What you need to know
- Huawei today announced a new flagship clamshell foldable, the Pocket 2.
- The Pocket 2 has the most rear cameras of any flip-style foldable, with four arranged in a circular bump.
- The Huawei Pocket 2 will be available in China, but there is no official confirmation on whether there will be a global launch yet.
Huawei has officially launched its latest clamshell foldable, the Huawei Pocket 2, in China. It’s the company’s first flagship flip-style foldable since 2021 when it released the Huawei P50 Pocket. More importantly, the smartphone has a nearly 7-inch main screen and five total cameras, which makes it competitive with the best folding phones currently available.
The problem is, you probably won’t be able to get one. Huawei is still caught in the middle of a trade war between China and the U.S., and that’s part of the reason why the Pocket 2 features a 7nm processor in 2024. Additionally, while the Pocket 2 is available in China, it’s unclear when or if Huawei will release the smartphone globally.
Huawei is keeping a design for the Pocket 2 that’s very similar to that of the P50 Pocket and the budget Pocket S. There’s a small, circular cover display measuring 1.14 inches next to the rear camera system. Huawei managed to stick four cameras in that tiny camera bump: a 50MP main sensor, a 12MP ultra-wide sensor, an 8MP 3x telephoto lens, and a 2MP UV sensor.
Admittedly, that fourth sensor is a bit of a gimmick, but Huawei says that it can be used for things like detecting UV intensity levels and discovering skin spots that aren’t visible to the untrained eye. Still, the four rear sensors on the Huawei Pocket 2 are the most we’ve seen on a clamshell foldable yet.
You should also keep in mind that since the Pocket 2 is a foldable, all of the cameras are basically selfie cameras (with the exception of the UV sensor). You can use the cover display, however tiny it may be, as a viewfinder to take selfies with the rear camera system.
The main screen is an LTPO OLED panel measuring 6.94 inches. As for the chipset, we don’t know exactly which one the Pocket 2 uses. However, the 7nm Kirin 9000S processor is almost certainly what powers the Huawei Pocket 2. It’s a competent chip, but it won’t hold up against the best from other chip fabricators like TSMC. It comes with 12GB RAM, and the storage options range from 256GB to 1TB.
You can order it in China starting today directly from Huawei. The Pocket 2 starts at around $1,000 and comes in four colors. But again, we don’t know whether Huawei will launch the Pocket 2 worldwide yet.