Huawei Opens Pre-Orders for Its 'Wide Slab' Phone, a Shape-First Bet in a Shrinking Market
Huawei has opened pre-orders for the Pura X View, marketed as the world's first 'wide slab' phone, as reviewers test whether a wider rectangle changes how a handset feels — a form-factor gamble set against a market forecast to shrink in volume while climbing sharply in price.
Huawei opened pre-orders this week for the Pura X View, a device the company and its reviewers are calling the world's first "wide slab" (阔直板) phone — a bid to sell customers a different shape in a market where the shape has not changed in a decade. Launch posts from Huawei's terminal division, liked more than 24,000 times since Wednesday, promise to "break the boundary of form" (打破形态边界) and front the campaign with two "pioneer ambassadors": the actor Wang Anyu and the singer Annabel Yao, daughter of Huawei's founder Ren Zhengfei.
The pitch is disarmingly simple: the problem with the modern phone is that it is too narrow. The Pura X View keeps the straight, non-folding body of an ordinary handset but widens the screen's proportions, and early units have gone out to the reviewers whose unboxings decide whether a new form lives or dies. "It looks wide, it still grips in one hand — 200 grams, a 7,000-milliamp battery," was the summary from Atai's Late-Night Reviews, an early hands-on whose verdict became the device's first meme: "once wide, there's no going back" (旦阔难回), a pun on the phrase for a point of no return.
The questions the reviewers put to it are the ones any outsider would ask. "Did the phone actually get better once it got wider?" asked Li Dachui, whose full unboxing — billed as the first complete look at a new category — drew more than 3,000 likes and the same one-line conclusion. Dizai, another early tester, compared it with an ordinary slab feature by feature and decided that "Huawei has thoroughly figured out the wide form" (阔形态的手机算是被华为给玩明白了).
The gamble lands in a market that is shrinking and repricing at the same time. An IDC forecast published on Wednesday and widely quoted under Baidu's trending headline "phones aren't selling, but the price went up" projects global smartphone shipments of just over one billion units in 2026, down 16.7 percent in a year, while the average selling price climbs 27.6 percent to 581 dollars. That squeeze is the backdrop to Huawei's recent run of hardware experiments — foldables, triple-folds, and now a wider rectangle: when the volume pie is contracting, the growth left is in selling shape itself, at a price that presumes buyers will pay for novelty.
The company has not said when pre-ordered units ship. IDC's forecast has the market smaller and dearer through 2026, and Huawei's wager is that the one way left to sell a dearer phone into a smaller market is to make it a shape nobody else is selling.