Huawei Launches the Mate X: Folding in a New Direction

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Today at Huawei’s press conference at MWC Barcelona, Huawei has something special to share with us. It’s only been a couple of days since Samsung announced its own foldable phone, the Galaxy Fold – generating a lot of talk and hype around the new form-factor. Huawei of course didn’t stand still and has long been an innovator themselves, introducing a lot of new first-exclusive features over the last year or two. This year, Huawei is ready to steal Samsung’s thunder with the follow-up announcement of the new Mate X – the company’s own take on a foldable smartphone.

From the front, you actually might have issues identifying the Mate X from any other larger screened phone. While the device is folded on itself and you’re facing on the wide screen side, there’s not much to really distinguish it from any other modern bezel-less device.

It’s when you view the device from the top or bottom sides that it becomes evident that this isn’t your usual slab phone design. The Mate X is defined for being a foldable phone with a bendable screen on the outer surface (Whereas the Galaxy Fold’s screen is on the inner surface).

Huawei here has opted for a novel asymmetric design where one half of the screen is narrower than the other one. What this allows the company to do is to create a thicker phone edge where we locate the phone’s quad-camera setup. Because the cameras are all lined up on this “bar”, it means that the phone doesn’t actually distinguish between rear and front cameras. However because when the phone is folded, we have screens on both sides of the phone and you can still take selfie pictures and see yourself in a viewfinder. The bar also serves to provide housing for the USB-C connector as well as the 2-in-1 power button / finger-print sensor.

Full reading: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13990/hua...the-mate-x