The Mate X is Huawei’s 5G foldable
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
> The device is thin, as far as tablets go, at 5.4 mm, unfolded. Closed, it’s nearly double that, at 11 mm.
11mm is _more_ than double 5.4mm.
> with a 19:5 aspect ration.
Aspect ration? Are aspects now too precious to waste?
> ...as Richard You takes the stage...
> ...according to mobile CEO Richard Yu...
Could we at least get some consistency in proper noun transliterations?
There's so much more that I feel like I'm reading an article published by a middle-school student. If so, then he did a great job. If this is supposed to be a professional journalist, though, then he should go back to middle school.
It is still no clear to me what makes "nearly" in this particular case to mean "less than". Curiously enough, "nearly crossed the finish line" indeed sounds totally wrong to me.
That said, I believe it is usually used to mean "less than". In this case, I would use "just over" instead, ie, "closed, it's just over double that".
See 1:28 : https://youtu.be/NnO08HnZf10?t=88
Samsung: https://youtu.be/-fcCQIdGpK8?t=175
But in my view the huawei concept is far better better on pretty much any other metric (pending info on durability)
Care to name those? From your description, it sounds to me like the Samsung fold is sharper (probably harder to do than a loosely bent screen, yet they did it). I know very little about foldable screens, so I'm curious what other metrics I should be looking at.
Great point!
As a concept though, I think this design makes a lot more sense than Samsungs. It gets to use the same full body screen, rather than the strange tiny one Samsung does. The fold being part of the outer body also makes more sense than having a wedge inside.
1) if the foldable screen is more delicate, samsung's design protects it.
2) In samsung's design, the outer screen is used when it's folded.. and when you unfold it you use the entire foldable screen. In Huawei's design, one side of the screen is going to be used more than the other side, and as it ages that side may start to appear different than the less used side.
3) If you drop it, you'll have to replace the entire foldable screen vs Samsung, just replacing the smaller outer screen.
4) Going on the outside, there are two creases. The inside only has one. This may make it easier to hide the crease.
I don't actually think the screen should be more delicate than a typical OLED.
I don't understand your point about the creases.
You're theoretically right about the aging, but I suspect that it could be mitigated because it's fairly predictable.
I think the amazing screen in the folded state, avoided duplication and great looks greatly outweigh any of the possible disadvantages.
Besides maybe ... Space for components. It seems way too thin to accomodate a well sized battery with all of the added casing.
Why? From Anandtech..
Huawei calls the new hinge system a “Falcon hinge”. It’s to be noted that this seems to be the weak-point of Huawei’s design as it doesn’t look nearly as refined as Samsung’s attempt. At the pre-brief we weren’t able to actually get our hands on the phone, but one unit of the presenter had a notable “waviness” of the screen where the hinge was.
The number one concern of the Mate X however is the fact that it is a outwards folding phone. By nature of it being a flexible display means that we’re dealing with a polymer material which is softer than glass, and thus also more scratch prone. Samsung’s inwards folding design here will be much less prone to scratches, however the Mate X will be a quite more fragile phone in this regard. In fact it seems Huawei is aware of this as they also presented a protection case in which you can slip the whole device in, trying to address this compromise of this surely better looking, but likely less practical design.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13990/huawei-launches-the-mat...
The "Falcon Wing" hinge (note how they learned from Apple about coming up with catchy names) is the strong point of the Mate X: Everyone has been wowed by it and how it allows the phone to fold flat and to be thin.
Questions about durability remain open both both the Fold and the Mate X. We shall see.
Most of the time I'll want to use the phone in the folded mode and there you have the choice between a stunning full screen and an embarassing, added display.
The Samsung doesn't fold flat. That makes it bulky and leads to a very problematic force distribution (2 lines). The flat folding Huawei distributes the force over the whole phone. There are already phones with OLEDs and they seem to work fine (they do have glass surfaces to distribute point loads, however). Additionally it just looks great.
I'm not sure about the scratches. You could make the surface so soft it doesn't get scratched at all, but it probably wouldn't feel good. I do like matte screens that don't show scratches, but that'd slightly impair display clarity.
Looks pretty bad, hence not letting the journalists hold it. I think they traded thinness for display surface uniformity. The Galaxy Fold is thicker, but uses the additional size to incorporate a stronger folding mechanism, which appears to put less strain on the screen itself.
Hopefully they figure this out before launch. It definitely doesn't look worthy of the $2600 sticker price in its current form.
Also worth noting that flagship phones have only gotten more expensive since the first iPhone. Remember when we all thought the first iPhone was too expensive?
This is 2k for what is essentially a prototype.
