this right here is the Huawei Mate XT. I spent over $5,000 to get one. It's the world's first triple folding phone. The thing is kind of mind-blowing, but as I've started to dig deeper, I realized there is also something sinister going on with it. So, this is how the thing comes presented: iPhone box size reference W. There's no doubt about it, this is absolutely incredible. So, right on top here are the Huawei Free Buds 5. I gave these things a 7 out of 10 when I tested all the band Huawei products. Got a car charger, 8 watts pluming NE. That's generous, but then I suppose equally at the same time, this is the kind of experience that you would expect. Anyone who's willing to pay thousands of dollars for a first-generation product is a true fan, and Huawei needs to make sure that those fans are looked after. So, in here we got tips for the earphones, a bunch of papers, and then a carbon fiber case. Okay, we'll come back to this. What's

in here. Oh, what? So, you got the mains charger, which is only 66 WS. How do you have a mains charger with less power than the car charger? And not one, but two cables: a USBC to USBC, and then a USBC to USBA. Now, before the whole we didn't even need one fold, why on Earth would we need two-fold Army comes to get me? Hear me out, because there is something I think is absolutely amazing about this. Ever since the very first foldable phones, we have had a problem. I think it's fair to say that most people are interested in the idea of a phone that could become a tablet at the snap of their fingers—a massive screen to watch movies or play your games on. But the reason that very few people follow through and actually buy these folding phones, like the ones from Samsung, is price aside. If you want to make it usable while it's folded, it's got to be tall like a phone. But then that means that when you open it, it's

got to be square, and because videos and games are all designed to be widescreen, it barely makes your experience bigger than just using a normal phone. And so, the only thing left for foldable is to be better at crazy multitasking, but that's niche. And just be honest, most people who could afford one of these already have a laptop or a proper tablet for that anyway. But that is where this Huawei comes in. So, you open once from here, and yeah, in this form, it is basically the same as a normal foldable, AKA pretty useless for most types of content. But look what happens when we open one more time. The extra width from this one extra fold is an absolute game-changer. I mean, like, this is an iPad. It's widely considered one of the best devices for catching up with your movies on an airplane. But now, we have a phone that gives you practically the same viewable screen area when watching content, except this one folds into something resembling this. What year are we living in, and what Huawei has done to

achieve this is actually just as cool. So, this is Samsung Z Fold 5, and when folded, it is 13.4 mm thick. Samsung's very latest is 12.1 mm. Huawei's triple-folding phone is just 12.8. They've crammed in a whole extra layer. This is like 2D versus 3D while barely making the phone thicker at all. And what that means is when the thing is unfolded, this is 3.6 mm thick. Obviously, it is easier to make things thinner when you have more space this way, but 3.6. I did a video a few years ago on the thinnest smartphone in the world, and that was 4.75, and the current iPhone is 8.3 for reference. It genuinely feels like some sort of sci-fi movie prop, and I can't quite believe this is a final product. You know where it really hits home just how slim this is is when you realize that every single port, button, and cutout looks like it barely fits on the device.

not to mention that you can really tell they've put some love into this design. Like, can you see this gold accent ring around the camera? Well, that is apparently hand-designed with almost 80 layers of stacked steel, very much like actually those highly prized Damascus knives. And what it means is that every single phone looks just a little bit different, and that's cool. So, is this what foldable phones should have been like all along? Is this what Samsung should be making starting from next year? Well, it certainly looks that way on first glance. 'Cause let's say that I'm using a normal bold folding phone. I could use it in one hand like this. I could use it in two hands like this. Or I could use it on a table in its half-folded state. But what can you do on this? Well, for starters, you've got the normal phone mode. You got the screen on the front. You got the camera on the back. This is effectively the same as using a normal folded phone folded up. So then, you open it up, and again, functionally at

this point we are still identical with what you get with a normal folding phone, and also like a normal folding phone, you can use the screen that's currently facing the back to allow the person you're shooting to see themselves and also to allow you to take high-quality selfies using your phone's rear set of cameras. Damn, that looks good. But then you get the third screen involved, and this way you can start to do some very interesting stuff. Like, you can use two screens to watch what you're doing while using the third screen to angle your camera. You could actually have two screens to work on and then use the bottom screen folded up like that as a stand. And then you add this case into the mix, which in itself already has a stand that can rotate to any angle that you want it to, and you start to think to yourself, I can use this phone however I can think to use this phone. This is what I mean when I say that the extra screen here is like the difference between 2D

and 3D because the possibilities aren't just additive; they are multiplicative. And they've managed to do all of this without even sacrificing on the cameras. I mean, you can probably tell by the fact that this camera bump is half the thickness of the phone, but this is on the upper end of foldable phone cameras. And even though it is somewhat early days on the software, like not that many things are fully optimized for three screens, it does feel like they have thought about the user experience. Like, for example, when you want to unlock the pin, the screen comes up on the side that you swipe up with. So, this is interesting enough that, yes, I would love to see what Samsung and Xiaomi and other foldable firm makers can do with this type of form factor. 'Cause while it does create a number of issues in itself, they're all solvable. And what it does is it fixes the one big one and actually makes foldables useful for the masses. Now, that is not to say that Huawei gets a free pass, because while the trifold design

could work. This specific attempt at one does not. I mean, the smaller issues are already something. There's the fact that, yes, there is absolutely a honeymoon phase with this, where you wake up every day with a spring in your step. You turn over to your wife, sorry, phone. You open it, and you marvel at how on Earth Huawei fit this much device into 3.6 mm of thickness when unfolded. But as the days go on, you come to another realization that because this thing is now twice as much effort to unfold, you're going to end up using it a lot more just like this. And when you use it folded up like this, you're basically just holding a brick phone that happens to weigh 300 G. 'Cause even though the thing isn't much thicker than normal phones, it's the hinges. Having to have two hinges on this means that a higher proportion of the device has to be made of densely compacted metal. And speaking of hinges, they don't fold both ways. So the front folds outwards, whereas the rear folds

