Huawei has shipped its third trifold phone, and the roadmap looks a lot like Samsung's.
The Mate XT2 ditches the original Mate XT's accordion-style hinge for an inward-folding design — the same approach Samsung uses on its Galaxy Z TriFold. Huawei has also bolted on a privacy display, a feature that first showed up on Samsung's Galaxy S26 Ultra this year. Switch it on and the pixels emit light at narrower angles, so the 10.2-inch screen goes nearly black when viewed from the side but stays fully visible head-on. It's an optional extra, only available on configurations with 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage, and it costs an additional ¥1,000 (about $150).
Under the hood, the phone runs Huawei's new Kirin 9050 Pro chipset, which the company says is 42 percent faster than the original Mate XT's chip. It runs HarmonyOS, Huawei's in-house operating system, has an IP59 water-resistance rating, and packs a 50-megapixel main camera, a 40-megapixel ultrawide, and a 50-megapixel periscope camera with 3.5x optical zoom, plus an 8-megapixel selfie camera on the interior display. Folded, the display is 6.5 inches; opened up, it's a 3K, 10.2-inch panel.
Pricing starts at ¥19,999 (around $2,980-$3,000). The 1TB variant with the privacy display starts at ¥24,999 (about $3,725), and a 2TB collector's edition runs ¥29,999 (roughly $4,470). It launched today in China. International release plans remain unknown, and Huawei is 'still deemed a national security risk,' per Engadget, so nobody's expecting a US launch.
Samsung's own Galaxy Z TriFold, for the record, was discontinued shortly after its release last year, though leaks suggest a follow-up is coming.
Here's the thing: this is what a functioning market looks like when two companies are actually racing each other. Samsung ships a privacy display, Huawei ships one months later with a trifold to match. That's competition doing its job — consumers in China get more phone for their yuan, and the pressure to iterate doesn't let up.
Except the race only runs on one track. Huawei can iterate all it wants, price a collector's edition at $4,470, and still never sell a single unit through a US carrier, because Washington has decided the company is a security liability rather than just a competitor. That's not protectionism dressed up as innovation policy — it's a genuine national-security call, and it means American consumers won't get to vote with their wallets on whether the Mate XT2's privacy screen beats Samsung's. The changelog stops at the border.
