Huawei’s first trifold is a great phone that you shouldn’t buy

Let’s get one thing out of the way immediately: you shouldn’t buy Huawei’s trifold phone, the Mate XT. And that’s alright, because you probably couldn’t if you wanted to — while it’s no longer exclusive to China, it’s only on sale in a handful of countries, and not in the US or Europe.

Besides, I can reel off a list of major problems with the Mate XT: at almost $4,000 it’s far too expensive, it doesn’t have native support for Google apps (though you can get around that more easily than you might think), it’s limited to 4G, and there are some pretty obvious reasons to worry about its durability. Any one of those individually would be a good reason to steer clear of buying the Mate XT. Taken together, they’re insurmountable.

But this isn’t a phone you’re meant to buy, at least not outside China. It’s a phone you’re meant to gawk at on the internet, to marvel at Huawei’s technological prowess, to ooh and ahh about its many and varied folds. This is Huawei showing off, proving to the world that it’s still got it. And in fairness, it has.

As I sit and write this — more than six months after Huawei first released the Mate XT in China — it’s still the only one of its kind. Rumor has it that Samsung has a trifold ready to show off this year, but it hasn’t yet. And by the time it does, odds are Huawei will have spent a full year as the only player in the game.

That might ring alarm bells in your head. This must be undercooked tech, you think, rushed out the door to beat everyone else to market. But the most surprising thing about the Mate XT is that it only occasionally feels first-gen.

There’s a hint of it in the multitasking, which refuses to allow you to fully open three apps at a time, pinning each to one of the three screen segments. Or when the fully open screen often doesn’t quite go entirely flat, which is more annoying than any crease will ever be. And you notice it when you open the phone, or close it, and the app you’re using seems to briefly reboot itself, losing your spot in a long article or (once, infuriatingly) discarding a Letterboxd review that was almost entirely finished. I’ve learned not to change the configuration while doing something, just to be safe.

But for the most part, these just don’t really matter. After several weeks using the Mate XT as my main phone, my primary impression is that it delivers on its promise, effectively offering three different devices in one.

Fully closed, this is simply a regular phone with a 6.4-inch display. At 12.8mm thick, it has a little heft to it, but not unduly so — it’s less than a millimeter thicker than Samsung’s Z Fold 6. It’s solid, and weighty, and even the cameras are decent. It’s as good a phone in this form as Samsung’s foldable, so long as you can live with sideloading the Play Store.

When I’m reading a long article or trying to keep up in the editorial Slack channels, I open the phone up to a 7.9-inch, squarish display that’s a pretty close match for what other foldables offer. For me, this is the least useful setup of the three, a reminder that current book-style foldables offer something I don’t really want most of the time, extra screen space in all the wrong places.

But that’s what the Mate XT’s full screen is for. Flipping one more section nets me a full 10.2-inch display, making this a thin, lightweight tablet I can fold up and fit in my pocket. It’s wider than it is tall, a close match for the aspect ratios in most streaming apps, ideal for watching videos and playing games, tripling the screen real estate for wide-screen entertainment. I haven’t traveled much in the time I’ve been working on this review, but this is a phone crying out for rail commutes and long-haul flights, a big-screen Balatro machine that fits in your pocket, not your backpack.

Nine times out of ten, I use the Mate XT like a regular ol’ phone, and that extra screen space is probably wasted on me. But I don’t travel all that much, or make a habit of gaming on my phone; I wouldn’t make the most of this outside a handful of plane rides a year. Maybe you wouldn’t either, but I imagine anyone who already gets regular use out of both a phone and a tablet is feeling a little pull of temptation to merge them into one.

The main thing people have asked me about the Mate XT, once they get over the foldiness of it all, is whether the battery sucks. In my experience, it absolutely doesn’t. The 5,600mAh capacity proves more than capable of lasting a full day (and then some), but I’ll refer you back to the previous paragraph — I’m not spending all day with the phone fully open. 5,600mAh is a decent battery for a phone, but a small one for a tablet, so if that’s your main use case, then you should expect to feel a bit more of a pinch.

The second thing people ask is how likely it is to break. And compared to a regular phone, the answer is pretty likely! There’s a whole extra failure point in the second hinge, and no IP rating, so you can’t trust it to survive either water or dust. I’m more worried that one part of the soft, flexible screen is always exposed to the outside world. It’s going to get nicks, scratches, and dents, and there’s nothing you can do about it. My review unit already has a couple, and I’ve been babying the thing. I’d say you shouldn’t buy this unless you can afford to replace it, but again: you probably shouldn’t buy it at all.

Maybe you should buy the next one. Or the one after that. Or one a few generations down the line. Or just the first one that isn’t made by Huawei, because fantastic as the company’s hardware can be, I’m still not convinced it’s worth giving up proper Google support. But while the Mate XT may be the first trifold, I’m confident it won’t be the last. And this hardware, with Google and 5G, for two-thirds the price, and a generation or two of durability improvements? You should buy that phone.

Photography by Dominic Preston / The Verge