In the run-up to this September’s big tech releases, the chief executive of Huawei was spotted on a plane, using a rather odd device. It was a folding phone, much like the many others on the market — which you can read reviews of in our pages — but it didn’t just have a central fold. Rather, it had another fold, expanding even further out horizontally. Folded up, it looked like a fairly normal, but thick, smartphone. Unfolded, it looked like a full iPad.

The executive wasn’t innocuously “spotted” with it, any more than candid photographs of celebrities looking good in candid settings just sprout up naturally. Huawei took the photo, had publicists spread it around, and gullible tech fans ate it up. Mere hours after Apple unveiled its terrifically underwhelming iPhone 16, Huawei showed this mysterious device, now on sale: the Mate XT.

After five years in development, the Mate XT is the boldest piece of phone hardware on the market; there is quite literally nothing like it on sale. It’s like the Magic V3, from sister company Honor — which I recently reviewed — but with another fold on the end, and running all of Huawei’s own chips. That was impressive; this is mind-blowing.

The thinness of the Magic V3 is extremely impressive and puts it ahead of its competitors, but that likely isn’t because they couldn’t make a phone that thin, but that Honor has lower standards for its durability. Few persons will buy Honor’s very thin folding phone, and those who do and have serious hardware issues because of its thinness won’t get much attention because persons don’t really care about Honor the brand. The phone exists for the initial release; to blow persons away with how cool it looks, and remind them that Honor the brand exists, putting their lower-end models in mind when they go to buy a new phone.

Samsung, in contrast, would sell many more of them; far more users would have issues; and those stories would get much more attention. They would get the same positive attention wave at launch, but it wouldn’t be worth it as there would be a later series of stories about how flawed the phone was; and it would make persons doubt choosing Samsung when going to buy a lower-end model.

The new Huawei Mate XT is the perfect example of this; but instead of making a risky product to bring attention to a brand, they’re doing so to make Communist China look more technologically advanced. And they aren’t.

Apple, Samsung, Google, and any other Western brand you could name could release a tri-fold phone today; but they don’t want to as it would be extremely easy to break, run software unreliably, and make no business sense. By contrast, none of that matters to Huawei, as they have the Chinese Communist Party on their board.

Even ignoring the folding screen, it’s a terrible phone. Because of the tariffs, it’s running chips and software made exclusively in and for Communist China, and they’re catastrophically worse than Snapdragon chips — made in Free China — and Android — made in America. This is bad for people who live in Communist China — where the phone will be exclusively released — but for those who buy an imported phone, it would make it basically unusable. Want any Western apps, or to connect it to a mobile provider? Too bad; and though it sells for $2,800, through Giztop, it’s $5,000.

Please don’t buy it — and by that, I mean both not to spend your money on it, and not to view this as some technically impressive phone. It’s not. It’s a false image of progress, pushed by a regime that spends its days doing just that in every other domain.