The Huawei Mate XT Ultimate has been announced for a full global launch, and it could well be the most exciting foldable phone we’ve seen yet – though there are a couple of potential snags that we can spot.
Huawei announced its Huawei Mate XT Ultimate foldable in November, but it was restricted to the local Chinese market at the time. Now, as teased earlier this month, Huawei has announced that the Mate XT Ultimate will receive a global launch.
At a special event held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Huawei revealed details on the global Huawei Mate XT Ultimate.
What is the Huawei Mate XT Ultimate?
The Huawei Mate XT Ultimate is the same unique foldable phone that we saw in China several months ago. Its core feature is a tri-foldable form factor, which means that it has three screen elements rather than the usual two.
Built around two hinges rather than one, the Huawei Mate XT Ultimate offers a 10.2-inch AMOLED display when fully extended. It can then fold up into a traditional 6.4-inch smartphone form.
It’s also possible to use the Mate XT Ultimate with only two of those three screen elements extended, producing an experience that’s not dissimilar to normal foldables like the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6.
Foundry | Alex Walker-Todd
With an extra folding element, the Huawei Mate XT Ultimate really needed to be slimmer than usual, and it attains that with a 3.6mm thick body. This still makes it a rather hefty 12.8mm thick when closed, but that’s still not far off Samsung’s latest dual-fold phone.
Huawei looks to have equipped its lates foldable with a strong cameras system, comprised of a 50Mp main camera with PDAF, OIS, and a variable f/1.4 to f/4.0 aperture. This is backed by a 12Mp 5.5x telephoto and a 12Mp ultrawide camera.
You might expect a slightly weedy battery to power all this, but Huawei has managed to include a large 5600mAh cell. There’s support for 66W wired charging and 50W wireless.

Foundry | Alex Walker-Todd
What’s the catch?
We mentioned three potential snags in the intro, and the first of those is the Huawei Mate XT Ultimate’s use of the Kirin 9010 processor.
Thanks to Huawei’s well-documented troubles with successive US governments, it hasn’t had access to modern Western chip technology. This means that the home-brewed Kirin 9010 is built on slightly creaky 7nm foundations.
Indeed, it’s technically inferior to the Kirin 9020 chip that powers the Huawei Mate X6, which was already “a good few steps behind the competition”, according to our reviewer.
Those aforementioned sanctions have also done for the Huawei Mate XT Ultimate’s Google apps and services support. We’ve covered this in detail in all of our Huawei phone reviews of recent years.
In a sentence: it’s a real pain having to find alternatives and workarounds to a number of the most popular apps.

Foundry | Alex Walker-Todd
The final snag that we can see is the Huawei Mate XT Ultimate’s price. This global model will cost €3,499 when it hits European markets, which shoots well past ‘eye watering’ and into ‘kidney selling’ territory.
Put it this way: our current favourite foldable phone, the Honor Magic V3, launched at €1,999 – a whole €1,500 less than the Huawei Mate XT Ultimate.
Don’t get us wrong, the Huawei Mate XT Ultimate has us excited. It’s a bold new approach for foldable phones, offering the potential for carrying around a full-sized tablet in your pocket. But it’s going to cost you in more ways than one.
Stay tuned for more details on regional availability.