Huawei’s New Foldable Phone Has Way Too Many Screens

Just hours after Apple unveiled its iPhone 16 lineup at the Glowtime event on Monday, Chinese tech giant Huawei announced the Mate XT, the world’s first tri-folding smartphone. As the name suggests, the Mate XT, with its trio of displays, can fold in three different ways, giving you a bunch of form factors to work with. Or you can just fold the whole thing shut in a Z shape and have it look like a regular phone from planet Earth. The Mate XT will retail in China for an eye-watering $2,800.

Huawei is really trying to hone in on the Mate XT’s otherworldly appeal. According to a translation by Reuters, the company’s executive director Richard Yu said, “Today we bring you a product that everyone can think of but could not make […] We will once again rewrite the history of the industry, turn science fiction into reality.”

It doesn’t take a genius to realize that Huawei was coming for Apple in an extremely non-subtle manner. By announcing its phone just a few hours after the new iPhone 16s were announced, even setting an availability date of September 20—the same date as Apple’s, and strategically starting pre-orders on Saturday—just two days before iPhone’s pre-orders—all point towards an obvious stab.

Popular Chinese social media platform Weibo was also rife with such content. Spotted by Reuters, a video that trended on #2 for 13 hours and amassed 91 million views hilariously showed employees in an Apple store in China leaving for the Huawei store to attend its phone launch.

Part of the reason behind Chinese consumers’ inclination towards the Mate XT has to do with one of the iPhone 16’s biggest selling points, the Apple Intelligence features, which are not available in China at the moment. Reuters reports, “Apple has yet to announce an AI partner in China to power the 16s, and Apple Intelligence […] will only be available in Chinese languages next year.”

This is why the iPhone 16 news didn’t garner the same reaction from Chinese markets as they did elsewhere. The absence of a feature Apple has been touting the most is too serious of an omission to ignore.

Huawei has a host of AI features on the Mate XT, including AI Senior Editor, AI Information Consultant, AI Translation Expert, and AI Photo Editor. The $2,800 phone ships with 256GB storage, but you can upgrade to 512GB for around $3,090 (converted from Chinese Yuan) or 1TB for a whopping $3,371. The RAM is 16GB across all variants.

The display measures 6.4 inches when the phone is folded and opens to 10.2 inches. A huge 5,600mAh battery powers the device, which is essential on a display as massive as this at 3K resolution. The camera array offers a 50MP main, 12MP ultrawide, 12MP periscope camera on the back, and an 8MP front camera.

While the $2,800 price tag is high, this is the only tri-folding smartphone on the market at the moment, so it still has a (very) specific target audience. If, for some reason, someone’s in the market for a gigantic collapsible phone, this is their only option. More than five million preorders in China further attest to my point.