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00:00All right, so you've heard of flipping phones, you've heard of folding phones, but technology
00:08never slows down.
00:09So welcome to a phone with both the world's first tri-fold phone.
00:14This thing, this is the Huawei Mate XT is what it's called.
00:18So I'd heard about this thing.
00:19I'd seen some videos online, but it's also a Huawei phone, so it's China only.
00:23So knowing that I'm never going to daily drive it, I didn't want to like get too caught up,
00:28but it's so interesting.
00:30Like I just had so many questions like, what is it like to use?
00:34What are the creases like?
00:35Like what are the trade-offs?
00:36How hard is it to carry a triple folding phone?
00:39What the case is like?
00:41Why is it called a tri-fold when it only technically folds twice?
00:44I just, I need answers.
00:45So I was like, all right, I need to get my hands on one.
00:47I reached out to dbrand and asked like, can you guys get me a contact where I can buy
00:51one?
00:52And I never asked questions, but they're always able to pull it off and they did.
00:56So I spent the money, I imported the thing, and now I can give you a tour of the tri-fold
01:02experience.
01:03So let us start with just when it's closed, right?
01:06When it's closed, you have a pretty reasonable 6.4 inch sized phone.
01:11Well, I mean, you know, reasonable from the front anyway, if you're just looking at it,
01:14using it, the screen gets plenty bright, it is 90 Hertz.
01:18And then somehow the bezels are pretty thin and even all the way around the top and the
01:23bottom, the left and the right.
01:24And actually, of course, the right side is the screen curving around the edge.
01:28So the software appropriately creates a fourth bezel to match.
01:32And it looks, it looks honestly more like a normal phone than a lot of the other foldables
01:37out there.
01:38So then using it, you know, you pretty quickly feel that it is thicker than a normal phone.
01:41But what's crazy is each of these slices individually is ridiculously thin, about four millimeters.
01:50So in total, they add up to 13 millimeters thick when it's closed, which would be pretty
01:54thick if it was a slab phone, but that's actually about the same as a lot of the other single
01:59folds, like the Z Fold 6.
02:02So then the power button slash fingerprint reader combo button and the volume buttons
02:05on the right side here, they're pushed a little bit back of the center, not the end of the
02:09world, totally usable.
02:11You're obviously going to notice that parts of the screen are a bit exposed and vulnerable
02:15if you're going to put it in a pocket or in a backpack or something.
02:19But overall, just as a regular sized single screen smartphone experience, this is actually
02:25really respectable.
02:26This is like an eight out of 10, really close to the best I've seen, which is awesome.
02:32But then you open it for the first time.
02:35And from here you get to the small tablet mode.
02:39So yes, size wise, now we're basically matching a lot of the other folding phones out there
02:44like Pixel Fold, Samsung Z Fold, et cetera.
02:47This is a 7.9 inch diagonal that is roughly a square aspect ratio.
02:51I'll be honest, it looks fine, but I actually don't really think it was meant to operate
02:54in this form factor.
02:56Most of the time.
02:57I mean, why stop halfway when you're just one more fold away from greatness, but it
03:01is clearly perfectly usable like this.
03:04The crease, your first crease is impressively small and very easy to ignore when you're
03:09actually using it.
03:10But yeah, thin bezels all the way around again, blacked out pixels on the far left hand side
03:15this time.
03:16And there's also still a couple of little folding phone tricks.
03:19Like of course, since the main camera is on the back and there's no selfie camera on these
03:23two panes, then this is the perfect time to take a selfie with the main camera, but get
03:27a full size preview on the 6.4 inch screen that's still wrapped around the other side.
03:32And they are really good flagship quality triple cameras, by the way, I'll get to that
03:36in a second.
03:37You of course get all the other benefits of the display spec, the brightness, the 90 Hertz.
03:41It's really solid.
03:42But it's obviously, it's just a little awkward that it's like it's twice as thick in one
03:46hand as the other, which is a little unbalanced.
03:50And then it is glass on one side and then the like sort of leather material on the other.
03:54So it's, it's a little bit weird in that way, but honestly still very impressive.
03:58I feel like this is like a seven out of 10, still pretty close, but you know, we're not
04:04done.
04:05So this is what we're all here for the final fold, which opens this thing up to a full
04:0910.2 inch corner to corner display.
04:13So this is now a full 3184 by 2232, 90 Hertz OLED display, thin bezels all the way around
04:23amazingly with a hole punch selfie camera over to the left side, two creases, two hinges.
04:29And yeah, this is not an iPad mini size screen in your pocket.
04:33This is literally a full sized 10 inch tablet in your pocket, which is actually incredible.
04:39The more you play with it, the more you start to notice little quirks.
04:43Like first of all, it's ridiculously thin now that it's all open.
04:47It's actually kind of disorienting to hold the tablet with a screen this big, but bezels
04:51this small and like the whole thing is this thin.
04:54It's just kind of a Marvel.
04:55And then you look at the creases, plural, cause now you got two and you can actually
05:00see there is a small difference between the inward folding crease on the right side and
05:05the outward folding crease on the left, but they are also actually both impressively small,
05:11but like, yeah, this I'm actually kind of sad that I can't like fully daily drive something
05:17like this.
05:18Cause it is Huawei.
05:19Like you can kind of hack your way into getting some Google services on here, but a lot of
05:23this UI, a lot of this OS is still Chinese only.
05:26Like it's not going to be great.
05:27It's probably missing some bands in the U S too, but just wow.
05:31It's a good amount of software tweaks for the triple fold thing too.
05:35Like when you fully unfold it, the whole UI stretches out, but it's still one page
05:39on each side.
