Two companies have officially revealed smartphones with foldable AMOLED displays. Come Sunday, that number will be be three.

We already had a pretty good idea that Huawei was going to introduce a foldable phone at Mobile World Congress this weekend. But someone snapped a shot of a sign being installed at MWC and Posted it to twitter, giving us our first look at the phone… and its name.

Meet the Huawei Mate X.

Samsung’s Galaxy Fold bends inward so that the 7.3 inch display is hidden when the device is folded. For that reason, Samsung put a smaller 4.6 inch screen on the outside of the device so you could use it in one hand in phone mode.

Huawei’s Mate X, meanwhile, seems to fold outward so that the screen wraps around the front and back of the device when it’s in phone mode. This lets you use a little less than half of the full tablet screen in phone mode.

This isn’t the first device we’ve seen that folds in this way — the Royole FlexPai also folds outward. But Royole’s phone also has a rather wonky looking design and a very visible crease in the middle of the screen when it’s unfolded for use in tablet mode.

It remains to be seen whether the Mate X will avoid that fate.

There’s still no word on the phone’s specs, pricing or availability. But we should find out more when Huawei officially launches the Mate X on Sunday.

via 9to5Google

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7 replies on “Huawei will unveil the Mate X foldable smartphone Feb 24th”

    1. The outer layer of the screen is likely plastic, not glass, in order to fold. It shouldn’t crack, but will probably scratch/wear quite a bit more easily.

      1. I guess you can install a (plastic) Screen Protector… although the display will always feel a little sticky/cheap, as opposed to the smooth, luxury-feeling, Glass Displays.

        Guess there’s a trade-off, though I don’t think it’s a bad one. Sort of like the trade-off between IP68 waterproofing versus Removable Batteries.

  1. These $1000+ folding screen phones are about as useless as a screen door on a submarine. It is another ultra-luxury fad and I can only imagine how well these can handle the abuse of being folded and unfolded hundreds of thousands of times over the duration of ownership. LCD and OLED displays have issues as it is with dead pixels and image retention in their respective cases so throwing in bending only further reduces lifespan. You might as well fold your money and pocket it in your wallet for later instead of essentially folding it and flushing it down the toilet. It will probably take another decade until the first economic and durable bendable screens are available and worth buying.

    1. Just to be clear, I look forward to the day of a digital piece of the paper insides of a book that is really a collection of foldable screens. I just think that right now that it is untested in consumer hands and that typically means low lifespan, high prices, and many drawbacks. Given its unrefined state, I think a foldable phone is not the best initial applcation for a foldable screen.

    2. Brand new technology (as opposed to evolving tech) always comes with serious drawbacks initially. I’m old enough to remember the first digital watches — horrible chunky LED devices that only displayed the time when you pressed a button so the battery lasted more than a couple of hours. In fact, the first digital watch on the market was, you guessed it, a luxury model that sold for over $2,000 (over $12k in today’s dollars).

      Nobody, not even the manufacturers, is claiming foldable phones are ready for the mass market. They are deliberately high-spec’ed, high price devices so only the much more flaw-tolerated early adopters and tech fans will buy them. Releasing them in this way is an important step in the evolution toward their final form, even certain models end up being blind alleys. They provide feedback on various designs that will prove valuable for the manufacturers as they work on the next generation of products. We will know when the market is maturing once the designs start to converge on one type of solution.

      The regular smartphone market has seen all kinds of blind alleys over the years, but has now pretty much converged on the full screen slab design that all the manufacturers use.

      So, as much as you belittle their efforts so far, you will benefit from the existence of these products a few years down the road. In the meantime, you can continue to pat yourself on your back and tell yourself how much smarter you are than those who are shelling out thousands of dollars for these devices, so it’s a win-win situation!

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