I've literally never seen this phone before and now that I'm holding it and using it well there's a lot of thoughts and observations that go straight to the top so when it's closed it looks like a normal phone just a big phone 6.6 inch diagonal phone but you know you can see the fingerprint reader doubles as a power button on the right hand side you've got your volume rocker the screen goes pretty close to the edges but then of course there's a couple obvious quirks
So you can see the fold of course and you can also see the usb-c port is all the way over to the right-hand side and two it's very smooth feeling because of course the display is what's wrapping around on the sides and they've polished and smoothed the right side to sort of look just like the screen wrapping around the left side but when you look at it you can kind of tell the bezel on the right is just a little thicker than their cutoff of the display on the left kind of reminds me of the first ever galaxy note edge so you can use it closed just like a normal phone but that's not why you get this phone right you got to be opening it up all the time to get your money's worth
So to open this phone up you flip it over and there's a red button and you press that button and the back part of the display is spring loaded and it flips out halfway open and then it's up to you to push it all the rest of the way open and sort of snaps into place when it's flat and then you've got your full size eight inch 2480 by 2200 oled canvas for all the productivity and big screen tasks in the world okay so a couple of thoughts so first of all I was immediately pretty struck by how thin this is it's 5.5 millimeters thick at the thin part and that of course means when you fold it over that's 11 millimeters that's not much thicker than a normal smartphone these days but the reason this whole thing is able to be so thin is mainly because these wings of the phone as I'll call them are basically just screen and battery so the total combined battery is 4 500 milliamp hours with some battery in each side but pretty much all the rest of the components of this phone are packed into this column over here that low key kind of acts as a grip when you start to get used to holding it but that's why the usb-c port is over here that's where the kirin 990 processor and eight gigs of ram and half a terabyte of storage are and that's of course where all the cameras are there's no camera cutouts for a selfie camera or anything like that all of the cameras live over here in this column and there's four of them there's a 40 megapixel primary camera an ultra wide a 3x telephoto zoom and a depth sensor and this is a review of these of course this is just my impressions but i do like the idea that in a folding phone you can take advantage of the main cameras for everything including selfie stuff so with the mate xs
You hit the button to switch to a selfie and then you literally flip the phone around and you're using those huge high quality main cameras to take selfies so you can use the ultrawide or even the zoom if you're into that and then also because this is screen on the back it's off most of the time but if you want to hit this button and turn the back screen on now you can show people as you're taking a photo of them what that photo's going to look like so yeah there you are so now with the viewfinder mirrored on the back you can imagine being able to hand the phone to someone and like direct them exactly how to take the photo based on what you see so I feel like we all kind of know Huawei's software experience here in the us is a bit nuked because they don't have a relationship with the us anymore and so even if you are able to get the phone here there's no google play services it's not ideal but there are some pretty nice software features in here where you get control over app scaling so some apps get column support on the big screen so there's a lot of good stuff but and this is the other side of the coin there's downsides too and you'll probably saw these coming so the crease there's no getting around it there's still a crease on folding phones and it can kind of catch your eye sometimes but I feel like this is as good as it gets with the current tech when you're actually looking at the contents of what's on the screen you really don't notice the crease it's just when you run your fingers straight over it or it catches a light a certain way then you do notice it but speaking of catching the light a certain way the built-in screen protector that's on this phone which is super important for protecting the super soft flexible oled doesn't uniformly go up to the edges so there's notches and cutouts everywhere and it caught my eye all the time so I'm not going to pull it off because I know better I know better than that but the dust collecting on these uneven edges and just the way the light hits
It you can't tell me that wouldn't eventually bother you a little bit but hey better to have a screen protector than not because unfortunately I've placed this phone down like a normal phone a few too many times and I've ended up with some scratches on the back plastic because well when you put it down it literally touches the ground so if you put it on a desk that plastic is touching a desk if there's any sort of grit or any particles or materials at all on that surface that's going up straight against the plastic and most phones are cool with that of course but this plastic screen protector is like scratches at a level one with deeper grooves at a level breathing too hard so I'm not shocked that it's already starting to see some marks but of course the whole point is you get the marks in the screen protector and you're not damaging the screen basically the bumper case that comes with this phone is like the best possible solution because then it sort of raises it up off of whatever surface you put it down on so if you're super never want to get any sort of scratches on it put the bumper case on it's a little less elegant but then you don't get scratches and then the hinge here on the xs is slightly improved from the x so you can see there's these dust caps now and the metal back to the hinge to keep it almost completely gapless when it's folding but of course it's still not going to be water or dust resistant or anything they're just doing the best they can so at the end of the day on one hand this feels like the most advanced sexiest folding phone I've ever seen it's it's pretty stunning hardware but on the other hand like I was saying in the flexpi video I'll link it below
It's just it's just not quite technically ready to be doing this outside fold thing so I'm really curious about the next version because like i said word on the street is the huawei mate x2 or whatever this next version is called is supposedly coming out within the next month or so and headlines suggest it's going to be switching to the inside folding design like the galaxy fold which would make a lot of sense given the current state of the tech you know there's a couple other things I'd like to see I'd like to see a 120 hertz display i like to see ho maybe a slightly bigger battery i know they want to keep it all thin and sexy like this but yeah i'm very curious now about how folding stuff goes forward seeing how this ended up you know do we go straight to folding on the inside and then come back to the outside fold when the folding screen tech is better we'll see let me know what your thoughts are below if you think we should still do the outside fold stuff or not that's pretty much
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