The Huawei Mate XT2 is the world's first tri-panel foldable with a built-in privacy display

Huawei is claiming the title for the first foldable smartphone that offers a built-in privacy display with the announcement of its Mate XT2. While Samsung offers its own tri-folding smartphone and the Galaxy S26 Ultra with Privacy Display, Huawei has combined those two features in its latest attempt to maintain control over the foldable smartphone market.

Unlike its predecessor released in 2024, the Mate XT2 features a new hinge mechanism that folds its displays inwards. The tri-folding phone will have a 6.5-inch display when folded up that expands into a 10.2-inch display with a 3K resolution when fully open. The Mate XT2 won't be quite the 16:10 aspect ratio of Huawei's ultrawide Pura X foldable that we saw last year, but it'll use the same in-house operating system called HarmonyOS.

On the inside, Huawei upgraded the Mate XT2 with its new Kirin 9050 Pro chip that promises a 42 percent faster performance compared to the Mate XT. Huawei also packed four cameras into the tri-fold smartphone, featuring a 50-megapixel main camera alongside a 40-megapixel ultra-wide camera and a 50-megapixel periscope camera that offers 3.5x optical zoom, while the interior display hosts an eight-megapixel selfie camera.

Unsurprisingly, Huawei's Mate XT2 comes with a steep price tag that starts at 19,999 yuan, or around $2,980. While all models offer 16GB of memory, the variant with 1TB of storage and the privacy display feature will cost at least 24,999 yuan, or around $3,725. There's even a collector's edition that will have 2TB of storage and start at 29,999 yuan or roughly $4,470. Of course, we're not expecting Huawei to offer its trifold phone in the US anytime soon, since the company is still deemed a national security risk.