the Huawei Mate X is a crazy foldable 5G phone

5G and Foldable phones – the two big trends of MWC 2019, and Huawei has made a phone that fits both trends. The Huawei Mate X is the company’s most ambitious device ever, and features not one, not two, but three total screen configurations. It’s also purportedly the world’s fastest 5G phone and features four cameras.

Let’s start with the first big trend of MWC: foldable phones. Like so many other companies, Huawei wants to be on-par with, or setting, the latest trends. The Mate X features a large flexible OLED panel on the outside of the phone, which features three distinct display configurations: when flat, it’s an 8” FullView display with no notch and minimal bezels. When folded, the front is a 6.6-inch “daily driver” screen that you’ll use every day, and the rear is a 6.38” screen. The FullView tablet display is 2480×2200 pixels (8:7.1 aspect ratio), and splits into 2480×1148 pixels (19.5:9 aspect ratio) for the “daily driver” screen and 2480×892 pixels (25:9 aspect ratio) for the second screen.

Huawei is also dubbing the Mate X as the world’s fastest 5G phone, thanks to a combination of the excellent Kirin 980 processor, and the Balong 5000 5G modem. The sub-6 compatible setup allows the Mate X to download at speeds of up to 4.6Gbps, which is twice the theoretical maximum speeds of the solutions from Qualcomm and Samsung. There’s no networks that support this – and likely won’t be for a while – but the Mate X will be compatible when it launches.

These aside, we don’t have a whole lot of details about the Mate X. Huawei was being particularly coy during our briefing, and we’ll need to wait for Huawei CEO Richard Yu to reveal more during the company’s keynote. We’ll update this as soon as we have more information and we’ve been able to experience this unique foldable 5G phone.