Huawei’s new foldable Pocket S combines a familiar design with a lower price

Almost a year after Huawei announced its first clamshell foldable in the form of the P50 Pocket, it’s back with a followup. The new device is called the Huawei Pocket S, and it maintains the same foldable form-factor as the P50 with circular notification display and camera bumps on its outside. But the new phone comes with one fewer external cameras, a lower-end processor, and a lower starting price of ¥5,988 (around $818) versus ¥8,988 (around $1,228) for the P50 Pocket. 

That price means the Pocket S neatly undercuts its main foldable clamshell competitor, Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip 4 (which was priced at around ¥7,499, or $1,025, in China, according to Gizmochina). But continuing US sanctions against Huawei mean the Pocket S faces technical limitations including a lack of support for 5G networks. And if it ever gets a release outside China, don’t expect any Google apps or services to be natively available.

Otherwise, the basics of the Pocket S are the same as the P50 Pocket. There’s a 6.9-inch internal foldable display with a 120Hz refresh rate and a resolution of 2790 x 1188. Huawei says this can survive 400,000 folds. It’s paired with a small circular 1.04-inch external display that can act as a camera viewfinder, show notifications, and more. But you only get two rear cameras this time around (a 40-megapixel main and 13-megapixel ultrawide) with the P50 Pocket’s gimmicky 32-megapixel ultra-spectrum camera absent. The Pocket S also features a step-down midrange Snapdragon 778G processor this time around, versus the flagship Snapdragon 888 found in the P50 Pocket.

The P50 Pocket saw a global release announced a little over a month after its original launch in China last year, so it’s reasonably safe to assume that the Pocket S will do the same eventually. In China, GSMArena reports it’ll go on sale from November 10th.