Flashback: Xiaomi Mi Mix made jaws drop with its near bezel-less design
Half a decade later the Xiaomi Mi Mix is still one of our favorite devices. Its near bezel-less design made it look futuristic and it was practical too, fitting a huge 6.4” display. The attention-grabbing Mix introduced several new things to the smartphone world.
The Xiaomi Mi Mix was a stunner
However, the design wasn’t one of them, even though it is its most recognizable feature. It wasn’t new – this layout first appeared on the Sharp Aquos Crystal a couple of years earlier, complete with moving the selfie camera to the thick bottom bezel.
This was a time before notches and punch holes, you see, and was a pretty awkward placement. But it enabled the top and side bezels to be razor-thin – in our hands, the Mix felt like holding a screen rather than a phone.
The selfie camera is not the only thing that had to move. There was no place for an earpiece either, so Xiaomi used a piezoelectric ceramic driver beneath the display itself. Later Huawei adopted the same design, but if we’re honest, it was never our favorite.
Xiaomi seemingly agreed, the second generation Mix had a slightly thicker top bezel to accommodate a traditional earpiece. Even Huawei seems to have given up on under-display earpieces.
With the Mi Mix, Xiaomi tried to make most of the structural components out of ceramic – the whole rear plate, the frame, and even the volume and power keys were made of ceramic. Microcrystal zirconium oxide, specifically, the kind of stuff that ceramic knives are made of.
This wasn’t its first dance ceramic, a special version of the Mi 5 had a ceramic back and launched a few months earlier. It was advertised as a nearly-indestructible material (check out the video below), though, in reality, it proved prone to cracking if you dropped the phone.
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