When I first heard about the Huawei Mate XT in September 2024, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. For some time I believed that larger foldable screens were the key to truly game-changing foldable devices, fueled by my ardent appreciation for the OnePlus Open, but seeing one come true took a moment to sink in.
Looking back, I suppose I had a case of what you might call first-generation jitters: Think back to 2019 and the original Samsung Galaxy Fold, a fragile, unreliable device that generated as much doubt as it did excitement. It didn’t exactly help that the Mate XT was, and remains, exclusive to China, so there would be little chance of testing it myself.
Fortunately, foldable screen technology has come a long way in the last five years, so much so that the Mate XT arrived as a technical marvel rather than a prototype. TechRadar’s phone editor Axel Metz was recently lucky enough to test the Mate , I bow. agree with my colleague on this point.
Apparently, as soon as the dust settled around the Mate XT, the rumor mill churned out news about a successor, tentatively titled Huawei Mate XT. We know little about this follow-up other than the suggestion that it’s being worked on, but what this tells us is that the Mate XT triple wasn’t a one-off. If a successor is produced, triple phones will have escaped the event horizon of the “experimental” category, and with that Huawei will be able to continue putting pressure – albeit from afar – on other phone makers like Samsung and Google.
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The current foldable phone market features two form factors that all foldable phone manufacturers adapt for their own devices, with very few exceptions. The cheaper of the two is the flip phone, a modernized version of the classic Y2K-style flip phones that typically aim to be more stylish than functional. The second are brochure-style foldables like the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 or the Google Pixel 9 Pro, which are much more focused on productivity.
Now, I’m an avowed fan of foldable phones, but as much as I loved using the powerful and stylish OnePlus Open, it led me to realize that a foldable phone can rarely do something a flat phone can’t. I loved using the Open’s 7.82-inch internal screen to watch movies, scroll through articles, and play games, but you wouldn’t find me writing articles, editing videos, or playing anything deeper than Tetris on the large internal screen. It just wasn’t big enough to be practical.
Plus, half of the things we do every day with a phone are so fast that it’s barely worth unfolding the phone to begin with. By the end of my time with the Open, I was using it folded most of the time.
Dare to fold
Perhaps it’s this middle-of-the-road mentality that’s starting to cost foldable phone sales. As we previously reported, late 2024 saw a decline in the number of orders for foldable displays across the industry, indicating lower production of foldable devices. Perhaps triple devices are the stimulus this niche of the telephone industry needs.
Fortunately, the latest updates suggest that Huawei is not the only one that believes in the triple form factor. At CES 2025, Samsung Display demonstrated two new triple phone displays, and while they remain proof of concept at the time of writing, it’s very encouraging to see physical evidence of Samsung’s explorations into the long-rumored triple territory. a long time.
And according to a rumor emerging from Korean news outlet Sisa Journal-E (via GSMArena), Samsung is set to produce a unique triple device that doesn’t expose the internal screen when folded in the second half of 2025, albeit in a very Small run of 300,000 units.
Personally, I think trifold phones have the potential to deliver on the productivity promise of foldable phones. A 10- or 11-inch screen, especially mounted vertically, is an ideal size for writing documents and has enough room for two, maybe three, multitasking windows. It will still be outclassed in screen space and performance power by laptops, particularly laptops of the same exorbitant price that the Mate XT sells for.
Samsung will decide whether or not the displays seen at CES are transformed into usable devices, but with these latest rumors and demos I’m hopeful that we’ll see more triple devices appear as the next few years progress (I’ll see myself out).
