PUBLISHED ONApril 07, 2020 10:45 AMByIlyas Sholihyn
Aside from a global pandemic, 2020 has heralded the return of another phenomenon of yore: folding mobile phones.
After some time away from hinged devices (remember the old Motorola Razr?) and going all-in on the candy bar models, making phones foldable again has become the goal for tech manufacturers these days. The thing is, was there a crazy demand for ‘em in the first place?
But no matter. Phones with bendy screens and can snap shut will be here to stay as niche toys for now. Two of the biggest tech companies in the world — Huawei and Samsung — have gone head to head earlier this year to release their takes on foldable devices. Same concept, different approaches.
Undeterred by the whole no-Google-apps-and-services thing, Huawei did some (literal) flexing with their Mate Xs, the follow-up to their first foldable phone launched last year that was exclusive to the China market. Now that the upgraded sequel is available on our shores, we have to say that it really is a piece of artful tech. For the cool price of $3,788.
Folded, the main screen is 6.6-inches and is perfectly useable on one hand like most other smartphones. Click a release button on the back and the screen unfurls into its full 8 inches, with the user interface seamlessly expanding and contracting according to the movement.
It’s a more practical form factor that makes a lot more sense than Samsung’s (troubled) Galaxy Fold. For the Galaxy Fold, users can only properly operate the device when it’s fully open in tablet mode. The Mate Xs, on the other hand, is perfectly useable whether its folded or not. One could still read and write messages, browse the web and do other smartphone-y tasks in its clasped state. Need more screen estate to watch videos or do some online shopping? Just stretch the whole thing out.
But in terms of size, weight and compactness, the Mate Xs can’t win against Samsung’s other foldable: the Galaxy Z Flip. Sporting a nostalgic clamshell form factor, the Z Flip is certainly an attention-grabber, what with its stylish fashion-inspired colours (go for the Mirror Purple for maximum sophistication).
Unlike the Mate Xs or the Galaxy Fold, this one doesn’t unfurl out into a tablet. It starts out compact and opens to a 6.7-inch display, offering the world’s first look at what a flip phone could be with Samsung’s usual flagship-level specs.
Plus, there’s the fact that the Z Flip is the world’s first folding glass phone — yes, the screen is made with an ultra-thin glass that’s actually bendable. Texture-wise, it feels a lot better and firmer on the fingers than Huawei’s double-layer aerospace-grade polyamide flexible material film, which is a fancy way of saying that it’s a very expensive plastic screen. Aerospace-grade or not, it’s just odd when you can actually feel the bumps of the phone’s interior through the Mate Xs screen.
Back to the $1,998 Z Flip. It’s sturdy, it’s foldable, it’s chic, but one can see that Samsung traded off quite a number of things to make everything fit inside that innovative body. The internal hardware isn’t top-tier for 2020 Android phones, that’s for sure, and the camera quality is aggressively okay as if these lenses were from last year’s models. Image and video quality is where the Mate Xs wins, of course, with a Leica quad-camera array.
What of the actual bending mechanisms itself? We can safely say that both of them are solid enough for anyone not to feel too afraid of bending the screen back and forth (after getting used to the initial weirdness). Without boring you with technical details, both will feel like impressive feats of engineering to the everyday consumer and snapping either of them shut will never get old. Being foldable phones, however, one will never get around the feeling that they’re fragile things. And perhaps the Mate Xs and the Z Flip should be treated as such: delicate, experimental devices that could probably deserve some extra layers of protection from the rigours of real life.
In our latest episode of Unwrapped, our hosts Timo and Jarvis have a bit of fun flexing the phones at each other.
ilyas@asiaone.com