The Mate X3, Huawei’s latest book-style foldable, was just unveiled in China.
Huawei’s newest foldable phone, the Mate X3, is an impressively thin and light book-style foldable phone. It was unveiled Thursday alongside the non-foldable flagship P60 series.
The Mate X3 has a 6.4-inch cover screen that unfolds to make way for a 7.85-inch inner screen. Despite the presence of two screens, the Mate XS weighs 239 grams and it’s 5.3 mm thick, making it thinner and lighter than the iPhone 14 Pro Max when unfolded. This also means the Mate X3 is the lightest commercially available foldable phone — a title Huawei clinched previously with the Mate XS 2. For reference, the Galaxy Z Fold 4 weighs 263 grams and has a width of 6.3mm when unfolded.
The Mate X3 also has a free-stop hinge, the company says, allowing the phone to fold in a variety of positions, which lends the device to Flex-mode style features. Speaking of the camera, the Mate X3 has a circular camera bump housing a 50-megapixel main camera, a 13-megapixel ultrawide camera and a 12-megapixel periscope-style telephoto camera, which is capable of 5x optical zoom.
Although the slick hardware of the Mate X3 is commendable, one of the biggest upgrades to the Mate X3 is the IPX8 rating, which remains uncommon in the foldable phone segment. Only Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 4 series has the same rating, which means the means the device can withstand immersion in over 1 meter (3.2 feet) of water.
The Mate X3 marks Huawei’s return to the book-style foldable. Last year, Huawei ran with the single-screen wraparound design of the Mate XS 2 instead of launching a successor to 2021’s Mate X2. The return to inward-folding design, which Samsung first introduced, seems to indicate that book-style designs are the future for Huawei foldable phones.