Huawei Mate X2 Foldable Phone Has Some Durability Surprises

Although it has the lion's share of the attention, Samsung is hardly the only one making foldable phones. There's, for example, Royole's FlexPai and, despite troubles with supplies, Huawei's Mate X. The latter just had its true second-gen model, one that goes in the opposite direction from the first Huawei Mate X's "outie" fold. The design, however, isn't the only thing that has changed with the Mate X2 and, fortunately, the changes that come with the redesign also made it a lot more durable in the process.

To be fair, the first Huawei Mate X didn't exactly have the same disastrous problems as the first Galaxy Fold exactly because of its outie fold. The screen was, of course, still more fragile than your regular phone screen and that design also carried its own problems. Dropping the Huawei Mate X, whether opened or even closed, was equally catastrophic.

With the Huawei Mate X2, the company switched to an innie fold just like the Galaxy Fold and Galaxy Z Fold 2. While more expensive, the new foldable did more than just upgrade the specs but also added some measure of redundancy and reliability. After all, you still have a screen on the outside even in the worst-case scenario that the main foldable screen breaks.

That flexible screen does get scratched with sharp nails but sand and rocks surprisingly do no damage. The Mate X2's hinge design notably didn't let sand get out once folded, and JerryRigEverything speculates that it wouldn't let dust in either. Most importantly, the phone doesn't even flex when forcibly bent the other way, an effect of the hinge and the two halves locking against each other.

The Huawei Mate X2 turns out to be quite a durable phone despite being a usually fragile foldable one. There's still a lot of room for improvement on the screen, but every year seems to push technology and materials towards that direction. It will be interesting to see if the Galaxy Z Fold 3, which may be announced in July, has more to offer in this regard and whether it will be more accessible than a $3,000 foldable phone without Google Play Store that you can't easily buy outside of China.