In 2007, the proper web involved tons of Flash. Flash video players, Flash games, Flash-based interactive websites. None of those worked on the iPhone.
Its web browsing ability wasn't much better than what you could already get on keyboard-based phones like Nokia, Blackberry and Samsung. On the iPhone you did pinch to zoom, and on the other smartphones, you were served the WAP version of the page, or you could browse the full page with the scrollwheel.
That's a very revisionist version of events. Much of the initial disillusionment around the web on featurephones came from WAP being (mis)sold as the Internet on a phone.
If you go back and watch the original iPhone demo you can see that people were genuinely wowed by being able to browse the Internet ('the real internet') on a mobile.
In fact, 'it's not a watered down version of the internet' was one of the tag lines of one of the first iPhone commercials
https://www.indiatides.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/iOS-vs...
What's happened instead is that they've become bigger and bigger. My smartphone prior to the iPhone had a 2.2" screen. After that, it quickly went from 3.2" to 3.5" to 4.3" and onwards, and my current one is 5.8".
I had a Motorola Q once and felt like I was holding up a big scientific calculator to my ear.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13990/huawei-launches-the-mat...
It seems to be me your two options with a mobile device are:
1) Make it durable so that it can be dropped on a variety of surfaces without big concerns of dropping or scratching. This might be a lot easier to achieve if devices got much lighter (or go the Toughbook route and harden it).
2) Allow it to support a variety of case types that a user can choose
This whole thing seems more like a prototype than a great idea. I think foldable and rollable computing devices have a future, but this doesn't seem fully considered.
Although this one looks significantly better than the Galaxy Fold, which reminds me of the Homer Simpson Car: https://patrickwthornton.com/samsung-galaxy-fold-is-the-home...
I mean, developers buy nice looking MacBooks and then cover them in shitty looking tech industry stickers and dumb decals. Same thing.
I plan on getting 4+ years out of my phone too, especially since Apple replaced the battery for free a few months ago. My 6s is close to the 4-year mark.
to keep it intact?
> What's the point to pay top dollar for a beautiful screen if you cover it with a cheap cover?
Well, when you need to, you open the cover then gaze upon your beautiful screen ;)
http://iri.jrc.ec.europa.eu/scoreboard18.html Huawei spends more in R&D than Apple or Intel so I wouldn't automatically assume everything they do is stolen.
The current flagships are over 1k. I’m not upgrading for the next 4years minimum.
If you don't have a need for a tablet device, why not go with one of the much stronger phones? Samsung's and Apple's flagship phones are much better when you consider everything a phone should and should not do.
I can see a device like this potentially being popular with someone who needs to carry a tablet with them everywhere for their job (healthcare and architecture are two fields where this can be true).
We still have an iPad mini 1 in service.
These prices seem to be in Verblen goods territory.
https://gizmodo.com/courier-first-details-of-microsofts-secr...
Like their attempt at tablets with XP, they seem to have been a little too early.
While not that nice, having display on the inside of the phone at least protects it from scratches.
As a small tablet, it’s likely easier to carry than a small e-reader or iPad Mini.
Relevant scenes: https://youtu.be/qvrSUwqt6Mw?t=54
Leave us engineering professionals (who need workstations to be productive) out of it. Most people have one, pocketable, device. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that, if you work within that restriction, that bigger screens will give people better experiences and thus make for better products.
If it ever becomes feasible to have a phone that unfolds into the size of a TV, you'll quickly find fixed-size TVs become niche products for always-on monitoring dashboards and advertising billboards. People will just unfold their phones to watch whatever show or movie they're going to watch, even if it takes them a couple of minutes to unfold their phone that far to set it up.
Sometimes you know you'll be sitting down for 5+ min and a larger format is just more useful, whether it's for reading with bigger fonts, shopping with more items displayed per page or just for accessing non-mobile-crippled websites like GitHub.
Tablets are like dedicated cameras of the photography world. They might be good at it but it's useless if it's not on you. You don't want to carry a second device. Tablets still can't handle multi-users and you want a personalized experience. You don't want multiple tablets at home. There's no continuity unless there's some drastic change in OSes and we go back to the Novell terminal model of computing. I want to have the exact tabs opened with the text fields I'm halfway through typing. You want a single device to charge. A single device that's paired with the bluetooth peripherals etc etc.
Phones already don't fit in pockets and can't keep getting bigger. Developers are already not making native desktop apps except the heaviest class productivity types.
I applaud developments in this direction.
Neither Apple, nor Samsung can justify prices of $1000+ for flagship models when the benefits are so marginal compared to flagships of even 2 years ago. I paid $900 for a Galaxy S7 in 2016 and decided to import a Nokia X6 from HK for $300 instead of getting a new Galaxy.
