Here's Huawei's tri-fold smartphone in the middle of (un)folding

Huawei has just shared an image of its tri-fold smartphone in the middle of (un)folding. The company shared that image on Weibo, giving us the very best look at the phone thus far.

Huawei shared an image of its tri-fold smartphone in the middle of (un)folding

If you check out the provided image, you’ll see how the device unfolds. It has one hinge on the right, and one on the left side. In the middle of unfolding it basically looks like a letter Z.

You’ll also see that Huawei used vegan leather on the back of this phone. That goes for the backs of all three display portions, so when unfolded, the entirety of its back is covered by vegan leather. That will provide a much-needed grip.

There is a camera island on the back, with four separate circles, and an LED flash strip in between them all. You’ll also spot the XMAGE branding on that camera island. The camera island is not a perfect circle, it actually has more of an octagonal shape.

Pre-orders have also kicked off in Huawei’s homeland

Along with this image, Huawei kicked off the pre-orders for the device in China. As many of you know, the device will become official in a couple of days, on September 10.

This handset will use a display from BOE, by the way. BOE chairman, Chen Yanshun, said that they collaborated with Huawei in order to make this happen on the Huawei Mate XT.

What we also were able to find out thanks to the pre-orders kick off is that the phone will come in two variants in China. A model with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage will be available, and the same goes for a variant with 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage.

We’re still not sure if it’s coming to global markets

We’re still not sure if the device will come to global markets, though. If it will, that will happen later this year or next year. This is the first phone of its kind, so Huawei could opt to keep it exclusive to China, we’ll see. Richard Yu was spotted using this phone on two occasions, once in an unfolded form, and then in a folded form, in case you’d like to check out more images.