Those “stale” flagships beat the “groundbreaking” Mate XT in more ways than one.
Recently, Huawei unveiled what is probably the most innovative phone in recent memory. Instead of just toying around with concepts like Samsung and some others, it directly took its research into phones with multi-foldable displays to the retail stage and launched the Mate XT trifold.
We tested it and went away pretty impressed, and not only by the idea, but by the fact that Huawei carried it to fruition and actually has a multi-foldable phone on the market right now, albeit a rather expensive one.
For all the brouhaha around the Mate XT launch and the excited dithyrambs that the current phone form factor paradigms are over, done, finished with (“are you listening Apple or Samsung?!”), and so on, there is little chance that the phone will actually catch on.Mate XT is the most expensive phone in recent memory
Apple, what are you thinking with your puny 2024 iPhone 16 Pro Max flagship given that the groundbreaking Mate XT is already out there? Samsung, your Galaxy Z Fold 6foldable phone mama is too fat!
That seems to be the mantra of almost every Mate XT preview that waxes poetic about true innovation and, above all, Huawei’s ability to deliver. This is not to say that Huawei didn’t pull off the most impressive handset in a decade, because it did.
The tri-folding phone, however, follows Huawei’s cowboy philosophy of kicking the door of the saloon with pistols blazing and then failing to take the patrons’ disposable cash. It was the first to deploy a periscope zoom camera on a modern phone, for example, placing one in the P30 Pro five years back.
When we interviewed Huawei’s CEO Richard Yu at the time, however, he advised that the novel at the time folded camera optics is so prohibitively expensive as a phone component that Huawei was forced to price the phone north of what even Apple or Samsung flagships cost and even that didn’t suffice.
