Folding phones might still be picking up steam, but Huawei isn’t waiting around – it’s officially first with a dual-hinge foldable smartphone you can actually go out and buy. If you live in China, anyway. The Huawei Mate XT Ultimate Design looks as sci-fi as you’d expect, with a dual-folding design that unfurls from 6.4in smartphone to 10.2in tablet.
At 12.8mm while folded it’s barely any thicker than the current crop of foldable phones from Google and Samsung, yet is a scant 4.76mm when fully unfolded. It weighs in at 298g, which is less than just about any 10in tablet I can think of. The Z-style hinge lets you use the Huawei Mate XT like a regular phone, unfold one part for a square-ish screen, or unfold both for a widescreen experience.
Huawei has form with folding phones that do things a little differently: the Huawei Mate XS 2 had an outward-folding design that helped it stay seriously thin, at a time book-style rivals were still very much on the chunky side and relied on two separate displays – one inner and one outer. That’s still the case for the wider phone world, but Huawei has taken its old design a step further here, with a single expansive screen that folds twice. When shut, only one third is exposed. That makes it a dual-folder, rather than a triple-screener.
There are a trio of cameras at the rear: a 50MP main snapper with optical image stabilisation and a variable f/1.4-f/4.0 aperture; a 12MP ultrawide; and a 12MP periscope telephoto good for 5.5x optical zoom. An 8MP selfie cam has been punched through the top centre of the outer-facing section of screen.
A 5600mAh battery doesn’t sound all that huge, given it’s going to be powering a 10.2in display, but 66W wired and 50W wireless charging are suitably speedy. The Huawei Mate XT will run Huawei’s own HarmonyOS 4.2 out of the box.
As has become the Huawei norm lately, the firm isn’t talking hardware specifics. The Mate XT is almost certainly using the same home-grown Kirin 9010 chipset as the Pura 70 Ultra non-folding flagship. We do know it comes with a generous 16GB of RAM, and three storage options: 256GB, 512GB and 1TB.
I’m a fan of the dramatic colour scheme, which mixes red vegan leather with polished gold metal. There’s no word if Huawei has other colours in the works.
What has been confirmed is Chinese pricing. The Huawei Mate XT will land at 19,999 yuan (about $2,809) for the 256GB storage model and climbs to a heady 23,999 yuan (roughly $3,371) for the 1TB option. Which will almost buy you two Galaxy Z Fold 6s or Google Pixel 9 Pro Folds. And keep in mind Huawei’s phones carry a sizeable price premium when they eventually leave China, so those figures are likely to climb even further skyward if the Huawei Mate XT ever gets a more global release.