Of course, I'm not going to pay $1500-$2000 to be a guinea pig for this new form factor, but it's good to see that in a couple of years, smartphones might not become yet another boring shopping list item.
Samsung foldable: $2,000
Huawei Mate X: $2,600
Why are these devices so expensive?
That excuse works for Samsung. Huawei stole the tech.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/30/tech/samsung-china-tech-theft...
Considering how all the major manufacturers are pushing hard to get flagships over $1000, I don't see how this is possible
Is this true outside of the west though?
Also, there were other androids that costed more than the iPhone X.
And no, Apple is not a trillion dollar company, Wall Street valuates Microsoft higher.
You're technically correct, poor Apple is just an $815B company right now with MSFT at 851. Want to make any bets they won't exceed last October's $1T in the near future? Or do you have a point? https://ycharts.com/companies/AAPL/market_cap
Apple's hardware margins are less than that of Microsoft or Google.
If you are so certain of Apple's stock, you can put your money on AAPL stock.
And if Apple is worth $1T, it's still undervaluation, because one can easily look at their revenue and see they are massively underpriced and that's because Wall Street can't stop making FUD against them, among their competitors paying for negative infomercials about them.
Time will tell if they're right, but I can see the logic. High end smartphones are already at the $1,000 mark, and all they have to differentiate themselves from the $200 models is some nice design, and a slightly nicer screen processor and camera - they're fundamentally the same item. Manufacturers search hard for differentiation on a commoditised space, and this is the first major bit for years. This is a high end product, aimed at the '1%' who can afford to a stand out device.
Do you remember when iPhones weren't ubiquitous, and if there was someone in the group who had one everyone would want a go? That's what the manufacturers are hoping for.
Makes sense, as this is new tech and they are trying to understand consumer demand and use cases for the product. Also, they may want to avoid costly recalls if it turns out that the V1 hinge isn't as sturdy in real world use as it was in their tests.
It is likely that both cellphones are not going to pay itself off this year when accounting for R&D (assuming technology hasn't been stolen), but the value of being seeing as the leaders in the industry (brand value) and the increased availability of the technology will likely drop the cost of fold-able tech and hopefully propel the industry to the next level.
Whether these technological updates are true value-adder to customers remains to be seeing. We have seen people buy new cellphones yearly with a lot less changes to it.
I also think that if someone is willing to pay 2-4x more for a foldable cellphone, they are likely to pay a couple hundred to a customized case or at least something that will protect their cellphones. (@pwthornton)
But won't having both within a single device mean either an iPad mini with crappy battery life or a much heavier iPhone?
What's the point of hybrid? Not gas, not electric. What's the point of a non-prime lens? Not wide angle, not telescopic. What's the point of the Switch? Not mobile console, not TV console. What's the point of a multi-bit screwdriver? Not phillips, not flat.
Definitely not worthy of the price tag.
At least Samsung can have a glass screen on the outside, more exposed to the elements .
I would worry a lot more about NSA, Apple, Google and Facebook (if you are American at least) than Huawei.
No, it hasn't. No leaked document says that. Instead, there is a well known understanding for the opposite. https://www.lawfareblog.com/i-spy-you-spy-we-all-spy
[Ok] [Ok]
On the other hand, I'm not sure if the Chinese government is a bigger threat to foreign individuals than the US government. It looks like China is mostly focused on industrial espionage while the US often mix an unpredictable amount of ideology in their actions.
At no point was Apple a company that was first in a product category. They didn’t make the first PC, the first portable MP3 player, the first smartphone (not even the first all-touchscreen smartphone), or the first smart watch. They won by jumping into these categories afterward and doing them better. Comments like this display an incredible ignorance of how Apple does business just to score cheap points.
This is a chestnut you can roll out in every discussion on new tech, because the history of tech is littered with new ideas poorly executed, then (usually) Apple coming along and defining how it should be done, and then everyone copying that.
Two recent examples I can think of of this phenomenon:
* Asus' ScreenPad, a screen stuffed into the trackpad. Completely not integrated into the overall experience and a total gimmick.
* Any Kinect-like product (LG's Project Tango phones, Intel RealSense, etc), which were essentially hardware demos without quality software to hit useful use cases
Apple happily sold 100's of millions of "bendgate" phones, and 100's of millions of costumers happily used them and still use today, without a problem.
Android fans are so full of themselves, they think anyone listens to them ahahahah
(search for bendgate)
They started back with the Note Edge since samsung flagships are their main advertised and mass market product that demos to the masses their hw design supremacy
What kind of analogy is that? I haven't felt the need to fill up a tank of gas every week, but I still bought a car.