Huawei Shows Off Brand New Design for Its Upcoming Tri-Fold Phone

Huawei has unveiled the design of the upcoming Mate XT 2, a tri-fold smartphone that significantly differs from its predecessor. The most notable change is the folding mechanism, which Huawei has replaced with a new U-shaped design. Official images reveal a folding pattern similar to Samsung’s tri-fold design, albeit with a slightly different folding sequence.

Unlike the Galaxy Z Tri-Fold that opens from the left, the Mate XT 2 folds towards the right. Huawei claims this U-shaped design provides better protection for the flexible inner display, keeping the main foldable screen shielded inside the device when completely folded. This could be especially valuable given the high cost of replacement, estimated at $743.

The outer display of the Mate XT 2 showcases a pill-shaped front camera cutout, similar to Huawei’s regular flagship phones, hinting at potential 3D facial recognition capabilities—though Huawei has not confirmed this feature. On the rear, the phone maintains an octagonal camera module akin to the previous model. Huawei plans to power the Mate XT 2 with the Kirin 9030S chipset, identical to the one used in the Pura X View, and introduced with the Pura 90 Pro and Pura 90 Pro Max.

This chipset houses a super core running at 2.69GHz, three large cores at 2.15GHz, and four medium cores at 1.62GHz. Accompanying the processor is a Mali-G77 MP3 GPU operating at 933MHz, configured with three compute units. Huawei’s Mate XT 2 is also set to be the first device to launch with HarmonyOS 7. This updated Ark Engine introduces a large model directly into the operating system for the first time.

Trained on over 2 billion scene-learning data points, Huawei states that this upgrade could boost performance by an additional 15%, while managing annual load growth under 10%. While Huawei has not yet announced an official launch date for the Mate XT 2, the public display of its design suggests a forthcoming full launch is imminent.