HUAWEI's answer to the iPhone Ultra? A slimmer tri-fold with a privacy screen

Apple’s finally set to make a splash with the first-ever folding iPhone later this week. However, even before Apple’s announcement and the official reveal of the supposed iPhone Ultra, Chinese phone makers are attempting to hog the limelight with their similarly, or more, impressive foldables. Xiaomi is launching the Xiaomi 18 Fold, with a design too familiar. One step ahead, HUAWEI has already revealed its latest foldable: the second generation of its triple-folding phones.

At a launch event in China earlier today, HUAWEI pulled the wraps off the Mate XT 2 tri-fold phone. Like the previous XT series phones from HUAWEI, the Mate XT2 unfolds fully to a 10.2-inch inner screen with a roughly 3.2K resolution when fully unfolded.

As with the older version, the Mate XT2 can also be unfolded to reveal just two faces (similar to a familiar book-style design), or folded entirely into a slab-phone-like design with a 6.5-inch front. Both the inner and outer displays use LTPO technology, allowing variable refresh rates between 1 and 120Hz.

The outer display now also gets a new selfie camera cutout shaped like the iPhone’s Dynamic Island instead of a hole-punch. The phone also gets a special edition with a privacy screen, which HUAWEI has previously used on some laptops.

The new Mate XT2 is powered by HUAWEI’s new home-grown Kirin 9050 Pro chipset, featuring a 9-core design. HUAWEI claims the chipset offers a 46% upgrade in CPU performance and a 142% improvement in GPU performance with ray tracing compared to the Kirin 9030 Pro. HUAWEI does not reveal specifics about the manufacturing node.

There are no comparison stats for the NPU, but HUAWEI says it runs a local large language model with 30 billion total and 2 billion active parameters. Along with 5G, the modem also supports NTN communications with 40% better satellite paging rates. The phone offers 16GB of RAM with up to 1TB of storage.

The HUAWEI Mate XT2 also comes in a new set of colors. The phone measures only 3.5mm thick in unfolded state (and 12.3mm when folded), marking a slight improvement over the earlier two Mate XT models. However, its weight has increased by a gram.

The phone comes with triple cameras, including a 50MP RYYB primary sensor, a 40MP ultrawide, and a 50MP periscopic telephoto with 3.5X optical zoom.

In addition to the new tri-folding phone, HUAWEI has also revealed HarmonyOS 7 built around iOS-like glass effects and AI.

The HUAWEI Mate XT2 is currently on pre-order in China, starting at CNY 19,999 (~$2,980) for the 256GB variant. The 1TB variant with the privacy display is priced at CNY 24,999 (~$3,725). There is no information about its immediate availability outside China.