Huawei ups the smartphone ante with new tri-fold phone

If you thought the price of a fully specced iPhone 16 Pro Max or Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 was high, Huawei has a new flagship that might require some folks to pull off a bank heist to afford. The Mate XT, which the company claims is the first triple-fold phone to hit the market, will debut in China and start at 19,999 yuan (approximately $2,800). That's enough to buy an 11-inch iPad Pro, M3 MacBook Air and an iPhone 16 — and still have cash to spare.

It took Huawei five years to develop the Mate XT, according to the chairman of its consumer business, Richard Yu. As part of that process, the company is said to have made breakthroughs in screen and hinge technology. The device folds up accordion-style, with one hinge bending outward and the other inward, leaving one of the panels available to use as a 6.4-inch exterior display.

“Huawei Mate XT is the world’s first triple-fold smartphone, and the largest and thinnest foldable handset globally,” Yu said during a launch event, according to CNN. “We are the first in the world to achieve outward folding (in smartphones) and the first to create an inward-folding phone with no gaps.”

See it in action.

Despite the high price, the Mate XT has already caught the imagination of Chinese consumers. By early Tuesday, Huawei had received 3.7 million preorders.

It's no surprise as to why Huawei formally revealed the device hours after Apple’s iPhone event - it's looking to steal some of Apple's thunder. Given its pre-order numbers and the relatively modest iPhone hardware updates this year (Apple is banking on the delayed Apple Intelligence features as a key selling point), Huawei may have just pulled that off.

When completely unfolded, the Mate XT has a 10.2-inch 3K display with a 92 percent screen-to-body ratio. Buyers can use one, two or all three panels at once (the size of the two-panel display is 7.9 inches). It comes in red or black with a leather finish on the rear and gold trim on the edges and folds. When they're out of range of a cell network, owners will be able to communicate with the rest of the world via satellite.

As you might imagine, there are a bunch of Generative AI features too, including a voice input function that can polish and translate a transcript. There's the option to have a chatbot open on one side of the screen to answer questions and summarize articles. There's an AI photo editing tool too. On that note, Huawei says the triple-camera system - which features a periscope telephoto camera and an ultra-wide-angle camera - includes an approximate optical zoom of 5.5x.

Huawei isn't the first company to show off a tri-fold device, however, reporters had some hands-on time with a tri-fold TCL tablet back in 2020. The rollout plans for the Mate XT outside China are not yet clear. The Mate XT is unlikely to officially come to the US, given sanctions that have been in place against the company over the last few years.