Now I don't usually start a video with a shout out to our sponsor, but if it wasn't for Dbrand,
I would not even have my hands on the Huawei Mate XT Ultimate Design.
This phone is so exclusive that these are going for about 9,000 US dollars on eBay right now.
The hilarious part is they don't even make accessories for it.
No cases, no skins, no nothing, because it's China exclusive and I'm pretty sure they don't
let Dbrand's guys into China anymore after all that s*** they've pulled over the years.
So we've got that in common. Anyway, without further ado, massive shout out Dbrand for getting this phone over to us,
however the hell it is you did that. Unlike a lot of our recent phone videos, there's no Labs testing or anything.
It arrived, we jumped through a bunch of freaking ridiculous hoops to set up a Huawei Cloud account
and I jumped on set. I am so excited to see this thing.
You will pay for this. That's my garage door.
Why is my garage door open? That's a really weird and f***ed up thing to have in the packaging.
Is this from Dbrand? Wow, it's freaking huge.
I have looked at basically no media coverage of this thing because I wanted to experience it in person.
It's got about the same crease as I would have expected on like a first generation folding device,
but what jumps out to me is the astonishing thinness.
I'm daily driving an iPhone 16 Plus right now.
This is the thickness of the iPhone in comparison. It's on a whole other level.
I am loving the design too. Huawei has gone from being just like a copycat brand to this looking absolutely incredible.
Dude, it's basically as thin as it could possibly be and still have a SIM tray.
I've seen concept devices for like a tri-fold, for example, in the Samsung booth at CES.
The difference is that even their concept devices weren't this thin.
That is not an IR emitter. Shut up.
It has an IR emitter? This is a device that I look at and I go,
yeah, they couldn't have fit a headphone jack in here. Not this one.
On the right, volume rocker. What appears to be a fingerprint sensing lock button.
USB-C port. Look at this.
Can you even see the edges of it? How is there room in this thickness at the edge of this port for the entire display stack?
Is this leather? It can't be. It can't be real leather. It's got to be a faux leather, but it feels really good.
Oh, oh, oh, oh, it's folded. Oh, dang, that is so cool.
Oh, buddy. And there, yeah, that's cool.
It's like a folded metal. Oh, oh, oh, what else is in the box?
Oh, important reminder. Thank you, Andy. Right, I forgot Andy's my cameraman today.
Oh, this buddy ain't waterproof. I'll tell you that much.
Don't go where it's cold. Don't touch it with anything sharp. Don't touch it at all.
Don't fold it if it's under five degrees. Oh, minus five.
I can see why they didn't bring it to the Canadian market.
This is the kind of thing that feels like they built a concept car.
And then they were just like, you know what? F*** it.
We'll make a handful of them, you know? Like it reminds me of that Sony OLED from 2008.
They were just like, yeah, this thing makes absolutely no sense at this price and size.
We're going to do it anyway. Oh, it comes with Huawei earphones.
Now I know that these are a thing. That's good. Shut up.
88 watt charging on this thing? There's no way.
Yeah, okay. This is an 88 watt. Wait, why does it come with a car charger?
Does it come with a regular? Oh, dude. This thing is the whole package.
Regular charger, 66 watts, two cables.
Oh, it comes with a case. That's great. This is carbon fiber.
Oh my God, I think this is real carbon fiber. The reason I think it's real is A, it looks real.
And B, they know there isn't going to be a single accessory on the market for this.
So whatever comes on the box, that's the only possible case that anybody can get for it,
which means if you have the kind of money to afford a phone like this, it better be a good one.
How much does this cost in China? It's not even that much.
Like to be clear, $2,800 is a freaking ton for a phone.
But you'd spend almost that much on a top tier iPhone, especially if you pay for Apple care, which this includes similar service to.
It includes four replacements of the screen protector in the first two years
and a full out broken screen. So it's not beyond the realm of what people are spending on phones.
It's just that that's for 16 gigs of RAM and only 256 gigs of storage.
I don't even know how they put an hands chip in here, let alone 250.
You can get it with up to a terabyte of storage, but that's going to cost you $3,400, $10.2 inch display.
Absolute freaking game changer for on the go entertainment.
3k resolution, 92% screen to body ratio.
I believe it. Look how tiny these bezels are. It's like a Samsung Galaxy Fold plus a third phone.
This thing's crazy, like pretty good anti-glare treatment.
It's not perfect, but like guys, that's a studio light. You know, oh, that's cool.
It prompts you for the password down in the bottom right, because it knows how you're going to be holding it.
Oh, you can tell it if you're right or left handed or if you're holding it.
Shut up, shut up. Andy said if you're holding it with your left hand, no way.
Oh, they did the work, man. I've been using a fold since the first generation Samsung Galaxy Fold.
Okay. And with those early ones, you could really tell like it was basically stock Android,
but like with some tablet tweaks and, you know, they didn't really have it all figured out.
Dude, it moves where the pin prompt is depending where you swipe.
That is freaking awesome. It's little touches like that, that make all the difference in the world with a device like this.
It comes preloaded with a lot of garbage.
That I know is pretty typical for Chinese devices.
We've talked about three screens, two.
Okay. How does it feel in the same? That is smooth.
The way it transitions, you guys. Also, this is totally a high refresh rate display.
What are the compromises people? 90 Hertz, which is good enough.
Obviously, a 120, 144 is better or whatever your extreme gamer.
But if you're an extreme gamer, you're not buying this phone. Now that I finally got it folded down the whole way.
Dude, it's not even thicker than a buy fold from Samsung.
And it's a tri-fold. Wow.
Yeah, it's thicker than a traditional candy bar phone.
