We’re getting a glimpse of the future. The Tecno Phantom Ultimate 2 is a tri-fold foldable smartphone, and while it’s just a concept for now, it offers a tantalizing glimpse of where manufacturers are heading with foldable design.
Beyond foldable phones like the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6, which has a single hinge and two panels for a single fold, the Phantom Ultimate 2 has two hinges and three panels. In other words, it can be folded three times and it looks spectacular.
The Tecno Phantom Ultimate 2 sports a 6.48-inch display, but what’s really impressive is that the device is just 11mm thick in this form. Sure, Honor made the Honor Magic V3 a foldable phone that’s just over 9mm thick, but the Phantom Ultimate adds another panel and hinge to its design. A special battery cover that’s just 0.25mm thick also helps give the Phantom Ultimate 2 its incredibly thin profile.
Unfold the panels and the phone becomes a 10-inch tablet with a 4:3 aspect ratio, much larger than the roughly 7-inch screens we’re used to on current foldable phones. This is effectively a full-sized tablet rather than a mini one, and Tecno has come up with some clever use of its dual-hinge system.
Flip the unfolded phone into portrait orientation and the bottom panel can be folded slightly to prop the device up on a desk. A virtual keyboard appears on the screen, making this a surprisingly cute laptop. Tecno claims the hinges are very strong and should pass 300,000 folds while minimizing creases (twice the number of hinges means twice the screen fold, remember) on the unfolded screen.
Tecno has also worked some software magic to make the icons and UI adapt to the phone’s orientation. For example, the phone can be placed between two people who can each use one side of the screen. This could be useful for collaboration or for translation functions, as we’ve seen from Samsung and Google. The rest of the hardware specifications are unknown, but we can see that it has three cameras placed inside a raised side section, much like the Huawei Mate XS. The possible downside to this camera design is that it may not lay flat on a desk.
The Phantom Ultimate 2 is the successor to the Phantom Ultimate rollable phone, and both are concept phones. Tecno isn’t saying when either will go into production, if at all. That doesn’t mean Tri-folding smartphones aren’t fully explored, as Huawei has teased (intentionally and unintentionally) its own tri-fold phone, whose full announcement is expected this year.
