Tri-folds are not experiments or fads, they are the future foldable devices that are needed
When I first heard of the Huawei Mate XT in September 2024, I wasn’t sure what to think. I’ve believed for a while that larger foldable displays were the key to truly groundbreaking foldable devices, spurred on by my avid appreciation for the OnePlus Open, but it took a while to see this become a reality.
Looking back, I think I was suffering from what you might call first-generation jitters – think back to 2019 and the original Samsung Galaxy Fold, an unreliable and fragile device that caused equal parts doubt and excitement. It didn’t exactly help that the Mate XT was, and still is, exclusive to China, so there would be little chance to test it for yourself.
Fortunately, foldable display technology has come a long way in the past five years – so much so that the Mate XT ended up as an engineering marvel rather than a prototype. Ny Breaking’s Phone Editor Axel Metz was recently lucky enough to get hands-on with the Mate XT and found the phone “an extremely exciting device” – and despite only seeing the phone for myself thanks to the power of the internet, I’m inclined to to agree with my colleague on this.
Seemingly as soon as the dust settled around the Mate XT, the rumor mill has reported a successor – tentatively titled the Huawei Mate XTs. We know little about this sequel other than the suggestion that it’s in the works, but what this does tell us is that the triple Mate XT wasn’t a one-off. If a successor makes it to production, triple phones will have escaped the horizon of the ‘experimental’ category, allowing Huawei – albeit from a distance – to continue to put pressure on other phone makers such as Samsung and Google.
Image 1 by 2
The current folding phone market has two form factors that suit all folding phone manufacturers for their own devices, with a few exceptions. The cheaper of the two is the flip phone, a modernized revival of classic Y2K-style flip phones that tend to be more stylish than functional. The second is foldable booklets like the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 or the Google Pixel 9 Pro, which are much more focused on productivity.
Now, I’m a fan of foldable phones myself, but as much as I loved using the powerful and elegant OnePlus Open, it made me realize that a foldable phone can rarely do anything that a flat phone can’t. I loved using the Open’s 7.82-inch interior display to watch movies, browse articles, and play games, but I wouldn’t find myself writing articles, editing videos, or anything deeper than Tetris would play on the large indoor screen. It just wasn’t big enough to be practical.
Plus, half of the things we do with a phone every day happen so fast that unfolding the phone is hardly worth the effort to begin with. Towards the end of my time at the Open I was using it folded more often than not.
Go bold with the pleats
Perhaps it’s this middle-of-the-road mentality that’s starting to cost sales of foldable phones. As we previously reported, by the end of 2024 there was a decline in orders for foldable displays across the industry, indicating reduced production of foldable devices. Perhaps triple devices are the bull’s-eye this niche part of the phone industry needs.
Fortunately, the latest updates suggest that Huawei isn’t the only one believing in the triple form factor. At CES 2025, Samsung Display demonstrated two new triple phone displays, and while these are still proofs of concept at the time of writing, it’s very encouraging to see physical evidence of Samsung’s long-rumored forays into triple territory.
And according to a rumor coming from a Korean news channel Sisa Journal-E (via GSMArena), Samsung plans to produce a unique triple device in the second half of 2025 where the inner screen is not visible when folded – albeit in a very small production run of 300,000 copies.
Personally, I think triple phones have the potential to deliver on the productivity promise of foldable phones. A 10- or 11-inch screen, especially mounted vertically, is an ideal size for writing documents and provides enough space for two, perhaps three, multitasking windows. It will still be outpaced in screen space and performance by laptops, especially laptops with the same exorbitant price that the Mate XT sells for.
Whether or not the displays seen at CES turn into usable devices will be up to Samsung to decide, but with these latest rumors and demos I’m hopeful that we’ll see more triple devices popping up in the coming years (I’ I see myself out).