But it's not totally unreasonable either. Like again, as someone who used a fold for a long time,
it feels pretty good in the hand. And not only that, but this is such a usable form factor, man.
Do you remember how small the front screen was on the first Galaxy Fold?
Like it's tiny. I made that work. This would be basically no compromises.
No, no, I would go like this. Boom, fold.
Boom, I got some movies to watch. I want this thing so bad.
Like so bad. Does it even work on Canadian bands?
Come on, Huawei. It's not like we jailed your executive and kicked all your infrastructure
out of our country or anything. I'm going to try it. I'm putting my sim in it, boys.
You can uninstall their garbage. I can uninstall Huawei Wallet.
Maybe a blah, blah, blah. Yeah, sure. See you later. Okay, cool. So I don't have to keep any of that stuff.
In single window view, you could swipe up and down to either side to scroll.
Oh, that's a nice usability tweak.
Dude, this is crazy. It's so thin. It's so light.
Let's talk about specs. Got a Kyron 9010 7-manometer chip in here.
10.2, 7.9, or 6.4-inch display.
No particular peak brightness rating, though. Hey, you've got the Play Store and everything.
Wait, what the hell's in Aurora Store? No Google Play Services.
You can't even force it? Dang it! So wait, what am I supposed to watch on here, then?
We did find one source that says 1,500 nits. We found another source that said 1,000 nits.
Either way, it's pretty flipping bright. This is not like your first generation folding displays,
where they're super dim and basically unusable outside. Looks a little yellow.
It's got a bit of a red cast compared to the iPhone, but in terms of the brightness and SDR content,
I do not see any disadvantage here. I will say this, though.
The color accuracy is probably good enough for just about anybody who's not doing
color-critical work on their phone. And can your iPhone do this?
Holy crap. No, your iPhone can't do that.
It looks like even when they're powering the whole display, the overall brightness is close.
It might be a little bit less bright.
Oh man, the auto-rotate, it's off. Like, it's 90 degrees off.
Oh, it doesn't know what mode I'm in.
Oh, that's a downer and a half.
You can see it's working fine in bi-fold mode, but then I switch over to tri-fold.
Herpader, herpader, herpader.
The lock button's like right there. You're going to accidentally mash that constantly,
but this is like caveman technology by comparison.
This is awesome. You got to put all your apps in like a little like
shuffly thing like a peasant. Dude, don't you even have a bigger screen, Apple?
Oh, oh, I want to try the camera though. It has a variable aperture camera?
How the crap did they pull that off? Oh, oh, no way.
You can go all the way from f1.4 to f4.
Basically, that affects how wide the hole is through which the camera's shooting,
which affects the depth of field and affects how much light gets in.
So if I want to open it up all the way, I can get real bokeh, like not fake AI bokeh,
like real bokeh on my shot. That is super cool.
I can close it all the way and I can make sure that basically everything
in my shot is in focus. Okay, let's go back to, let's go back to auto mode though.
Not the best I've seen. Not terrible. Pretty sharp actually.
50 megapixels. Yeah, you can count every one of them. You can actually read the brand of our tripod on the Huawei.
Can barely make it out on the iPhone. Pretty wild, hey?
Man, look at that. Look at it like stretch out.
That is so cool. Dude, I want one of these so bad.
Wow, that's a big sound, boys.
One speaker here, one speaker here.
They're pretty muddy. But given the space constraints, I'm still very impressed.
I'm also impressed by how little the folds are bothering me.
Once I've actually got content on the screen, you can see as I move it around and catch the light,
you'll catch a glimpse of them once in a while, especially when it's directly reflected towards your eyes.
But overall, pretty good at most of the angles that you would actually care about.
Even though it does have an older processor in it, it's got a 5600 milliamp hour battery in here.
That'll help a lot. You'll probably get a day out of it. All right, let's put on the case.
This little flappy guard thing kind of gets in the way when you go from bifold to trifold.
But apparently it's there because people were concerned about the unprotected screen here.
And like this way, it's right there when you're holding it. So I guess that's something.
Oh yeah, I was going to try out the stand. Oh yeah, that could work. There we go.
Okay. Oh yeah, oh yeah.
Okay, she's stable. She's stable, she's stabilized.
Oh yeah, there we go. No problem, bud. I mean, look, you laugh, laugh all you want.
But this was an engineering challenge that someone at Huawei had to solve.
And they did a pretty, pretty okay job.
Oh, not bad, not bad.
Nope. A little inconsistent.
Oh, it'll be better without the case, I think.
So much better. Nope, it failed. I think it comes down to when I enrolled it,
it was kind of wonky because I had the case on. I would definitely recommend
enrolling with the case not on. I want one so bad, but there are multiple deal breakers here.
Even if it did support North American bands, which did may vary well.
There's no Google services on here, which doesn't mean, oh yeah,
well just go get the Play Store and add Google service. No, they won't run on it.
Not unless you like, I don't know, root it somehow, but then you're going to lose a lot of the optimizations
that Huawei has made to Harmony OS. You literally cannot put the Play Store on here
and you can't run Google apps like Google Maps, for example.
Wait, Google Maps works? Ah, I see.
The rotation bug? Pretty brutal. And even though we have it set to English right now,
there are many aspects of the device that remain Chinese only.
There's no IP rating, so you drop this thing in the drink.
It is dead and setting up an account in Canada was extremely difficult
because Huawei devices are banned in the country over security concerns.
Finally, the SOC and camera. Well, actually I thought the camera seemed pretty solid,
but the SOC is very last gen, estimated to be about on par with a Snapdragon 888,
which came out in 2020. I really want one though.
And I want you to subscribe to ShortCircuit. Thanks again to Dbrand for making it possible
for us to get our hands on this thing. I was not expecting it to blow my mind this effectively.