The official Xiaomi 12 launch date is only a few days away, with the company confirming that the new top-end Xiaomi phone will debut on December 28 – but a poster has given us some more news about the event.
The deputy manager of Xiaomi's marketing division shared on Twitter a poster of two phones and the title 'Xiaomi 12' – the post was accompanied by a caption saying 'Two Flagships'.
We don't need Sherlock Holmes to work out what's being said here – it seems that only two phones will arrive on December 28. It's possible that the image means there are only two versions of the phone, full stop, but we don't imagine that's the case, as there were almost a dozen variants of the Xiaomi Mi 11.
The two pictured phones both have slightly curved-edge screens and small-punch-hole front cameras, though there's not much else we can tell about the phones just at a glance. If we had to guess, we'd say this is the standard and Lite versions of the Xiaomi 12.
That means Xiaomi 12 Pro, Ultra and X-series and T-series variations could all come in 2022 – although it's possible that the depicted phone is the Xiaomi 12 Pro, not the Lite.
Two Flagships pic.twitter.com/qBPzHYTzsuDecember 21, 2021
Analysis: so could we see more?
Xiaomi isn't like Apple, which will generally unveil all its smartphones for the year at the same time. The Chinese giant likes to stagger its phone releases throughout the year.
For the Mi 11 series, the 'standard' phone debuted in December 2020 in China before getting a global re-release in February 2021 alongside the Mi 11 Lite. A few months later the Xiaomi 12 Ultra debuted, alongside the Pro, though that phone only went on sale in China. Over the next few months various Xiaomi Mi 11X phones were launched, though these two got limited availability, and towards the end of 2021 the Xiaomi 11T and 11T Pro appeared, alongside a new version of the Mi 11 Lite.
In total, 11 members of the phone family launched between December 2020 and October 2021; clearly the brand is a fan of its staggered strategy. So, while only two phones are launching on December 28, that certainly doesn't mean we won't see more in the future – we just might be waiting a while.
Not all the Xiaomi 12 phones will launch in all regions, as the brand seems to stagger its models out quite a bit by geography as well as time, but if you're a Xiaomi fan, 2022 will almost definitely bring something for you.
