Huawei's Mate X2 is a gorgeous foldable phone. Most people shouldn't buy it.
Huawei may have built the world's nicest foldable phone.
I say "nicest" because the Huawei Mate X2 is a stunningly beautiful piece of hardware. It has two wonderful displays, impressive specs, and is very comfortable to hold.
Of course, none of that really matters for buyers outside of China. Due to the U.S. trade ban, Huawei uses a modified version of Android 10 for this phone, which lacks built-in Google apps and services, including the Google Play marketplace.
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Oh, and the price is nuts: 17,999 yuan or $2,784.
This is not a standard review. I've tested the device for just five days, and some of its shortcomings made it impossible for me to really use it as an everyday phone. But I can tell you a thing or two about the future of foldable phones, because the Mate X2 has some cool features that Huawei and its competitors will likely put on upcoming devices.
Once more, with feeling
The Mate X2 is Huawei's first folding phone that folds outwards, not inwards. It may not be as sexy when closed, but it's a vastly better design choice as you don't have to worry about the larger display getting damaged in your pocket.
Huawei managed to get it right on the first try. The hinge's sturdiness instills confidence, and the phone has no visible gap when folded — unlike Samsung's folding phones.
Additionally, the Mate X2 is wedge-shaped when unfolded, with the left side thinner and lighter than the right. When the phone is unfolded, you'll likely grip it on the right, thicker side, where it's heaviest (unless you're left-handed). Thanks to the wedge shape, the center of gravity is shifted toward that side, making the phone easier to hold and handle.
The entire thing feels fail-proof and very high quality, but it's not without drawbacks. As expected, at 295 grams, the Mate X2 is noticeably heavier than your typical phone. Worse, due to its polished, curvy sides, it's nearly impossible to open it with one hand when folded. It can even be tough to open with two hands. It's a pretty big nuisance that will hopefully be addressed in future iterations.
The larger, 8-inch OLED display has a slight crease through the middle, but it's barely visible unless you actively look for it. It's also generally a great display, with a 2,200 x 2,480 pixel resolution, 90Hz refresh rate, convincing colors, and deep blacks.
Most importantly, the display just works, most of the time. For a device like this to be practical, it has to be a fully usable tablet when unfolded, and Huawei's done that, with app icons and individual apps conforming to the large display nicely. Some apps appear a bit stretchy and odd on that nearly square resolution, but it's probably impossible to get them to look perfect.
The outer display is a 6.45-inch, 90Hz OLED with a 1,160x2,700 pixel resolution, making it a bit narrower than your typical smartphone screen. Still, when the phone is folded, if you disregard the weight and thickness, it feels pretty much like a regular smartphone, which is great. The outer display also has a cutout for a powerful, 16-megapixel selfie camera.
Nice specs, with some notable omissions
In terms of specs, the Mate X2 is basically the best Huawei can do at the moment: It has a Kirin 9000 5G chipset, 8GB of RAM, 256/512GB of storage, and stereo speakers. The battery capacity is 4,500mAh, which is a little disappointing for a device of this size, and some other tidbits are missing, such as wireless charging and a headphone jack. But mostly, it's a true Huawei flagship.
This extends to the main camera, which is a beastly system consisting of a 50-megapixel main sensor, a 16-megapixel ultrawide camera, and a 12-megapixel telephoto camera, capable of 3x optical zoom, coupled with an 8-megapixel periscope telephoto camera that's capable of 10x optical zoom.
The entire camera system is similar to the one on the Huawei Mate 40 and P40 devices, which should make it one of the best available, and it delivered. I took some wonderful daytime photos with tons of details and pretty accurate colors.
Especially impressive is the zoom, which, at 10x or more, saw a lot farther than I could, and delivered decent photos of some very distant objects. In the photo below, the low islands in the distance were invisible to the naked eye.
When it comes to selfies, every phone is a little different, but I generally prefer Huawei selfies to those taken with other phones. They're slightly softer than what you'd get on an iPhone 12, for example, but not overly so.
I didn't have time to test every aspect of the camera, but to me, it seemed on par with the best Huawei phones out there, which means it's great.
No, it's not nearly the same as other Androids
The big question about this phone: Is it manageable for daily use to someone outside of China? The answer: Probably not. There were just too many things I couldn't get to work.
The very first app I tried to install was Kindle, because I'd primarily like to use the Mate X2's larger display for reading. I was happy to find that Kindle was indeed available in the AppGallery. But after installing it, I just couldn't log in, no matter what I tried. I tried to fix this for 20 minutes and failed.
Other apps, like YouTube, worked well — and yes, fullscreen, high-res YouTube videos looked amazing on the Mate X2's display, despite the hefty black bars on top and bottom. But generally, if you start using this phone as your daily driver, I bet there will be an app or three that's either missing or doesn't work well. And that's a tough pill to swallow nowadays, when pretty much every popular app is available on both iOS and Android.
Here's another example of how the Mate X2 let me down: After I took some photos with it, I wanted to download them to my MacBook Pro. But connecting the phone to the computer didn't yield the familiar Android app that usually gives me access to a phone's files. Again, nothing I tried worked, so I resorted to connecting the Mate X2 to a Huawei Windows PC, and that worked after a few tries.
It's nice, but you shouldn't buy it
I do have to hand it to Huawei: Despite the fact that Mate X2 is using a slightly obsolete, custom version of Android 10, the phone is fast, and most apps look good on the unfolded display. But the aforementioned issues make it tough to love.
I know: This phone is currently only sold in China. But still, Huawei sent it to me for some reason — perhaps international availability will happen at a later date — and I gotta give my opinion based on what I have. And it boils down to this: If you're a hacker or tinkerer who doesn't mind trying a lot of different things and using third-party software, the Mate X2 might be alright for you. Everyone else should steer clear.
Topics Huawei
Stan is a Senior Editor at Mashable, where he has worked since 2007. He's got more battery-powered gadgets and band t-shirts than you. He writes about the next groundbreaking thing. Typically, this is a phone, a coin, or a car. His ultimate goal is to know something about everything.
