Huawei's folding smartphone "Mate Xs" has evolved from "Mate X" to an unexpected part: Yasuhiro Yamane's overseas mobile exploration

Huawei's folding smartphone "Mate Xs" announced in February is a product that boasts the highest performance among 5G smartphones. However, its appearance was the same as the "Mate X" announced a year ago, and it did not become a vertical folding type or even thinner. Mate X is only sold in China after all, and Huawei is trying to sell Mate Xs again as a folding smartphone for the global market.

The Mate Xs features a "mountain fold type" that folds the display outward. It can provide a large screen with thin bezels even when folded. On the other hand, Samsung's "Galaxy Fold" is a "valley fold type" that folds inward, and in the case of this mechanism, it is necessary to prepare an external display separately, and considering the strength, it is difficult to reduce the bezel width.

For Huawei, in order to appeal the merits of this mountain folding type in the future, the performance is the strongest at the moment. The processor has been replaced from Mate X's Kirin 980 to Kirin 990, greatly improving CPU, GPU, and NPU performance. This has the advantage of speeding up processing such as camera AI scene determination. The memory configuration is the same as Mate X. Although I wanted you to increase the memory 8GB a little more, it is a passing level. 512GB of storage should be enough.

At the Mate Xs presentation, the foldable flexible display uses polyimide with a double-layer structure. We introduced 80% stronger and 3 times more expensive than gold. After hearing this, I actually touched the Mate Xs display and felt it was harder than the Mate X I touched at the Huawei booth at CES 2020 in January.

However, the 80% increase in strength seems to be for a single layer structure only. It may not be possible to know how much the strength of the display surface of the Mate X and Mate Xs has improved without actually touching it.

However, when I touched the actual Mate Xs, there were some obvious differences from the Mate X. It is the structure of the hinge part.

When you open the Mate Xs, the top and bottom of the hinge part looks like a pin stuck in like a stylus pen. At first, I didn't really care when I touched the actual device, but I quickly realized that this was different from the Mate X I had seen before, depending on the angle I was shooting from.

You can see the pin from the back. By the way, even if you try to remove this part, it will not come off. It is firmly fixed as a shaft that supports the hinge.

By the way, this is the Mate X. There is no gap in the hinge part. It's a little hard to see, but it has a bellows-like structure.

This improvement is thought to reduce the number of parts in the hinge part and to avoid failures such as being difficult to bend. Or it may have the advantage of making it easier to disassemble when a failure occurs. If you compare the Mate X and Mate Xs from the side, you can clearly see the difference in structure.

Due to their structure, folding smartphones also have the weakness of being prone to dust entering from the hinges. Samsung's vertical folding smartphone "Galaxy Z Flip" has a brush inside the hinge to prevent dust from entering. The Mate Xs hinge improvement may be the result of considering not only strength but also dust and dirt intrusion countermeasures.

The Mate X didn't make it to the market for a long time, and I think its existence was forgotten before I knew it. The Mate Xs has already been exhibited in some countries and will be released in the global market this time. I'd like you to put it out in Japan where 5G starts.