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Huawei Unveils the Mate X, a Foldable 5G Smartphone That Costs $2,600 (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The world's fastest growing mobile company has long had a chip on its shoulder when it comes to Apple and Samsung. For too long, the company has had to go out of its way to remind the world that it's capable of being every bit as innovative as those better established brands, a concept very much at the heart of the Mate X. The device lives right at the cross section of the year's biggest forward looking trends -- foldables and 5G, and unlike some of the concepts we've seen to date, the product does so with panache.
The device is thin, as far as tablets go, at 5.4 mm, unfolded. Closed, it's nearly double that, at 11 mm. Not thin, exactly, but still a heck of a lot easier to slip into your pants pockets than the 17mm Galaxy Fold. More impressive is what the company's been able to do with its displays. The screen is very much the thing on these products, and yet the Fold's outside screen only measures 4.6 inches. The Mate X, meanwhile, sports a pair of outward-facing displays, the larger of which measures 6.6 inches at 2480 x 1148 pixels, with a 19:5 aspect ration. The flip side is 6.38 inches, allowing for space for the camera bar -- a chin that folds over to meet the display. The system features a Leica lens and the design is such that photo subjects can see themselves on the outward-facing display as a shot is taken. On the device's side is a combo fingerprint reader/power button. The phone uses a proprietary "Falcon Wing" hinge to unfold and turn into a full 8-inch tablet. The report does note that there is "a visible crease in the middle of the phone." Inside are a pair of batteries that add up to 4,500mAh of power, as well as a Kirin 980 processor.
In a separate article, TechCrunch says the Mate X is expected to retail for about $2,600, proving that there is certainly a pricing premium with foldables and 5G phones.
The device is thin, as far as tablets go, at 5.4 mm, unfolded. Closed, it's nearly double that, at 11 mm. Not thin, exactly, but still a heck of a lot easier to slip into your pants pockets than the 17mm Galaxy Fold. More impressive is what the company's been able to do with its displays. The screen is very much the thing on these products, and yet the Fold's outside screen only measures 4.6 inches. The Mate X, meanwhile, sports a pair of outward-facing displays, the larger of which measures 6.6 inches at 2480 x 1148 pixels, with a 19:5 aspect ration. The flip side is 6.38 inches, allowing for space for the camera bar -- a chin that folds over to meet the display. The system features a Leica lens and the design is such that photo subjects can see themselves on the outward-facing display as a shot is taken. On the device's side is a combo fingerprint reader/power button. The phone uses a proprietary "Falcon Wing" hinge to unfold and turn into a full 8-inch tablet. The report does note that there is "a visible crease in the middle of the phone." Inside are a pair of batteries that add up to 4,500mAh of power, as well as a Kirin 980 processor.
In a separate article, TechCrunch says the Mate X is expected to retail for about $2,600, proving that there is certainly a pricing premium with foldables and 5G phones.
Some may say this new category of folding phones are too expensive, but I really like the idea of these things - it seems like a great combination of a phone which you always have, plus a better media/reading/creating surface to work with.
I am super curious to see how these turn out and eagerly await the comparison of models like this with the Samsung to be coming out... I really wonder how the folding action will feel (the Samsung sounded nice in theory).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Nice idea, needs more time.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You could buy 50 $50 phones and some duct tape to get a giant redneck foldable super computer tablet.
This was my PDA in the late 1990s. It was 25mm thick closed. It fit in my pocket perfectly fine.
My last two phones were 8.5mm and 6mm. They were actually too thin - I kept dropping them when I tried to hold them by the edges. I ended up buying cases for them not to protect them, but to make them thicker so I wouldn't drop them so often. I really wish they'd just put a bigger, multi-day battery into these and make them closer to 10-15mm thick. That would also alleviate most of the complaints about the battery being non-replaceable. You could limit the charge/discharge cycle to between 10%-90% or 20%-80% (like they do on EVs), increasing lifespan from around 600 cycles to closer to 2000 cycles before the battery wears to half its capacity when new.
The question though is this: Where is APPLE?
There's nothing really new about a folding phone that morphs into a pad. Various folks have been talking about this for a long time.
I wouldn't be surprised if they even built prototypes and evaluated them internally. That fact that Apple has not even hinted at such a critter probably means that they decided that the product wouldn't be a big hit.
Time will tell if others have success with their models . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Having the large screen on the outside is better in that it keeps the bend radius much larger and avoids the need for another small display on the outside, but on the other hand it leaves it unprotected which isn't great since it's not going to be covered with gorilla glass.
