Samsung Killed Its Tri-Fold After Three Months. Huawei Just Launched Its Second One.

In January, Samsung put the Galaxy Z TriFold on sale in the United States at $2,899. It sold out the same day. By the middle of April it was gone for good, after roughly three months on the market and a last restock that nobody outside the Samsung store queue noticed.

The obvious reading at the time was that tri-fold phones are a technology demo, not a product. Too expensive, too heavy, too fragile, too niche. Samsung had made its point and moved on.

On September 7, Huawei announced the Mate XT 2 Ultimate Design. It is the company’s second tri-fold, it starts at ¥19,999 which works out to roughly $2,980, and the top configuration reaches ¥29,999 or about $4,470. Pre-orders are open in China now, with deliveries starting September 13.

Two companies, the same category, opposite conclusions. The interesting part is not who is right. It is that the Mate XT 2 answers the specific complaints that sank the first generation of these things, and it does it with a hinge that folds the other way.

The Hinge Turned Around, and That Is the Real News

The first Mate XT folded like a letter. Two hinges, three panels, and the outer third wrapped backward around the body, which meant that when the phone was closed, a section of the flexible OLED was facing the world with nothing over it.

That is a bold design and a nervous one to own. Flexible panels are plastic, not glass. Keys, sand and the inside of a bag do to them what they do to a watch face, only faster. Every review of the original made the same point in the same paragraph.

The Mate XT 2 folds inward instead. Huawei calls the mechanism a G-shaped hinge, and the practical result is that the entire flexible display is enclosed when the phone is shut, with the rigid 6.5 inch cover screen taking the abuse. Underneath it sits what Huawei has named the Advanced Precision Hinge System 2.0, built around a five curved arm structure with a synchronized linkage so the two folds move together and the load spreads across the panel rather than concentrating at the crease.

Folding inward is not free. The Mate XT 2 closes to 12.3mm, which is chunky next to a book-style foldable and very chunky next to a normal phone. It weighs 299 grams, roughly the weight of two iPhones. This is a device you feel in a jacket pocket.

But it is also the first tri-fold with IP58 and IP59 ratings, meaning it is rated against dust, immersion and high-pressure water jets. Getting there with two hinges and a folding panel is a legitimately difficult piece of engineering, and it is the difference between a phone you carry carefully and a phone you just carry.

The Spec Sheet

Three things on that list are worth pulling out.

The variable aperture on the main camera is the sort of feature that has come and gone from flagship phones for a decade and rarely justifies itself. Here it does more work than usual, because a phone this large gets used as a camera in a wider range of situations, and stopping down to F4.0 for depth of field on a sensor this size is a real creative option rather than a spec sheet flourish.

The ECG sensor is odd in the best way. Class II medical certification in China is not a trivial box to tick, and putting it on a phone rather than a watch means Huawei expects people to hold this device in both hands anyway. It is the kind of feature that only makes sense on a device this shape.

The satellite connectivity is the one that reads as futuristic from a US perspective and is entirely normal in China, where Huawei has shipped satellite calling on flagships for several generations now.

A Privacy Screen Built Into the Panel

The genuinely new idea here is the optional Lingdun display, which Huawei is billing as the first hardware privacy screen in a tri-fold.

Software privacy filters darken or scramble the image at an angle, and they work about as well as you would expect. Lingdun instead uses a dual-pixel structure in the panel itself to physically limit how much light leaves at off-axis angles. Toggle it with a double tap and the screen stays perfectly legible to the person holding it while collapsing to near nothing for anyone leaning over from the side.

Think about who buys a 10.2 inch folding screen and the feature explains itself. This is a device for reading documents on planes and in meetings, which is exactly the situation where a screen the size of a small tablet becomes a liability. Huawei charges ¥1,000 for the privilege on the 1TB model, which is about $150.

Why Samsung Quit and Huawei Did Not

The temptation is to read Samsung’s exit as a verdict on tri-folds and Huawei’s persistence as a bet against it. That is not quite what happened.

Samsung never really tried to sell the Galaxy Z TriFold. It was sold only through Samsung’s own stores, never through carriers or retailers, and the early allotments were reportedly around 3,000 units each. It sold out repeatedly, but scarcity and demand are not the same thing, and a phone that sells out of 3,000 units tells you almost nothing about whether 300,000 people wanted one. Korean sales ended on March 17, the final US restock landed on April 10, and that was the end of a run that lasted under five months.

Huawei’s position is different in a way that has little to do with engineering. Huawei has a home market where it is a premium status brand, a vertically integrated stack from the Kirin silicon to HarmonyOS, and no realistic path into the US regardless of what it builds. Its foldable shipments are expected to nearly double in 2026 on IDC’s numbers. Building the most extreme folding phone on earth and charging $4,470 for the top model is a coherent strategy when your buyers are in one country and they already associate your name with hardware nobody else is making.

That same logic is showing up across Chinese manufacturers right now. Xiaomi’s newest foldable skips Qualcomm and Samsung entirely and runs on the company’s own silicon and next-generation memory, for reasons that are as much industrial as technical. And Honor built a phone with a motorized gimbal camera that you also cannot buy. The most inventive phone hardware in the world is increasingly launching into a market most readers of this site will never shop in.

Why It Still Matters If You Cannot Buy It

Nobody reading this in the US is ordering a Mate XT 2. It is not sold here, it has no Google services, and paying $3,000 for a phone that cannot run your bank’s app is not a decision anyone needs talked out of.

The reason to pay attention is that this is the second generation, and second generations are where the category’s real problems get solved. The XT 2 fixes the exposed panel. It adds an ingress rating nobody had managed on a tri-fold. It brings a privacy screen that answers the most obvious objection to carrying a small tablet into a meeting. Those are not stunts. They are the specific things that would have to be true before a tri-fold could be a mainstream product anywhere.

Samsung has not said it is finished with the shape, and the Galaxy Z TriFold reads more like an expensive prototype sold to enthusiasts than a canceled product line. If it comes back, it will come back having watched what Huawei did here.

Apple, meanwhile, is starting one fold behind. Its first foldable is expected tomorrow, and the current rumor set has it launching with no Face ID and no telephoto camera at around $2,000. That is a company solving the crease first and adding features later, which is close to the opposite of Huawei’s approach of shipping everything and refining the shape in public.

The Bottom Line

The Mate XT 2 is not going to convince anyone that tri-folds are ready. It weighs 299 grams, it is 12.3mm thick when closed, it costs as much as a decent used car in some markets, and it runs an operating system most of the world has never used.

What it does show is that the format is being iterated on seriously by at least one company with the resources to keep going. The original Mate XT asked you to accept a bare flexible panel against your keys. The XT 2 does not. That is a year of engineering aimed at a single complaint, and it is exactly the kind of unglamorous progress that decides whether a category survives long enough to get cheap.

Samsung stepped back and Huawei stepped forward, and in eighteen months we will know which one was reading the market correctly.