Huawei unveiled its first foldable phone at MWC. When unfolded, the so-called Mate X has a screen with a diagonal of 8″. There are no notches or holes in the screen; the Leica cameras are in a side panel at the back. The device costs 2299 euros.
When the Mate X is folded, that side panel is next to the screen, which is then at the back. These cameras also serve as a front camera when the Mate X is unfolded. The front screen has a diagonal of 6.6″ with a resolution of 2480 x 1148 pixels and the rear is 6.38″ and 2480 x 892 pixels. Together they form an 8″ screen with a resolution of 2480 x 2200 pixels.
When opened, the phone has a thickness of 5.4 mm and when closed it is about 11 millimeters. The sidebar is thicker because it contains more components. However, Huawei claims in its presentation that this 11 mm thick part ensures that the device is nice to hold there.
Huawei calls the hinge a falcon wing design. It is patented and contains about 100 different parts. When the phone is closed, there is no notch between the two halves. “Halves” may not be quite accurate to say; Due to the design, the fold is not in the middle, which it is with the competitor from Samsung.
The Mate X also supports 5g. Huawei has put its own Balong 5000 modem, which it announced last month, in the device. It is made on a 7nm process and supports 2g to 5g. It supports both NSA and SA network architectures and achieves combined download speeds of up to 7.5Gb/s. It contains four 5g antennas. Furthermore, the Mate X has a Kirin 980-soc that, for example, can also be found in the Mate 20 Pro, but the Mate X does have 8GB of ram.
The battery in the phone is divided over the two halves of the phone and has a total capacity of 4500mAh. The USB-C port for data and charging is located at the bottom of the sidebar. Huawei supplies a 55W charger that should be able to bring the battery from 0 percent to 85 percent charge in half an hour. The same charger also works with the newly announced MateBook X and delivers 65W.
Furthermore, the on-off button has a fingerprint scanner built in. The phone currently only has a single color variant, which Huawei calls Interstellar Blue. The device has dual SIM functionality. The second SIM slot also fits a memory card, but apparently this slot does not support 5G. The internal storage is 512GB. Huawei has also developed a case for the device.
Huawei is aware that 2299 euros for a smartphone is a lot. “There is so much new technology and innovation in this. The costs are very high right now. Our engineers are trying to make this more efficient,” said Huawei chief executive Richard Yu at the end of the presentation. The phone should be for sale from mid-2019.