Apple will sit out for a generation or two, Tim Cook will say something about how only losers need to fold their tablets, before eventually making their own groundbreaking version.
Why a phone though? This is just an utter, complete failure of imagination on the designers of all these. MS was at least rumored to have come up with a new form factor, but all these others are just "phones but...". I'll prove it's not as useful as it could be. As with the Fold, it's nigh useless for media. Holding it sideways give near the exact same screen realestate for a video as unfolding, congrats a third of the use is mostly gone.
It's still too small to use for creating things, let's not kid ourselves. My 12" Surface still feels cramped compared to me desktop monitor. The one use it has is websites and a select handful of games. Not that I'm knocking better website reading, it's what I do half the day. But the point is to think beyond just 'What's popular now, but with a fold!" What if it was a tablet to begin with? A 3:2 10" tablet could unfold into a 14" 16:9 laptop that sits on a desk or lap, for example and with enough engineering. That's interesting, that's not something we have. I just want these companies to think a tiny bit more, and rush products to market a tiny bit less.
To patent the origami phone? Little cube you keep on your keychain folds out to a 24in screen when you hit the button. And I'm sure I can sell it for at least 10k!
What a bizarre rant.
Apple hasnâ(TM)t invented much at all. They didnâ(TM)t have the first mp3 player, the first smartphone, the first tablet, the first high DPI display, the first 3G phone, the first LTE phone, etc. It would be a confused fanboy indeed who claims Apple is first to market with everything.
Appleâ(TM)s success comes from doing these things later, but better. They almost always wait, and it turns out fine. Hate âem all you want, but probably at least have base your hate on reality.
The question though is this: Where is APPLE?
1) Waiting to see if people like folding phones.
2) Spending quite a lot longer until they comeuppance with a design they really like, instead of releasing a kind of hacky initial version.
That's the main thing I worry about with the initial versions of the folding phones, that they will not have design kinks really worked out for the first few revs.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This phone shares a number of problems with the Samsung offering (other than the ridiculous price, which I will not discuss.) First, when folded, both phones remain WAY TOO LARGE! Second, when folded, both phones (especially Samsung's) have a main screen that is TOO SMALL! That's right, this does not contradict the first observation.
One can tell that these are first efforts. The concept is great, and hopefully things will improve a lot over the next couple of years. For the time being, I'll be giving them a miss.
The question though is this: Where is APPLE?
There's nothing really new about a folding phone that morphs into a pad. Various folks have been talking about this for a long time.
I have been talking about this for a long. Like millions out there. Talk is very cheap.
The Samsung screen I thought, had a foldable screen that flexed in the middle so was continuous when opened...
The design of this Huawei device is the opposite, where there's a screen on front and back that fold put to meet each other - I think there is a hairline where the meet though it's very hard to see in the video they have in the story.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Huh? You mean a tablet with a crease down the middle. The phone has a crease on the edge.
Looks like the ads are coming in as stories.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
It took quite a lot of convincing for them to move on from the "perfection" that is the 3.5" screen. I expect a similar delay in moving towards anything foldable.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
There is a very fine line between a gimmick, and something that is genuinely useful on a regular basis. Many hybrids at the hardware level have been attempted. There are some I thought would be useful but turned out to have pretty much zero consumer demand. For example, cell phones with an e-ink display on that back that could always show information with zero battery drain and provide an optimal display for daylight reading. Nope. It was tried both as native device and as an add on case, and neither caught on. What about phones with slide out keyboards? Super functional right? Also totally gone from the mainstream.
These foldable phones are also a novelty looking for a killer use case. Seems useful (I have a bigger screen now for watching Netflix,or a dedicated keyboard area) but like my old slide out phone that I eventually realized I just used the onscreen keyboard 90% of the time, it won't justify the extra expense and potential for damage.
Better known as 318230.
In order to flex like this I can guarantee they do not have anything nearly as protective as glass on that screen. I would much rather have mine on the inside where it is protected with a smaller glass-shielded screen on the outside.
I can overlook the alleged spying stuff (is it that they can, or that they aren't rolling over for FBI/CIA?). But they seem to regard a charging bug as a WON'TFIX and that means the Honor 8 that I have now is the last one I buy from them. When I connect a device that should source power TO the phone and the phone refuses to be charged, but insists on trying ti charge the device? NOPE! If they can't be bothered to fix something that basic, I can't be bothered to buy from them again.
