Xiaomi Mi Mix Alpha And Its Wraparound Screen Has Been Axed

Just like Samsung, Xiaomi has a big day scheduled for August 11 where it will launch a handful of new phones across several of its brands. Those might include a few from its premium Mi line that will introduce never before seen features on mobile, like fine-tuning GPUs and under-display cameras. One thing that will be noticeably missing is Xiaomi's futuristic Mi Mix Alpha and the reason is simple. The company apparently decided it wasn't worth the trouble and silently dropped it from the face of the earth.

It was just a pre-research project, according to CEO Lei Jun, which will sound like "pre-alpha" to most people's ears. Given how the design and idea of the phone whose screen wraps around its body almost completely, that's not hard to believe either. Then again, Xiaomi's Mi Mix line has always carried that "experimental" aura but there have already been three Mi Mix phones in the market so far.

It all boils down to unspecified problems in mass production, implies the chief exec. Again, given the design of the phone, it wouldn't be too surprising if Xiaomi admitted the Mi Mix Alpha was too expensive to make and had yield rates too low to break even. It would have cost Xiaomi a fortune to make and would have cost consumers just as much to buy, something that's almost antithetical to Xiaomi's brand.

Xiaomi, however, will still have a Mi Mix 4 coming but that will take some time. Now that most phones have adopted the bezel-less design it started, Xiaomi will have to find a new innovation to set the Mi Mix line apart.

There was also a question about the company's homegrown Surge mobile processors, the first of which was launched way back in 2017 in the Xiaomi Mi 5c. Xiaomi also admits it encountered huge problems with it down the line but it isn't giving up just yet. Given the fate that Huawei is now suffering, Xiaomi may have more motivation to make sure all its bases are covered should that worst-case scenario also happen to it.