Xiaomi is no stranger to foldable phones. The company has released a couple of models over the years, but thanks to recent photos shared on Twitter by Kuba Wojciechowski, we managed to get a glimpse at an early prototype of a Xiaomi foldable smartphone that featured a slightly different form factor.

For the most part, foldable phones these days utilize an inward folding design where the foldable display itself is on the inside of the fold to better protect it. But according to the photos, it seems that Xiaomi had initially planned to go with an outward foldable design, where the main portion of the foldable display sat on the outside of the phone.

This is a prototype of the Xiaomi outward folding phone that was patented but never actually shipped (or even leaked in real life). More details and photos below 🧵👇 pic.twitter.com/wMgCdCnUx2

— Kuba Wojciechowski⚡ (@Za_Raczke) November 17, 2022

This isn’t exactly a new design as it was initially used by Huawei and Royole, but we think it’s interesting because this could have been a direction Xiaomi could have gone with, but ultimately chose not to. It is unclear why Xiaomi did not go with an outward foldable design, but perhaps they realized that durability could have been an issue and opted to go with the inward folding design instead.

Either way, what do you think of the current design of foldable phones? Apart from the phone-tablet hybrid and the clamshell-smartphone hybrid designs, how else do you think foldable displays could be taken advantage of when it comes to future smartphone designs?