How much black technology is hidden behind the popular Huawei tri-fold

Once again, an opportunity to change the form of smartphones.

As a well-known red ocean market, it has been verified for many years that the sales volume of smartphones has “peaked”. It is in such an era that the Huawei Mate XT Extraordinary Master, which has been shining before it was even launched, has naturally attracted more curiosity and attention.

The smartphone market, which has reached a peak in sales, needs more fresh air. The recently popular Huawei Mate XT, with its unique three-fold concept and the ultimate user experience brought by the ultimate technology, has taken a refreshing curve in the smartphone market.

Even though this is an ultra-high-end flagship phone with a starting price of 19,999 yuan, the pre-sale volume exceeded 6 million before it was released, and it was sold out instantly after it was officially launched on September 20.

The phenomenal popularity of the tri-fold phone reflects the freshness that the Huawei Mate XT, as a “new technology species” of tri-fold phones, brings to users. Users have gradually lost interest in changing phones in the daily iteration of conventional smartphones. The high level of hardware presented by the Huawei Mate XT has made more users willing to believe that it has the potential to subvert the existing smartphone experience in terms of both function and form.

Huawei is the first company to bring the concept of a three-folding phone to users. In fact, this concept has been around for many years with folding screen technology: every year at consumer electronics technology shows such as CES, you can see a lot of three-folding concept phones. In addition to the concept phone demonstrations for the purpose of “showing off” by upstream screen manufacturers, mobile phone manufacturers also participate from time to time to show the outside world their own technical accumulation in the field of smartphone research and development.

But in the end, none of these were actually launched on the market, and the first to take the lead was the Huawei Mate XT Extraordinary Master.

The reason is that there is a huge difference in difficulty between a concept phone and a mass-produced product: in order to pursue the ultimate shocking effect, concept phones often have obvious shortcomings in other aspects of the experience – these are harmless for concept phones, but for mass-produced phones, any minor problems are enough to be fatal to the product.

In other words, the fact that Huawei finally became the first manufacturer to launch a truly three-fold mobile phone proves that Huawei has a deep accumulation of three-fold technology, which is much stronger evidence than “one concept phone every year”.

This blueprint for the “next revolution in smartphones” is gradually becoming a reality at Huawei.

Long-term investment “goodbye”

At the Huawei Meet the Extraordinary Brand Ceremony on September 10, Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei’s Consumer Business Group and Chairman of the Terminal BG, mentioned that the Huawei Mate XT Extraordinary Master is Huawei’s “five-year culmination”.

What is referred to here is obviously the more than ten folding screen mobile phones that Huawei has released since the Mate X in 2019, covering various forms of external folding and inward folding.

As an exploration of the concept of the next generation of smartphones based on existing smartphone technology, the process of triple-folding from concept to final mass production is obviously not as simple as the meme “two folding screens put together” that has been circulated on the Internet. Its difficulty can even be described as “geometrically increased” compared to traditional folding-screen phones.

Geek Park learned that in the past five years, in the exploration of the three-fold, screen material is still the hardware field with the most concentrated difficulties. One of the major problems with the screen material of the three-fold is that the flexible screen needs to be able to bend in both directions.

When designing an outward-folding screen structure, the screen is located outside the entire device after being bent, and the hinge design needs to focus on tensile resistance; while for an inward-folding structure, it is necessary to focus on extrusion resistance. These two mechanical structures have several corresponding materials in the traditional folding screen era, but no one material can meet both requirements at the same time.

In response to this new demand for screen materials, Huawei has adopted a multi-directional flexible material with a chain-like molecular structure on the screen of Huawei Mate XT. The overall screen bending resistance has been increased by 25%, and it is also the first time that a mass-produced material for a folding screen can be bent in all directions from -180° to +180°.

Another difficulty with the tri-fold is the hinge.

The hinge directly determines the opening and closing feel and service life of the folding screen. In the three-fold version, due to the addition of a screen-axis linkage design, in order to ensure that the hinge has sufficient strength to support the body, the past three-fold concept phones all adopted a heavy structure, making it difficult for the three-fold concept phones to meet daily use needs.

Huawei is the only manufacturer in the industry that has continued to invest in external folding hinge technology for the past five years, which can be traced back to Huawei’s first folding screen mobile phone, Huawei Mate X.

In 2019, when folding screen technology was just starting, the external folding screen had obvious advantages in thickness and weight compared to the internal folding solution chosen by more mobile phone brands on the market at that time. However, Huawei finally chose to “turn to technology” – after three generations of Huawei Mate X series, starting with Huawei Mate X3, it became the mainstream internal folding design in the industry at that time, and the external folding flagship disappeared from the industry.

On the Huawei Mate XT, Huawei “walked on two legs” by relying on its technical accumulation in two completely different hinge structures, external folding and internal folding, and finally achieved an amazing performance of a three-fold unfolded thickness of only 3.6 mm. At the same time, it overcame the matching problem of the screen axis linkage and achieved a consistent feel of opening and closing inside and outside on the three-fold.

