Wide-Screen Phone Race: Oppo, Honor Chase Huawei's 180K-Unit Hit

Huawei sold 180,000 Pura X View phones on the first day they hit the Chinese market in September, and that single number has redrawn the roadmap for two of its biggest rivals. The Pura X View is not a foldable. It's a flat slab with a screen so wide it looks like someone took a traditional phone and stretched it horizontally—the kind of shape that has lived inside expensive foldables for years, locked behind price tags above $1,600. Huawei found a way to give people that shape without the hinge, the fragility, or the cost. Now Oppo and Honor are racing to follow.

The story of how this happened starts with a different phone. In spring 2025, Huawei released the original Pura X, a foldable with an unusually wide 16:10 screen. Something unexpected occurred: owners in China began using it without ever unfolding it. Accessory makers even sold cases designed to physically prevent the fold. The signal was unmistakable. People wanted the shape, not the mechanism. Huawei listened. It removed the hinge, kept the width, and created a 6.39-inch phone that weighs 201 grams and measures just 6.68 millimeters thick. The screen runs at 120Hz with a 96.1 percent screen-to-body ratio and sits behind 1.05-millimeter bezels on all sides. Inside is a 7,000-milliamp-hour battery using silicon-anode technology, which packs more energy into the same space than traditional graphite. The camera setup mirrors Huawei's flagship approach: a 200-megapixel main sensor paired with a 50-megapixel periscope telephoto lens. The price started at $895, or about 5,999 yuan. That first day's sales figure—180,000 units—matters because Huawei's two wide foldables combined have shipped roughly 2.9 million units over their entire lifetimes. Moving six percent of that total in a single day suggested the simpler, cheaper version could reach an audience the foldables never touched.

Oppo is moving fastest among the challengers. According to Digital Chat Station, a Chinese tipster with a strong track record on hardware leaks, Oppo's wide phone will launch alongside the Find X10 Ultra, its premium camera flagship, sometime in the first half of 2027. The prototype reportedly carries a 200-megapixel main camera, a periscope telephoto lens, and a 7,000-milliamp-hour battery. The processor is either a Snapdragon 8-series or Dimensity 9-series chip—both faster on paper than Huawei's Kirin 9030S. By pairing the wide phone with its most expensive camera device, Oppo is signaling this won't be a budget experiment or a quirky side project. It's positioning the wide slab as a premium tool. Honor is further behind, still in development with no confirmed specifications. Other Android brands are moving slower still, with no clear timeline. Neither Oppo nor Honor has officially acknowledged their plans, so every specification remains subject to change.

The mathematics of screen size reveal why this shape is gaining traction. A diagonal measurement hides the real story. The Pura X View's 6.39-inch screen, measured diagonally at a 16:9.5 aspect ratio, delivers roughly 115 square centimeters of display area. A typical 6.83-inch phone at 20:9 offers about 113 square centimeters. The wide phone gives you 16 percent more width while holding nearly identical total screen space—like trading a tall glass for a wide mug that holds the same amount. The real advantage emerges in video. A standard tall phone in portrait mode has a width-to-height ratio of about 0.45, while TikTok and Instagram Reels videos are 0.56. The Pura X View hits 0.59, meaning vertical videos fill nearly the entire screen without cropping or letterboxing. Flip it sideways, and standard 16:9 YouTube videos also fill edge to edge, with minimal black bars. The wide shape aligns with how most people actually consume content.

There are complications in the Oppo leaks. One report describes a 7.6-inch prototype screen, while an earlier leak mentioned a 6.3- to 6.4-inch panel. Those numbers cannot describe the same pocketable device. At 7.6 inches with a 16:10 shape, the screen alone would be roughly 102 millimeters wide before adding any frame—wider than most phones today, which range from 71 to 78 millimeters. That's a small tablet, not a one-handed phone. The 7.6-inch figure matches the inner screen size of Apple's $1,999 iPhone Duo and Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold 8, suggesting either a measurement error or that Oppo is testing multiple sizes and hasn't committed to one. A 6.4-inch wide slab makes more sense: it matches Huawei's proven size and keeps the device usable in one hand. The rest of the Oppo specification sheet is more credible. A 200-megapixel camera, periscope zoom, and 7,000-milliamp-hour battery are components Oppo already ships on flagships. A Snapdragon 8-series processor would give Oppo a clear performance advantage over Huawei's chip.

The trade-offs are real and uneven. A wide phone excels at video and photography—both vertical and horizontal content fit better. Reading becomes more comfortable; wider lines of text mean fewer awkward line breaks in articles and e-books. Split-screen multitasking finally feels usable instead of cramped. Many games reveal more of the map. But typing suffers. The keyboard spreads wider, forcing your thumb to stretch farther. On a tall phone, the keyboard occupies a smaller portion of screen height; on a wide phone, it consumes more of your chat window. Scrolling through social feeds—X, Instagram, WhatsApp—becomes less efficient. These apps are built for tall screens; a shorter display shows fewer posts or messages at once. One-handed use grows difficult, and the phone becomes bulky in a pocket. An 83-millimeter-wide screen plus frame exceeds what slim jeans pockets accommodate. Some apps aren't yet tuned for the shape. WeChat, for instance, doesn't support tablet-mode login on the Pura X View in China. The advantage over foldables is that a wide slab never changes shape, so apps don't need to redraw themselves when the device opens and closes—a problem that plagued early foldables.

Price is the lever that makes this trend possible. The Pura X View costs $895. The original Pura X foldable starts at $1,118. The Pura X Max reaches $1,641. Apple's iPhone Duo sits at $1,999. The wide slab undercuts the most expensive foldable by roughly $750 and costs less than half the iPhone Duo. For buyers drawn to the wide shape but repelled by foldable prices, it's a genuine alternative. There's a complication for Oppo and Honor, though. Chinese phone makers raised flagship prices by up to 3,000 yuan (about $446) this fall because memory chip costs surged—driven by artificial intelligence data centers competing for supply. A camera-heavy Oppo wide phone with a Snapdragon 8 processor will likely exceed Huawei's $895 starting price. If Oppo wants to win on value, staying under roughly 6,999 yuan ($1,044) is critical. Cross that threshold, and the "cheaper than a foldable" pitch loses its force.

Western markets remain unlikely destinations for now. Huawei cannot sell phones with Google services in the United States, and the Pura X View is China-only. Oppo is the more intriguing case. It sells flagships globally, and the Find X10 lineup has a confirmed worldwide launch, so a wide phone could reach Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. The United States is improbable; Oppo doesn't operate there. The real indicator will be Samsung and Google. Samsung has already widened the Galaxy Z Fold 8. Google's next Pixel Fold leak points toward a sharper screen rather than a wider one. If a major Western brand ships a wide slab, the shape goes mainstream. Until then, the wide-screen phone remains a China-first trend with genuine potential in Asia and Europe by 2027. The shape only makes sense if you watch more than you type. If your day is mostly messages and feeds, the tall phone in your pocket remains the better tool.