Well, what do you know? Huawei’s nova line of smartphones has just been joined by a vertical folding phone. Hot on the heels of the “more serious” Huawei Pocket 2 folding smartphone is the Huawei nova Flip, a compact folding phone that is more fun. Unfortunately, Huawei has not caught on with the large external display fad.
The nova Flip [CH] has a measly 2.14” OLED that lives alongside its dual-camera setup on a rectangular camera bump. I don’t know man. With so many compact folding phones with a full external display, I am unsure how far Huawei can push this. But it is one of the thinnest—at 6.88 mm to 6.9 mm, depending on the back cover’s material—if not the thinnest compact folding phone, and it weighs a pretty ridiculously lightweight 195g.
The device opens up to a 6.95” flexible OLED bolstered by Huawei’s Display Turbo 2.0 true color display. This display offers 2,690 x 1,136 resolution (FHD+) while the external display has a crisp 480 by 480 resolution. Huawei has lifted a page from Apple’s playbook by giving its tech fancy names.
The display has SuperMotion which is essentially 1-120 Hz LTPO adaptive display technology, and there is the SuperVision which offers natural light perception, and pixel-level brightness adjustment. The display further rocks AI HDR for a high-dynamic display of images and Touch Turbo 4.0 precision touch.
The phone is also imbued with Harmony AI but we do not need to detail what “AI” can do. It is pretty much the same across so-called AI phones.
In the imaging department, it has a dual main camera comprising a 50 MP super-sensing 1/1.56-inch large sensor with AIS and an 8 MP 112° super wide-angle camera that also does macro as close as 2 cm. On the inside, it is outfitted with a hole punch camera featuring a 32 MP 90° wide-angle camera. Imaging, especially in the area of portraits, is bolstered by a newly upgraded Huawei Da Vinci Portrait Engine 2.0.
Another key selling point is Harmony Smart Communication 2.0 which ensures the device’s strong, reliable connection. It touts dual-card super acceleration to enable fast upload and download speeds, weak signal enhancement mode with tightly coupled fast and slow wave antennas, plus congestion signal enhancement tech that offers intelligent network optimization to reduce latency.
Other tech specs include Wi-Fi 6, dual-band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.2, USB 2.0 with Type-C interface, dual SIM, positioning (GPS L1+L5, AGPS, GLONASS, Beidou B1|+B1C+B2a+B2b, Galileo E1+E5a+E5b, QZSS L1+L5, NavIC), and a built-in 4,400 mAh battery with 66 W Huawei fast charging technology Turbo 2.0.
When it comes to the System on Chip, it is always a sensitive topic so, it is not a surprise that Huawei has chosen not to list the details. Anyhoo, it is a 64-bit Kirin 8000 chip featuring an octacore processor (4x ARM Cortex-A77 + 4x ARM Cortex-A55), Mali-G610 GPU, and I believe 12 GB of RAM with a choice of 256 GB, 512, GB, or 1 TB ROM.
The Huawei nova Flip has been launched in the China market with a starting price of 5,288 yuan [CH] which is around US$739 based on the current exchange rate.
Images: Huawei [CH].