The Register gets its claws on Huawei’s bonkers tri-fold phone Huawei’s triple-fold Mate XT smartphone is a classy creation that’s easy to handle even when fully extended, but disappoints because it’s ridiculously expensive and the included Android variant struggles to keep pace with the machine’s contortions. The Register came upon the Mate XT in a Huawei store at a mall in Kuala Lumpur …
Keep an eye out whilst watching The Apprentice - when you will also learn how loud it is on speaker, held like a saucer instead of like a phone.
Thinking of that, bet it doesn't have a speaker at the top of the leftmost pane and mic at bottom the rightmost, so you can wrap it around your head and take a call.
{cue the obvious 'You are holding it wrong' comments}
If you see iPads in use in businesses, they almost all have a easy to hold handle suck on the back. May I humbly suggest that you look at getting one? I bought one at Dubai Airport on a stopover. If is stuck on my Logitech case and makes it a breeze to use.
I agree, but we are foolishly sensible and will be put in our place very quickly.
It seems that printers of yore decided that putting one fold in created a bifold, no a bipane or a quadsides or ... Now that trend continues.
So it seems we are stuck, counting panes but talking about folds. Aint vernacular fun!
The amateur philologist might venture to suggest that 'fold' might derive from 'folio' - sheet? In which as a bifold has two moving sheets fastened at a spine (even though maybe only one sheet in practice) and a trifold, obviously, three leaves.
Ye gods I'm arguing as if I'm in favour. Just for the record: I think the technology is impressive but I think it's a silly idea.
I think there could be a market for a phone which tacks up the same space as a regular phone, but which can be unfolded into a "T" shape with the top horizontal being the same form as the phone only rotated 90 degrees. You can use it like a regular phone or unfold and have the width at the top, but still able to hold it easily in one hand.
The fact that no one appears to have thought of it tends to make me a bit suspicious. They certainly aren't letting the market decide ...
Just because they don't build it doesn't mean there's a conspiracy not to let the market decide. If they thought people would buy a lot of those, they'd make them. They probably aren't because they don't think people will want them, and if that's what they are thinking, I understand why.
Why would someone want that? Other than being easy to hold, is there any advantage at all? What interfaces are going to adapt well to a landscape portion and a portrait one, but not a full rectangle? You could spin it around and put the keyboard on the landscape section and a message list on the portrait one, and then you'd have more room for both, or you could have two apps open a la Surface Duo, but otherwise, it seems gimmicky and not very easy to convince people to buy for the increased price that any hinged, multi-screen device tends to cost.
Malaysia really is the world capital of phone shops - all the malls are jammed with them! What you don't see so much is endless pre-owned phone stores that litter our UK high streets, although doubtless they're out there in the backstreet areas. I once even bought a retail Huawei phone in Malaysian mall, some years back, before deciding to switch to non-Chinese made Samsungs later.
But yes, on this device, I cannot see many people shelling out over $3,500, even in wealthy nations - quite insane! That would buy you a high end Macbook...
Apple is rumoured to have sold around 500,000 Vision Pros so clearly the "throw $3,500 at something regardless of utility" crowd might not be massive but it definitely exists.
Of the two dissimilar products, I guess the Apple has greater brand draw for wealthy types but the Huawei might make up for that by having slightly more purpose?
Or, you know, just learn to write apps that scale since it's clear that phones screen sizes, resolutions and folding screens are a "thing" now. Having said that, maybe it's a "too hard", as evidenced by even some desktop apps struggling to scale well to the larger, higher resolution screens currently on the market. And yet, many apps do scale well, so maybe it's not really hard, just lazy or under-funder programmers? I suppose we've reached a stage where there or s/w devs out there who have only ever developed for phones and don't really understand how to cope with larger screens. But, on yet another hand, phone devs surly must take tablets into account too. How is a fold out phone all that different to a tablet screen in terms of size and scale?
My wife has a Samsung Fold 4 and every time she shows me a picture or video I say why don't you unfold it so I can see it on the big screen, but she can't as the app restarts and looses where it is.
She's said she's not getting another foldable, as its far too expensive for the actual amount of use the big screen gets.
