, I learned a new word today. Smishing. So, I realized that Drisha and I have actually been smished about three times this week. It's very fun to say, but it's not fun to experience. So, smishing is basically SMS-based scams, and I don't know about you, but I have noticed these everywhere now, and not just because I keep
ordering weird phones from AliExpress. I just find myself constantly having to second-guess. Like, did I definitely order a package that is shipped with this carrier, or is this a scam? So, I'm actually very relieved that Surfshark, our sponsor, has just popped out a smishing tool that does that for me. So, if it detects a scam, it automatically moves it to the spam folder in my messages app. That, plus the billion other benefits of Surfshark, like a really fast, very secure VPN, like an alternate ID feature, like the best price in town with the code boss, it's literally $2 a month with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Okay, ready to find out which phone is which? I hope you got this right. That's the iPhone. That's the Xiaomi. Catch you in the next one.
