Months after Samsung appeared to abandon its Galaxy Z TriFold line due to high production costs and the memory shortage, Huawei has announced it will launch the Mate XT 2 on 7 September. This is the Chinese manufacturer’s third attempt at a tri-fold, but it might be the first properly designed one.
The company confirmed the date and the redesign in a teaser at the end of August, alongside its new HarmonyOS 7 software. Pre-orders are already open in China, but no price or international availability has been announced.
The pitch hasn’t changed much compared to Huawei’s original tri-fold, announced in 2024 and available in the UAE by 2025.
Stay up to date with the latest news. Follow KT on WhatsApp Channels.
What’s changed is the approach: the new tri-fold ditches the single-screen design of its two predecessors and adopts the dual-screen setup Samsung used for its Galaxy Z TriFold. Still, the promise is a real 10.2-inch tablet; fold it, and it shrinks to a 6.4-inch phone. The question is what that flexibility costs, and the answer is a lot. Huawei’s previous tri-fold, the Mate XTs, launched only in China and started at 17,999 yuan, almost Dh10,000. With memory prices at record highs, the Mate XT 2 is unlikely to cost any less.
Fixing a design flaw, again
Back in 2019, Huawei was an early adopter of the foldable form factor, launching the Mate X two months after Samsung’s Galaxy Fold. To keep it compact, Huawei used a single screen instead of two, making the folding panel pull double duty. That proved problematic: the folding screen was too soft to take the abuse glass absorbs easily. It took two generations to fix, and the tri-fold has taken exactly as long. The Mate XT 2 finally folds inward, behind a cover screen of its own.
The rest is a genuine step up. Storage now reaches 2TB, the purple edition adds a stylus and a privacy screen, and HarmonyOS 7 arrives alongside. A Kirin 9050 Pro chip and a battery above 6,000mAh have leaked, though neither is confirmed. And there is clearly an audience: the Mate XT and Mate XTs are estimated to have sold around a million units between them, a figure Huawei has never confirmed.
How much tablet do you actually get?
The answer is more than you would expect. Unfolded, the Mate XTs offers about 50 per cent more screen real estate than an iPad mini, while weighing 298g against the mini’s 293g. At its thinnest it measures 3.6mm, where the iPad mini is 6.3mm. This is not a phone pretending to be a tablet. It is a tablet you can also make calls on.
The bigger screen on the Mate XT 2 won’t be a waste either, as it should make use of Huawei’s MultiView feature, which splits the display across up to three apps at once. That is a laptop habit rather than a phone one, and it holds with a big asterisk: the software has to run on HarmonyOS.
The software question Huawei hasn’t answered
Huawei phones have shipped without Google services since May 2019, which means no Play Store, Gmail, Google Maps or YouTube. There were some ways to get around that restriction with sideloading, and the UAE has fared better than most markets, as Huawei’s own AppGallery carries Emirates NBD and other local banking apps. But the restriction has since grown into something much harder to work around.
In China, the Mate XT 2 will use HarmonyOS 7, part of the line that dropped Android compatibility in 2024, so even sideloading APKs won’t work. Globally, Huawei has kept selling phones with its Android-compatible EMUI skin, but that might change, as the company has said it plans to pilot HarmonyOS in select markets. This single possibility makes it very hard to recommend any Huawei phone, let alone one that costs Dh10,000.
Who is a tri-fold actually for?
Tri-folds are clearly not for everyone. Even with regular foldables breaking into the mainstream due to their extreme thinness, tri-folds are still a tough sell. They are more expensive, more awkward to use, and they require two motions to unfold. Unless Huawei sets a new bar for thinness, most users would be put off by the size of the Mate XT 2.
The reported sales numbers of tri-fold phones should not be overread either. An estimated million tri-folds in two years means there is demand, but whether it is enough to sustain the segment in the long term is still to be seen. LG sold 1.6 million units of the modular G5 in its first month back in 2016, but even a start like that could not make modular phones stick.
Source: Khaleej Times