TIME TO FOLD

The Samsung Galaxy Fold and Huawei Mate X bring in a whole new world of phones that transform into tablets with a flick of the wrist. The future is here, and it flexes

After years of waiting for the first folding phone that looks like a product worth buying, we’ll have two coming out within a few months of each other. Samsung announced its Galaxy Fold smartphone to be released in April, followed swiftly by Huawei’s reveal of the Mate X, which it says is coming summer this year.

What’s really interesting is that these two pioneers of the new kind of device have come at it from very different angle.

The Samsung Galaxy Fold has two distinct screens. When it’s folded up, there’s a 4.5-inch OLED ‘Cover Display’ on the front, with a resolution of 840x1960, which you can use like a regular phone, though we know a lot of people won’t have tried one with that small a screen in a while.

If you decide you want a bigger canvas, you can just open up the phone to reveal a 7.3-inch OLED folding screen inside, which has a resolution of 1536x2152. This might seem a little low-res compared to high-end flagship screens in regular phones, but it’s still a density of 362 pixels per inch, which is more than high enough to look sharp.

When you open it up, whatever you were doing moves right onto the other screen, though now you can see more of it, or even can open up more new apps alongside in split-screen. It looks very slick from what Samsung’s shown off so far, using its new One UI Android skin, but we haven’t been able to get our hands on it as yet.

We’re also holding judgment on the design for now – the finish of the case looks lovely, but that huge gaps above and below the Cover Display are pretty unsightly, and it looks mighty chunky when closed. Perhaps it will feel just right in the hand.

Alright mate

Huawei’s approach for the Mate X has been to use just the one screen, folding around the outside rather than the inside. When closed, you’ll see a 6.6-inch 1148x2480 screen, which puts it pretty close to non-folding high-end phones for use as a regular handset. The rest of the screen wraps around the back of the handset, where it can actually be used for a second (very narrow) display that’s handy for showing someone else something that appears on your main screen, or for lining up selfies with the cameras. When you want to fold it out into tablet mode, you press a little button on the section on the right (a chunkier part of the frame, which houses all of the tech), and can then fold the rear screen round to create a single eight-inch ‘FullView’ display, with a resolution of 2480x2200.

The Samsung’s tablet-size screen has roughly a 4:3 aspect ratio, like most iPads or its own Galaxy Tab S4. The Huawei’s screen is practically square (8:7.1), so we’ll also have to see if one feels like it makes better use of the space available.

Both phones are promising to be proper flagships, with the fastest hardware and top-level cameras, though only the Huawei is making a point of offering 5G support.

There’s no mention of it in the Samsung – that seems to reserved for the S10 5G (p78).

They need to be pretty swish, though, because both handsets are making the steep price of Apple’s XS Max look positively Poundland: the Galaxy Fold is set to start at €2,000 (about £1,700), while the Mate X is pegged at (about £1,950). UK pricing will be announced closer to launch, but expect to pay something close to those converted figures. Too much for a phone? For most people, sure, but they’ll fly off the shelves anyway – the lure of owning something truly mindblowing can’t be overstated.