I’m In Love with the Huawei Mate XTs Folding Phone.

In China, we picked one of these up:

Some people call it a tri-fold, which isn’t right – it’s only got two folds in it. When it’s folded up like a Z, you have a reasonably sized phone:

It’s thick, but not unreasonably thick. It still fits easily in a pocket, and it’s about the same thickness as the single-fold Samsung Galaxy phones I’ve handled, or as thick as two iPhones on top of each other. Unfold it once, and you have a device with a square screen, twice as big as a regular phone:

Their custom operating system automatically resizes apps to fit the screen. They’re not stretched, either – they resize appropriately, just like windows on your computer. Turn the phone over, and you can use one of the panels as a selfie screen with the high-quality rear cameras:

But of course the big party trick is to fully unfold it, and it becomes a tablet:

Works in both portrait and landscape, apps resize automatically, etc., etc. just like a regular tablet. It just works, to the point where there isn’t really much to say about it.

It does have drawbacks, of course, and most of the drawbacks would be immediately obvious just because you can guess ’em. It’s expensive, around $3k USD. You definitely do feel the indents in the screen for the folds, and depending on what angle you’re looking from, you can see the folds quite obviously as well. Reliability will be a concern long-term, although Huawei includes a screen protector, plus replaces the screen protector free at their stores several times per year. It ships with a case, and it’s fine, but not great – and given the number of ways you can use this thing, I can’t imagine a case that would fit all situations.

If you buy a Mate XTs in China like I did, it comes with Huawei’s own operating system, which Google Play and Google’s app stores don’t support. You can load Google apps onto there, but some of them will never work quite right. If you buy it in other markets, it has a different OS, from what I understand – perhaps some flavor of Android – and I hear you can get Google’s apps and app store officially supported over there.

For me, though? This is great! I absolutely love it, and I’ve found myself using it more than my iPhone when I’m traveling. It’s so nice to have the full widescreen tablet experience for watching downloaded YouTube videos on planes, or portrait mode for surfing the web.

The instant Apple brings out something like this, I’m in. In the meantime, though, this’ll do.

To learn more, check out Marques Brownlee’s video of the first version of the phone, the Mate XT, or his video of Samsung’s Galaxy Z. Ironically, the Galaxy Z does not fold like a Z: it folds like a U, which has serious drawbacks that he discusses in his review. I wouldn’t recommend the Galaxy’s approach unless you can’t get the Huawei Mate XTs.