Chinese hardware giant Huawei's latest piece of gear is wild. The MateBook Fold Ultimate Design looks like a 13-inch laptop on the outside, until you open it to reveal an 18-inch foldable screen that's just 7.3 mm thick. For reference, an iPhone 16 has a depth of 7.8 mm.
The idea is to let you use it as a massive touchscreen tablet when it's fully open, and for it to function as a compact laptop with a virtual keyboard when it's sat up at an angle.
Although Lenovo beat it to the punch with the first foldable laptop years ago, Huawei has been in the business of foldables for a while now. Remember the stunning US$2,800 Mate XT trifold phone from last year?
This latest offering is no less impressive, weighing in at just 2.5 lb (1.16 kg), and measuring 14.9 mm (0.58 in) when closed. Somehow, Huawei's managed to squeeze two fans, a vapor cooling system, and six speakers into the aluminum body.
Since it's a touchscreen, the company also had to engineer the hinge so it stays open at whatever angle you set between 30 - 150 degrees, even when you tap on the display. Huawei says the mechanism is a zirconium-based alloy die cast at a high temperature for tensile strength and hardness.
There's also a built-in kickstand on the back to prop up the full-sized display at various angles. The exterior is finished in wear-resistant silicone-coated leather, and there are neat details like unique patterns on the kickstand and blackened gold lines running down the hinge.
The screen itself is a 3.3K dual-layer OLED affair rated for peak brightness of 1,600 nits. Huawei claims a 92% screen-to-body ratio, which means you'll only have a slim bezel running around the display. It's protected from impact by a non-Newtonian fluid buffer layer beneath, as well as a a carbon fiber support layer below that.
The MateBook Fold runs Huawei's proprietary HarmonyOS, and it's tuned to work like you've got two displays with windows that can be moved from one to the other with a tap. There's also AI assistance for work stuff like taking meeting notes and generating slide decks.
On the inside, you'll get up to 2 TB of storage, 32 GB of RAM, and a 75-Wh battery. There's a fingerprint reader built into the power button, an 8-megapixel front camera, and two USB-C ports on the edges.
If a virtual keyboard isn't your thing, you can pick up a physical one that's wireless and just 5 mm (0.19 in) thick. It's got matching design elements and it will magnetically attach to the back of the Fold.
Now for the bad news: it's only available in China at launch, and it costs the equivalent of a jaw-dropping $3,300 if you can lay your hands on it. Between that and the fact that you can't natively run Android apps (you'll need an emulator like this one that works on HarmonyOS phones), this likely won't find a lot of buyers outside the mainland anytime soon. However, it could become available more widely later on like the Mate XT, and it raises the bar for other laptop makers.
Source: Huawei
