【2006 Archives】

Every now006 Archivesthen, Xiaomi surprises us with a cool, innovative phone that we then never get to try. This makes us sad, but the world is a cruel place, and all we can do is hope that one of these nice features will one day end up in a widely available device.

This time, the company has a concept phone with a quad-curved waterfall display. This means that the display "overflows" over all four sides of the phone, with "almost" the entire frame of the phone covered by the display. The phone has no ports or buttons, and sounds absolutely infuriating to use, but it's very cool to look at — check out the video below.

The effect is even more impressive when you place two of these phones side-by-side and play a video. Which no one will ever do in real life, but it's great for promotional videos like these.

Xiaomi claims that bending the glass four ways was an extremely complicated process, which required internally developed glass processing equipment, hot bending under temperature of 800 degrees Celsius and high pressure, four polishing tools and ten complex polishing procedures. It took "thousands of attempts" to get one such piece of glass, Xiaomi says.

As for all of the stuff that's missing — namely, ports, buttons, speakers, cameras, and such — Xiaomi said it took 46 patented technologies to replace them with invisible features such as under-display cameras, wireless charging, and pressure-sensitive touch sensors.

In 2019, Xiaomi launched a similar phone, called the Mi Mix Alpha, which had a display wrapped around the phone completely. That phone, however, didn't have the display overflowing over the top and bottom. It appears that Xiaomi is just a few steps away from creating a phone that is literally all screen on all sides.

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