I used the Huawei Mate Xs and now I don't want to go back to a normal smartphone

pgangwani35

Does your phone turn into a tablet?

Some say all phones kind of look alike these days. Their features might be different, but overall, we’re stuck with the glass slab design. The push towards maximizing the feature set has more or less lead to standardizing the smartphone design robbing us of the variety we enjoyed in the past.

But these phones, all of them, have one huge downside that no one talks about - they don’t turn into tablets. I'm only half joking there - smartphones have now gotten to a place where their looks and general feature set are commoditized. That’s great if you enjoy slow iterative changes year to year, but can also be slightly boring.


Enter foldables. Because foldable handsets had been rumored to be just around the corner for many, many years I had practically given up on this ever actually becoming a thing, prior to that fateful February of 2019, when both Samsung and Huawei announced the first consumer-ready devices.

Huawei is now on its second-generation foldable with minor improvements compared to the first, and after using the Mate Xs for a few weeks I have to say - it’s incredibly hard to go back to any traditional smartphone. It feels like the Mate Xs is just straight up from another world - or from another more advanced time, if you will.


Of course it’s not the only foldable that turns into a tablet, the Galaxy Fold also does that, but, in my opinion, the Mate Xs has by far the better design. You can feel that a ton of small details have been carefully considered, whereas the Galaxy Fold seems like it was designed in a time when Samsung did not expect to have any real competition in this space and then was taken by surprise by Huawei’s announcement of the Mate X.

The Mate Xs has no awkward side-notch when opened, and it doesn’t need a laughably bezel-endowed small and cramped external screen, because the internal screen is also the external one. That’s a very smart design, which also means you’ll be taking selfies with the main camera array. The cameras fit very nicely the elongated slab of glass on top of the frame, this side of the phone makes it very easy to hold in one hand when in tablet mode, and the bottom fits the USB-C port for charging. The stereo speakers are as far away from each other as possible when the Mate Xs is opened up, and they’re ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ when you use it like a phone. See, it’s the little things - and they do add up.


The complaints about this device are obvious: people assume the Mate Xs is more fragile than the Galaxy Fold because of the exposed screen. However, while scratches might be an issue the fact that Mate Xs’ screen is plastic, not glass, means that even if you drop it, it won't shatter - you know, like every traditional flagship device out there. I will confess to not having tried intentionally dropping it just to see what would happen, but I also don’t see that happening a lot.

When closed, it’s hefty but not unwieldy, and because of the 11mm thickness it’s actually one of the phones that are easiest to grip securely. The chunkiness was never an issue for me, but the weight… is a lot for the size, when it’s closed. I wish it was lighter, then again that problem goes away when you open it up because now the same weight is spread out over far larger surface area.


The Mate Xs is definitely not all rainbows and sunshine. Aside from the weight (which isn't that bad), there’s also the fact that the screen is mounted sideways (the bottom of the display panel is in the side that houses the power and volume buttons), which means scrolling when you use the phone with the earpiece up is quite janky, because of the way the panel refreshes. You do get used to this eventually, but it did take me over a week.

The issue is gone if, when opened up, you rotate it such that the side with the buttons is the bottom one, and in ‘tablet mode’ the device works in all possible orientations so that’s easy to achieve if you leave auto-rotation on. I usually turn that

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