The external folding eagle-wing hinge technology, which was once widely recognized by the outside world as the only one in the industry, finally achieved its “reunion” at the finish line in this way on the Huawei Mate XT Extraordinary Master.

Tri-fold, more than just big

Almost every time a new species is born, existing users will subconsciously fit it into the existing product usage logic and use existing habits to imagine the future; it is also easy to ignore opportunities that are already right in front of them and have huge potential.

In 2007, after the release of the first iPhone, Steve Ballmer, then president of Microsoft, ridiculed the argument that “smartphones have no future” by saying that “it doesn’t have a keyboard and you can’t even use it to send emails.”

It was amidst such widespread ridicule and doubt that the era of smartphones quietly began. Seventeen years have passed in the blink of an eye, and now there are no more “mobile phones with keyboards” in the world.

The smartphone, as a product form, is based on “change”. With designs that are ahead of their time, such as full touch operation, application store, and software service priority, it has attracted countless users around the world to become loyal fans, while also quietly building the “infrastructure” of the next era.

By the time Huawei Mate XT went on sale, we were still unconsciously trapped in the dilemma of “lack of imagination”: lack of imagination is the beginning of mediocrity, and many heated debates around the theme of “what is the use of tri-fold” are largely a reflection of this deep-seated reason. But it also shows that Huawei Mate XT, while seizing the initiative, also has the important mission of answering this question.

The solution to this problem may be found five years ago: the specific solution to the question “What is the use of triple folds” today is not much different from the question “What is the use of folding screens”. As folding screen technology has been jointly promoted by the entire smartphone industry, more usage scenarios have been explored and more exclusive functions have been developed for folding screens. Ultimately, its position as the “smartphone flagship product line” has been consolidated.

The success of foldable screens in the high-end flagship field is likely to be just a prelude to the fact that foldable screen technology will truly bring about large-scale changes to the form of smartphones: the current killer features of foldable screens – multiple application openings, global interaction across applications, and displaying these operations in multiple levels of application windows at the same time, are largely about bringing the mature software operation logic of the original PC side to the mobile phone with a larger screen as the platform.

At the Huawei Mate XT launch event, Yu Chengdong also demonstrated the customized folding keyboard accessory for it, and put forward the slogan of “Put the computer in your pocket”, which ignited the whole audience. This is another attempt to “break the boundaries of smart terminal form factors” and put the PC/Pad into your pocket.

This is not the first time that Huawei has “entered no man’s land”: as the earliest manufacturer to deploy folding screens and the only manufacturer to mass-produce three types of folding screen phones so far, Huawei’s share of the folding screen market has reached 67%.

In addition to hardware, Huawei also has the Hongmeng OS operating system ecosystem that can be deeply customized based on hardware: supporting Huawei and developers to explore more future application scenarios unique to the three-fold on the Huawei Mate XT Extraordinary Master platform.

With the mass production of the tri-fold, there is no doubt that Huawei has now become one of the most qualified mobile phone brands in the industry to give the correct answer to the question “What is the use of tri-fold” and turn it into reality.

The future of smartphones

Indeed, the reason why Huawei Mate XT has become so popular on social media is that it has a tri-fold form factor that is ahead of all other mobile phone manufacturers.

But while most people’s attention is still on the question “What’s the use of a tri-fold device?”, we cannot ignore the essence of the problem, which is actually a question from users: “How will smartphones evolve?”

Compared with the nationwide discussion triggered by the tri-fold phone after its release, answering this question through continuous exploration of the tri-fold phone’s hardware and software may be the most important significance that Huawei Mate XT can play for the inevitable form factor changes of smartphones.

The era of smartphones is about to enter its third decade. Folding-screen smartphones, a concept that was once highly anticipated, are now reaching the next turning point after five years of development and the tri-fold fold. Whoever comes up with and mass-produces a new form of smartphone first will be able to enjoy the most first-mover advantages.

Today, the exploration of smartphones has once again come to a crossroads. The tri-fold phone carries not only a “ticket”, but also builds the stage itself, and demonstrates Huawei’s determination to promote industry change.

For the industry, Huawei’s journey from exploring the high-end path of folding screens to triple-folding screens not only represents a change in the form of smartphones, but also represents the transformation of Chinese brands, led by Huawei, from competitors to leaders.

In this era, the debut of Huawei Mate XT Extraordinary Master was the first to give an answer; in the exploration of the evolution of smartphones, Huawei has taken the lead in “stepping into uncharted territory.”

Kazam

Kazam is Focused on creating and reporting timely content in technology with a special focus on mobile phone technology. Kazam reports, analyzes, and reviews recent trends, news and rumors in mobile phone technology and provides the best possible insights to enhance your experience and knowledge.