05:40So they've kind of just played this animation to stretch out two pages among three panels,
05:45but the animation is pretty smooth and there is a wrong way to fold it too, by the way.
05:48And it tells you about it.
05:49So obviously you can close it pretty easily.
05:51The correct way to unfold it is to get the two on the inside, but if you unfold it the
05:56wrong way like that, it actually tells you it says, fold it a different way to use the
06:01device, please.
06:02So you're kind of doing something weird here, which totally fair.
06:04I'll get it right next time.
06:06I'll, you kind of have to, there is a little learning curve to accordion, accordion, accordioning
06:12quickly every time, but yeah, this has to be a 10 out of 10.
06:16I mean, there's the fact that I'm able to fit a size of this, a 10 inch display reasonably
06:23in my pocket, that that by itself is something that no other device can do.
06:27So I got to love that.
06:29Another question I had early when playing with this is, I mean, people put cases on
06:34every phone.
06:35What are cases for this phone?
06:36Like, it turns out it does come with a case in the box, which is this thing.
06:41And so really it's just one back piece of the phone that it can protect when it's fully
06:45closed.
06:46So this case snaps onto the back of the phone like this, and then protects also a little
06:50bit of the exposed screen on the side.
06:52So it makes sense.
06:53They don't want to get any debris in there.
06:55And then it has a kickstand on the back, which can rotate around and support it at a couple
06:58of various different angles.
07:00So you can watch videos like this if you're into that.
07:03And it can also rotate out of the way to expose the wireless charging coils, because it turns
07:08out this phone also has wireless charging.
07:11And if you just flip it sideways on certain charges, you can get it to line up and work
07:15with wireless charging.
07:16So that's one type of person who will use the kickstand built into the case.
07:19But there is another type of person, by the way, a total reckless psycho that would unfold
07:24it like this, and then use the phone itself as a built-in kickstand.
07:31And it totally works like the UI responds to it.
07:34And you can watch, you know, YouTube on a larger part of the screen, but you're also
07:39totally scratching the outside part of the screen you're using as a kickstand.
07:43So yeah, I'm obviously not going to recommend that.
07:46In case you're also wondering about specs on something like this, it's fit flagship
07:51specs inside, despite being these crazy thin slivers of a phone, it's the flagship seven
07:56nanometer Kirin 9010 chip made by Huawei.
08:00It is also up to 16 gigs of RAM and a terabyte of storage, which is crazy.
08:05And triple cameras on the back.
08:06As you can see, that's a 50 megapixel main camera, a 12 megapixel ultra wide and a telephoto.
08:12And there's a 5600 milliamp hour battery chopped up and distributed in here with 67 watt fast
08:19charging and 50 watt wireless charging, which is kind of insane.
08:24And then the whole thing will retail.
08:26It's in China.
08:27So if you sort of do the conversion price, this like top end model with the terabyte
08:30of storage is like $3,500.
08:32So 3000 to 3500 us dollars.
08:36That's actually not that much more expensive than some of the highest end folds that we
08:41have.
08:42So why is this the only trifold phone?
08:45Maybe that's the main question you're wondering after all of this, because it's so cool.
08:49It's just the fact that I can actually fit all of this in the dimensions of something
08:53that fits in my pocket is nuts.
08:57And they've done a lot of things with like nice software touches that actually make it
09:00feel really well considered.
09:01But yeah, there are also some trade offs.
09:04Of course, I think the biggest weakness on paper is going to be the battery, the 5600
09:08milliamp hour battery.
09:09You know, fast charging is great, obviously, so that can offset it.
09:12But the more time you use this wide open with the 10 inches of screen, the tougher that's
09:18going to be on the battery.
09:19You know, if you look at typical larger tablets, even the thin ones, the 10 inch tablets are
09:23having like 8000 plus milliamp hour batteries pretty often.
09:27So that's probably the biggest weakness here.
09:28The speakers are also truly terrible.
09:32It's interesting because they come out of the right hand corner and the left hand corner
09:35when it's open.
09:37But it's so thin, there's just there's physics, there's not enough room for big chambers for
09:41huge speakers.
09:42So this, yeah, the speakers are pretty tinny, pretty bad.
09:44And then there is no IP rating for dust or water resistance.
09:47Some of the newer foldables have water resistance now.
09:50This one not so much.
09:52And then, of course, the price is obviously going to keep some people away.
09:54But honestly, that's that's a pretty small list of trade offs for something that is so
09:58like shockingly different and new that I'm I'm impressed.
10:04This had the potential to be like the world's greatest concept phone.
10:07Remember concept phones from a couple of years ago, I was like, this is getting kind of weird
10:11that people are like showing off phones they're never going to make.
10:13This could have been the coolest concept phone ever.
10:16But then they just went and decided to actually make a bunch of them and ship them.
10:20This phone also just happens to have a variable aperture lens on the main camera.
10:25So it can switch between F1.4 wide open for some real background bokeh to F4 and getting
10:31more things in focus.
10:32It happens to also have that insanely fast charging.
10:35It comes with an 80 watt charging brick and it has fast wireless charging in a body barely
10:40thick enough to have an entire USB-C port.
10:43It happens to come with this pre-installed screen protector that I'm just never going
10:47to remove.
10:48It's crazy.
10:49There's just so much going on here that in this world of so many phones just being all
10:54phones are the same these days.
10:56It's just a little different from last year.
10:58Not a whole lot has changed.
11:00I got to hand it to projects like this.
11:02This is just insane.
11:03I got it.
11:04They didn't have to go this hard.
11:06They didn't have to go this hard, but they did.
11:09Thanks for watching.
11:10Catch you guys in the next one.
11:12Peace.