It’s only April, somehow, and we’ve already done teardowns on 2 foldable phones this year!
Now we’ve got our hands on a 3rd, the Huawei Mate Xs.
Unlike the other foldables we’ve seen, the Mate Xs wears its fragile plastic OLED screen
on the outside, even when folded.
In its folded mode the Mate xs looks and feels like most android phones, but activate the
selfie camera and the rear screen turns on, allowing you to selfie with all the main cameras.
More on those cameras later.
It’s also the first folding phone we’ve seen with a mechanical lock, ensuring the
phone stays closed when you want, and springing open when you’re ready for more screen.
It’s been a minute since we tore down a Huawei phone, so we enlisted some help from
our friends at Creative Electron to get an Xray view of the phone before we try to take
it apart.
With xray vision we can easily spot the two loudspeakers, the vibration motor, and an
impressively intricate hinge!
We can even make out faint traces of the improved thermal system.
Unfortunately, the xrays don’t reveal any shortcuts to get inside the phone, so it’s
time for some heat.
Lucky for us, we don’t have to start prying at that fragile screen!
Like the Galaxy Fold, two panels are glued to the back of the phone.
The adhesive is stronger than a galaxy phone, though, and prying the panels up feels destructive—they’re
very flexible and warp a little during the removal process (probably thanks to the heat
required to cut through the adhesive).
Depending on how careful you are during the removal process, you may have to replace them
with new ones after disassembly.
To disconnect the batteries we remove a few shields that seem stuck on or snapped in place,
then disconnect 2 cables to find the battery connector on the right side.
The battery on the left side just has a small bracket covering the cable connector.
Interestingly the batteries are positioned one right side up and the other upside down.
So the connector on the right side is on the top and the connector on the left side is
on the bottom.
The batteries look identical, but it’s hard to be sure just yet.
A ton of the cables here seem to lead underneath the grip panel where the cameras live, so
we get to removing that.
The section covering the cameras is glued down in two pieces: a rounded edge piece that
curves to meet the back panel, and a flat piece along the top which when removed reveals
the cameras.
Before all the Huawei - US drama, Huawei was starting to make a name for themselves with
the cameras in their smartphones, with the P30 Pro’s then-novel periscope camera and
the Mate 20 Pro, which was crowned champion of MKBHD’s blind smartphone camera test.
Like its non-folding predecessors, the Mate Xs doesn’t skimp in the camera department
(though it doesn’t quite have six cameras, like the Galaxy Fold, either).
The main camera is a 40megapixel standard-wide.
Below that is a 16 megapixel ultra-wide camera, followed by an 8 megapixel telephoto and Huawei’s
own time-of-flight camera for gathering depth data to help the phone know where to add the
fake bokeh to your photos.
Out next is the motherboard, covered in shields and ooey gooey thermal paste.
Huawei talked big game about the mate Xs’ thermal solution, specifically the “flexible
bionic graphite that rises to the dual challenges of foldability and balanced dissipation.”
That’s … almost as much marketing talk as thermal paste.
We don’t see any flexible bionic graphite yet, but we’ll keep our eyes open.
Since we’re still hunkered down at home without our reflow station, we’re going
to leave the shields on this board intact for now.
But somewhere in this candy bar of silicon and metal is Huawei’s custom octa-core Kirin
990 5G processor, paired with a healthy 8 GB of ram.
It’s probably about here.
Alright, time to address the elephants in the room: these batteries.
Like a samsung galaxy phone, they both sit in wells cut out of the metal frame.
Unlike galaxy phones, they don’t budge after we apply our usual healthy dose of isopropyl
alcohol.
Huawei has, for some reason, opted to use some extra-tough adhesive to keep these batteries
in place.
And that, kids, is the story of the first problem that alcohol didn’t solve during
a teardown.
Adding insult to injury, the second battery tore as we pried it out with our opening card
resulting in some extremely unnerving hissing, so we rushed it outside for an impromptu barbeque.
No neighbors allowed.
After all the battery drama we can finally put the two cells together for a quick comparison:
they are in fact identical! 2x 8.66Wh batteries present, and accounted for.
The display starts to come away similarly to the galaxy fold’s 7-inch plastic oled,
which just had adhesive around the edges.
We’re surprised, then, to find, after we clear through the adhesive that this display
is also attached along the spine of the device.
Trying to get to the bottom of just where the display is secured we try disassembling
the hinge.
Removing some screws releases the main attachments to the frames, but the spine of the hinge
is still covered in some metal shields.
These shields are held down by some seriously strong clips.
They take a scary amount of force to release, and once separated they are reluctant to go
back together.
With the shields out of the way we can see the white “flexible bionic graphite” strips
running under the hinge.
These graphite strips help transfer heat from the hot side of the phone where the processing
happens over to the less-hot side.
Now we’ve got the hinge excavated, but the display still doesn’t seem to want to budge.
In a last-ditch attempt to get our way, we try prying at the shields along the display
side of the spine.
They’re secured with adhesive and more of those crazy clips, but we’re rewarded for
our efforts!
It turns out those weren’t shields after all, but part of the display assembly itself.
As frustrating as it was to disassemble, this is actually a really interesting way to prevent
unwanted ingress from making contact with the fragile display.
Instead of leaving a gap between the metal plates backing it (like in the Galaxy Fold),
the Mate Xs display assembly has these wings that attach to the two frames where the rest
of the components live.
So, should any unwanted ingress make it past the layers upon layers of shields and adhesive
in this phone, it has almost no way to work its way through to the display.
Neat trick!
With the display conquered, we’ve made it to the end of this teardown, which means it’s
time to talk repairability score.The Mate Xs is a pain to work with, but we’re guessing
it will hold up considerably better to real-world exposure than the Galaxy Fold, due to better
ingress protection and sturdier construction.
We’re still giving the Mate Xs a 2 out of 10 on our repairability scale for its semi-modular
construction, liberal use of super-strong adhesive, and complicated display and battery
removal procedures.
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