Huawei’s new flip phone is weirdly wide

Huawei has launched a new flip phone that upends the form factor, opening sideways rather than vertically to create a wider device with a tablet-esque aspect ratio. It’s the first Huawei phone to ship without Android app compatibility, and debuts the company’s in-house AI assistant, Harmony Intelligence — something the industry shouldn’t ignore, Nvidia’s CEO admits.

The Pura X looks similar to a Samsung Galaxy Flip or Motorola Razr when it’s closed, with a palm-sized design and a square cover screen below its triple camera. The giveaway that something’s up is that the hinge is on the phone’s side, not its top — flip that and you find a 6.3-inch display in a 16:10 aspect ratio, wider than other flip phones and closer to tablets in its proportions. It seems to be a way of splitting the difference between flip phones and larger book-style foldables.

This is also the first Huawei phone to leave Android behind for good. It runs the new HarmonyOS Next, which doesn’t use Android Open Source Project code and isn’t compatible with Android apps. The OS launched in November 2024 alongside the Mate 70 series, …read more