Huawei to bring massively expensive trifold smartphone to world market Huawei is bringing its triple-fold Mate XT smartphone to a global audience, but with an eye-watering reported price tag, the question is – who will want to buy it? The Mate XT was unveiled in China last year, billed by the company as the world's first commercially available trifold smartphone, featuring an extra hinge so that …
TL;DR: yes, for the time being.
HarmonyOS 4.2 is not much more than AOSP 14, therefore, AOSP stores like F-Droid or Amazon APP store are super-easy to install.
If you want to re-introduce google play services, the process is much more involved.
Havingsaid that, HOS 4.2 is the last AOSP HOS. The next one, HarmonyOS-NEXT (or HarmonyOS 5.0) is NOT compatible with APKs. At least not for the time being.
I suspect the "country by country basis" rollout is to ensure the most relevant apps in each country (e-govt, banking, ridesharing, delivery, local chat and mega-apps) are ported, as it would be tanxing for Huaweito support 4.5.x and HOS-NEXT concurrently for a prolongued time.
I'm waiting for a manufacturer to make a phone based on this form-factor, which seems technologically much more do-able now than it did even a decade ago...
I can see people buying this while having a super-small android or iOS phone on their pocket, purse or briefcase, redirecting calls to the triple-fold, and using things like messages.google.com and web.whatsapp.com to handle the day to day stuff, while the small device has all the Android/iOS specific stuff this phone can not handle.
Talkabout flex.
I checked one out at a Huawei store when I was in China, it does feel and look nice. The wider aspect on the device when folded relative to a Samsung Fold (the phone I use) is really appealing. Each of the three portions is really very thin as well. I do wonder how the outward facing screen hinge will hold up to daily wear and tear though.
That said, from what I recall, the processor inside the thing is not exactly stellar, and while most phone processors may be overkill these days: if I was using one of these devices I would really want to be gaming on the large screen or something. I wonder how it performs in that context?
Doesn't matter to me I suppose, as an American I can be fairly sure it isn't coming to our market any time soon.
It makes some sense. People do buy regular foldable phones occasionally, and people use tablets. The existing foldable phones unfold into a square thing, but a triple-fold system would be much closer to a typical tablet form factor. Of course, I wouldn't buy one because of the price, worries about it breaking, software, and because I don't actually like tablets, but some of those are specific to me and some of them will go away in time. It doesn't strike me as the worst idea.
But I've long maintained that for folding phones to gain any traction they'd have to be trifold, so it can open up into a tablet. Having a phone that's a rectangle that unfolds into a square is pointless - after all what good is a square for watching videos? (one of the primary activities tablets are used for)
Similarly if you start with a square and unfold into rectangle I suppose that reduces the amount of pocket required for the phone, but that's more of a female problem than a male problem. Our pants seem to have plenty of room for even the biggest Max/Ultra type phones so there's little to be gained by folding it into a square.
Of course just being trifold alone isn't enough for it to gain any traction in the market. It also has to cost a lot less and not be too unreasonably heavy/thick when folded. Still work to do for Huawei on those fronts.
TBH Huawei might as well release it in the western markets regardless of compatibility.
After all a fool and their money are soon parted - I've definitely met people who would gladly spend €3000 on a phone to show off even if they had to keep their old one to actually do any of the things they need a phone for
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