For more than a year before Samsung even announced the Galaxy Fold, I was warning people that it would end up being a mess. No, I didn’t have any inside track into Samsung’s secret design labs. I’ve just been doing this for a really long time. Samsung’s mobile division is so good at so many things, but innovating with first-generation smartphones is nowhere to be found on that list. The company is all about evolution, not revolution, and its first-gen devices are always a disaster. We’ve been over this — when Samsung introduces a new class of device, it pretty much ends up being the physical embodiment of a “first!” YouTube comment. Down the road a bit once Samsung has refined its design over the course of a few iterations, Samsung’s mobile devices are incredible.
Long story short, stay far away from the Galaxy Fold once it’s released. Samsung announced earlier this week that the Galaxy Fold will finally launch sometime in September, and we’ve seen all the different things that Samsung did to improve the foldable smartphone’s design. It’s still a total mess. Keep your wallets in your pockets and save yourself $2,000. The design is terrible, even if Samsung really has fixed all of the obvious design problems the Fold never should have had to begin with. If you want a foldable Samsung smartphone, wait until the third- or fourth-generation model. It’s going to be fantastic — I promise. But if you want a folding smartphone in 2019, there’s only one model that’s going to be at least decent and its final design was just revealed for the first time in leaked photos.
Back in February at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona, we gave you a hands-on look at the Huawei Mate X. This stunning foldable smartphone was better in every way than the Galaxy Fold. It didn’t have massive bezels around its displays, it didn’t have a giant hideous notch chomped out of one corner, and it featured much better construction as well as a better overall design. Then, the Galaxy Fold debacle happened and Huawei got scared. Like Samsung, the company decided to delay the release of its first foldable smartphone and retool it a bit.
Well, Huawei is apparently done retooling the Mate X. How to do we know? A Twitter user named Teme managed to get his hands on a set of photos that show the redesigned Huawei Mate X being used in the wild. There are some clear differences between this updated version and the original that you can see in our hands-on photos, and there are likely even more tweaks that aren’t visible.
Here’s a closer look at those photos:
It’s unclear exactly when Huawei plans to release the redesigned Mate X, and it’s also not clear if the company will adjust the sky-high $2,500+ price point that had previously been tossed around. What is clear, however, is that the Mate X is still better in every way than the Galaxy Fold, and we can’t wait to check out the finished product.