Huawei Mate X Foldable Phone Going on Sale in June (Report)
The new phone will start competing with the Samsung Galaxy Fold this summer.
According to a new report from GizmoChina, the Huawei Mate X foldable phone will be available for purchase in June — allegedly starting at $2,580.
However, the store listing that had been spotted on the Chinese retail site Vmall seems to have been taken down.
For comparison, the Samsung Galaxy Fold will start selling later this month with $1,980 price tag. Both phones share technical problems typical of first generation products, like glitches in the interface and a slight but visible crease on their foldable screens.
MORE: Galaxy Fold vs. Huawei Mate X: Which Foldable Phone Will Win?
Huawei’s new 5G-enabled phone is powered by a Kirin 980 chipset running on 8GB of RAM and 512GB of storage — expandable to 768GB using one of the two SIM trays and Huawei’s NM storage card.
The phone has two batteries for a combined 4,500mAH capacity, which you can feed using the company’s 55W SuperCharge technology, capable of filling the device from zero to 85 percent in 30 minutes.
It unfolds into an 8-inch 2480 x 2200-pixel tablet. When you fold it, both the front and the back of the phone have operative screens that activate depending on the side you are viewing. This will enable Mate X owners to use the phone’s main three-sensor camera, co-developed with Leica as usual with Huawei phones —to take very high quality selfies.
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Critics have argued that these phones may have durability problems, although Huawei seems to have the lead with the best implementation so far of the foldable phone idea.
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem as though the Mate X will be sold in the U.S. due to the ongoing tensions between Huawei and the U.S. government.
Jesus Diaz founded the new Sploid for Gawker Media after seven years working at Gizmodo, where he helmed the lost-in-a-bar iPhone 4 story and wrote old angry man rants, among other things. He's a creative director, screenwriter, and producer at The Magic Sauce, and currently writes for Fast Company and Tom's Guide.