Huawei Launches World’s First Double-Hinged Smartphone

Huawei has introduced what it called the world’s first tri-fold smartphone, the Mate XT, hours after Apple’s event to announce its AI-powered iPhone 16.

While Huawei’s event was on Tuesday and Apple’s on Monday, the 15-hour time difference between California and China meant the two events took place on the same day by Chinese clocks.

Huawei, which has begun manufacturing its own advanced 5G and processor chips domestically after being placed on a US trade blacklist in 2019, is the first to launch a foldable smartphone with two hinges.

In the lead-up to the launch Richard Yu Chengdong, chair of Huawei’s consumer business group, built up anticipation for the device by allowing himself to be photographed in public several times while using it.

Double-folding smartphone

Aided by such tactics, the device attracted more than 1.3 million pre-orders within seven hours after Huawei began reservations on Saturday on its official e-commerce site, Vmall.com.

By Monday afternoon the Mate XT had more than 3 million pre-orders on Vmall, with scalpers listing it for at least 20,000 yuan ($2,821, £2,147) on the grey market, according to local media reports.

Official sales of the Mate XT are to begin on 20 September.

The 5G-capable Mate XT is available in two colours, red and black, and features 16-gigabyte random access memory and internal storage of either 512GB or 1 terabyte, Huawei said.

When folded it resembles an ordinary smartphone, but it unfolds to reveal a large roughly square screen, similar to a tablet.

Foldable smartphone shipments grew 85 percent year-on-year worldwide in the April to June period, according to Tech Insights.

Huawei leads the global market due to its top market share in China, followed by Samsung Electronics and China’s Vivo.

Meanwhile, Apple has been pitching its AI plans since early this year, and the announcements have helped drive its stock price to record levels, restoring its position as the most valuable US-listed company ahead of Microsoft, Nvidia and Google parent Alphabet.

Growing market

But the company has struggled in the key China smartphone market, with Huawei driving it out of the top five vendors there in the quarter ended in July.

For the first time in history, the top five smartphone sellers in China in that quarter were all domestic companies, researchers said.

Huawei’s fortunes have been driven by its Mate 60 flagship, announced last summer, with a high-end, domestically produced chip, which was created in spite of US sanctions on both Huawei and its chip-manufacturing partner SMIC.

Huawei has also been the top seller of foldable smartphones in China for the past two quarters.

Honor, a Huawei spin-off, trails Huawei in China but took the top spot for foldables in Western Europe in the most recent quarter, Canalys said.