Blackview Hero 10 Review: The $400 Foldable Phone

Remember when foldable phones were these unbelievably futuristic luxury handsets that were considered both experimental and expensive? The first foldable phone from Samsung, the Galaxy Fold, retailed for $2,000; Huawei’s first foldable phone, released a few months later, had a $2,700 asking price and was resold on the import market for over $3,500.

That was just five years ago. And the technology has matured and commoditized enough that you can now get a premium foldable phone for not much more than a normal phone.

And Shenzhen OEM Blackview is now taking it to another level by making the first affordable foldable phone. It’s a clamshell flip phone (not the larger book-like foldable), but it’s officially priced at just $400.

The Hero 10 features a 6.9-inch 120Hz 2.5K OLED screen that folds in half to become a smaller box roughly the size of a wallet.

The main foldable display looks good, though maximum brightness is a bit dimmer than the recent batch of foldables from bigger names. It’s got a relatively pedestrian Helio G99 chip from MediaTek, but a solid 108-megapixel camera sourced from Samsung. The 4,000 mAh battery is also quite large for a flip foldable.

The most crucial part about the foldable phone is the hinge and screen, and I can say the Blackview Hero 10, at least my unit, folded and unfolded a few hundred times during my testing without issues. However, I did hear from a peer that his unit has a very minor creaking at the hinge area sometimes when he unfolds. He stresses it’s been very minor. But still, perhaps concerning. Blackview is a smaller OEM without the R&D budget of bigger brands.

Elsewhere, I find the software — Android 13 — to be fine. It’s a bare bones vanilla version of Android, and it performed as it should. The hinge also allows the phone to stay in place mid-way, which allows the UI to take advantage and turn the Hero 10 into something like a mini laptop.

Overall, the Blackview Hero 10’s biggest draw is its very low price for a foldable phone. If you’re okay with the risk that comes from buying from a smaller brand, the Hero 10 may be worth a look.