Xiaomi’s crazy Mi Mix Alpha is one big screen wrapped around a phone

When Xiaomi said it has a smartphone with a bigger than 100% screen-to-body ratio, the company wasn’t kidding. 

Its new Mi Mix Alpha has a screen that wraps around nearly the entire body of the phone, with an insane 180.6 percent screen-to-body ratio (yes, the measurement doesn’t make any sense when used like this, but this new phone is so cool we’ll let it slide). 

Xiaomi calls this the Surround Display. The Mi Mix Alpha’s display has tiny bezels (just 2.15mm) on top and bottom, and it wraps around the sides of the phone and all the way around the back, save for a vertical strip that hosts the cameras. 

To make this work, Xiaomi used an ultrasonic, in-display fingerprint sensor, display acoustic tech (meaning the display also doubles as a speaker), pressure sensitive sides (because there are no side buttons) and mis-touch detection tech (I sincerely hope it works well because there will be a lot of accidental touches on this thing). 

The camera is nearly as impressive as the screen. It has a 108-megapixel main sensor, coupled with a 12-megapixel telephoto camera with 2x optical zoom, and a 20-megapixel ultra-wide angle camera. 

The rest of the specs on the Mi Mix Alpha are pretty good, too: a Snapdragon 855+ processor, 12GB of RAM, 512GB of storage, 5G support, a 4,050 nano silicon cathode battery, and 40W fast charging. 

Finally, the phone’s frame is made out of “aerospace-grade titanium,” while the strip on the back is ceramic. The display, which looks quite fragile when it’s exposed like this, is protected by sapphire glass. 

And while Xiaomi calls the Mi Mix Alpha a concept phone, it will be produced as a limited edition device, with a price of 20,000 yuan ($2,815).