I don't subscribe to RMS's GNUtopian vision.
Is the ability to learn not only from your own mistakes, but the mistakes of others as well.
Someone else asked where is Apple in all of this and right now, Apple is, amusingly, watching this event fully understanding what is about to take place.
There is a limit to what folks will pay for a smartphone. Apple learned this the hard way with their pricing arrogance and it cost them.
It seems, Huawei wasn't paying attention.
As such, they are about to learn that very same, painful lesson as Apple did.
I recently bought a MediaPad m5 only to learn that Huawei's official new policy is to lock the bootloaders on all of their devices, and they refuse to provide the bootloader unlock code to device owners.
If you give money to Huawei in exchange for a telephone, just be aware that you aren't actually buying anything, but rather borrowing their property for an unspecified period. The device obeys them at all times; they can remotely monitor you, install/uninstall whatever they want, fall behind on security patches, stop supporting the device entirely...
I'd recommend everyone do what I did: email their sales organization, and let them know that due to the anti-ownership provisions they've adopted, you'll be purchasing devices from their competitors. They're the ones most able/likely to correct the company's behavior.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
I wouldn't be surprised if they even built prototypes and evaluated them internally. That fact that Apple has not even hinted at such a critter probably means that they decided that the product wouldn't be a big hit.
You have to remember Apple is a very new entrant into the market of the technology that enables foldable screens. The company forever shunned OLED while all their competitors adopted it.
There's no doubt Apple are watching this space closely, but it's been very clear over the past 5 years that Apple has become very much a careful follower than a technology leader so their silence may not be an indication that they don't think it's a hit, it may be more that they aren't convinced that the technology is actually ready for market yet.
The exception of course being their bluetooth headphones. Never let careful adaption get in the way of selling Beats by Dr Dre!
"Inside are a pair of batteries that add up to 4,500mAh of power"
I'm trying to unpick this without being facetious, but it's hard; this sentence is just a technical disaster.
A pair of batteries is still a battery. A pair of cells is a battery.
4,500mAh could be more simply expressed as 4.5Ah, but lets skip past that to the declaration that it's 4,500mAh of power. Which it isn't - power is a factor of current and voltage, the latter of which isn't specified - and returns us to the "pair of batteries" part.
I suspect this is just marketing getting in the way of facts.
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
Nobody is going to want a 2600 dollar phone with a crease down the middle of the screen.
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
Beware of the Leopard.
Huawei seem to have wrapped their screen on the outside of the clamshell. At least means the normal display is reasonable. But since it's plastic it'll scratch and you won't get a case for it either.
And the price of these things... oh boy. Who are they even meant for?
It's a marketing achievement. Meh.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
All the problems of running Android on a tablet, with the addition of a line in the middle of the screen and a different screen aspect ratio for poorly behaved applications to fuck up or present big black bars that waste all that expanded screen. Great. Oh, and for only 3x the price of buying a phone plus a tablet.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
This might actually be one of the cases where the market takes care of itself - there will be a few people that buy one of these because they simply must have the biggest shiniest thing out there, but the user experience will be terrible due to realities of the product that are outside Huawei's control - for example, how terrible Android is on tablets mostly due to very poor application support for larger displays and screen rotation.
Now we get to salt that painful tablet user experience with yet another screen aspect ratio that doesn't conform to either phone sizing or current tablet sizing and you've got a wonderful device that no app maker other than Huawei will support unless they sell millions of these things (which won't happen at that price), ensuring either distorted app UI drawing or big black bars taking up all that extra screen real estate.
Due to limited sell through because of that outrageous price, there will not be incentive for app publishers to extend their apps to deal with this device properly, so it won't be a problem that goes away with new software.
If you've got the ability to control the whole stack - there's only a handful that do (Google, Apple, Samsung kind of) - then this is something that eventually could be worked around if you are willing to have slower adoption up front while most people wait for the software to catch up. Samsung will be stubborn enough to wait, and they ship enough volume to get developers on board. I don't know if Huawei will be able to do that.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
What are you talking about?
Apple already sells a lot of devices that cost way too much fucking money for the amount of value they deliver. This is just Huawei playing follow the leader once again.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
You know that Blackberry sells one, right?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
The answer is that Apple already patented a folding phone and has worldwide exclusive rights to the alloy Liquidmetal that will be used in the hinges of folding phones.
https://patentimages.storage.g...