inwards, and if you get that wrong even once with a little too much pressure, well, it will still fold just irreversibly. I've seen this happen enough times that I have decided I won't be the guy who tries it. And it ain't just the hinges; you also have to be very careful with the screen. Folding phone screens are much easier to scratch than normal phone screens, and there are lots of situations when using this where you have to expose some parts of this pressure screen to the elements. And on that note, how precious? Well, you know that I paid $5,000, which is obviously not the retail price of this thing. It's the I managed to scalp one and sell it on eBay for profit price. But even the retail price in China, where it's mainly on sale, is $22,800, or $3,400 for the top-spec model. And because this screen is such a unique component, the repair costs for this piece alone are $11,000. And even when you're not looking after the screens

you're looking at the creases on them. Do you notice they're actually not the worst we've seen, but by no means invisible? Well, that's partly because when you add more hinges, you can't make each hinge as good. A good hinge that doesn't crease the display takes up valuable space, and since the entire priority here is to compress the design as much as possible, something's got to give. But as I was saying, all of these issues are potentially solvable and, to be fair, expected when you're trying something that's this different. None of this stuff makes this phone a write-off. There is a deeper Huawei problem, and I'm not even talking about the over 50 pre-installed apps or the fact that if you want to do literally anything Google, you have to do it via one of these shady applications that try to convince Google you're not coming from a Huawei phone. Like, the most common one is Gbox, which signs into Google by identifying as a Samsung Galaxy A22. I know because I got

the email confirmation for it. Here's the thing. If you've watched any Huawei launch events recently, you'll have seen that Richard Yu, who leads them, keeps saying that Huawei is far ahead of its competitors. This company feels hyper-aware of what Apple and Samsung are doing and wants to make it very publicly clear to Chinese citizens that those companies are slacking in comparison. And you might look at something like this and say, you know what, actually yeah, I don't see Samsung's trifold phone, even if they have already used the letter z for a phone that looks nothing like a z. Huawei is ahead. But I think the reason they're doing this is because this is all they can do. See, the Huawei US ban in 2019 completely crippled this company. Cutting off access to their suppliers from all around the world basically means that in some ways, Huawei's tech has frozen in time. Like, look at this, the chip that powered Huawei's P10, this is their 2017 flagship phone, is based off a 16-nan fabrication process. The lower

that number the better 'cause it basically means the chip is more efficient. So let's look at next year, the P20 Pro. Wow, huge improvement. 16 nanm all the way down to 10 NM. And again with the next phone, the P30 Pro. 10 nanm all the way down to 7. This is the year the US ban struck. And if you look at Huawei phones since then, in 5 years, they haven't actually managed to move past 7 nanom. Now don't get me wrong, Huawei's chips have been refined since then. They are better. But it's just that the baseline tech is now far behind the rest of the world. And I think this is Huawei's way around that, to not really talk about the chips or the rest of the tech like the storage speeds that are also stuck in the past, but instead to try and come across like they're not behind, but actually still ahead by creating a new design. Otherwise, it might start to look like they're just releasing the same

phones again and again and clearly is working. I mean, this thing has racked up over 7 million pre-orders in China alone. That's like Samsung flagship phone levels of performance, and it has people running around inside Apple Stores doing this, whatever this is. But here's what this dated China-focused Tech actually means. So, let's try opening up Call of Duty Warzone. [Music] Okay, yeah, that's actually completely dead on the loading screen. Okay, let's try a different game. So, this one boots up, but it's pretty clear that this isn't designed for running top-tier modern applications well on a screen like this. And that's not even talking about the battery, which is actually quite good for a phone at 5,600 mAh, but bad for a tablet. It's like half of the capacity that you would expect. So, even though you have to give credit to Huawei for releasing this, not even as a slightly juny concept phone, but a genuinely usable consumer-grade product, I still wouldn't actually recommend anyone ditch

their normal bar phone. It's still got that slightly stuck in the middle of two things and does neither particularly well syndrome, which is probably why the initial frenzy of everyone buying the things up to resell them at twice the price is starting to cool down rather quickly. Now, let's be honest though, the main reason people are buying this phone is to flex on people, literally. So, let's use this video sponsor, the Insta 360 X4 camera, to catch that in. So, here's what I think is absolutely amazing about this camera. It captures every single thing around you all at once in 8K resolution, by the way. So, you don't need to angle it, you don't need to check the feed to make sure you're not missing anything. All you need to do is to hold it or put it in a backpack. And this is what that footage looks like. It automatically gets rid of the invisible selfie stick, so all you can see is this like drone floating directly in front of you, perfectly locked onto you. But the software is the

best bit 'cause let's say that you're looking through the footage afterwards, and you catch something that you want to follow, like in this case, this person looking at me like the fool that I am acting. As you can literally just tap on their face, and your camera tracks them automatically after you've already taken your video. And if you don't want to do any editing at all, there's even an AI button that automatically selects the best bits for you. Link below to get yourself the X4 with an exclusive 10% discount, as well as a free 3 m selfie stick to get your own drone-like shots like this.

The TRIPLE FOLDING phone has a Problem.

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I'm Arun Maini, I'm a 27 year old Economics graduate whose life's passion is Technology, and I'm on a mission to make the most FUN and USEFUL Tech videos on the Planet! 🙏



