If you are a power user who always must have a smartphone and a tablet with you, and totally in need for multitasking, then Huawei’s new foldable Mate Xs is for you. Or may be not – if your life is overly reliant on Google Services.

So, yeah, the Huawei Mate Xs is official and like Sony, Huawei made the announcement virtually yesterday (February 24, Barcelona time) in lieu of the canceled MWC 2020 due to the current outbreak of COVID-19.

As with Samsung Galaxy Fold and the brand’s previous offering, Mate Xs is essentially a smartphone and a tablet in one. Sporting a longish candy bar form factor when folded, it unfolds into an expansive 8-inch tablet.

Huawei Mate Xs Folding Smartphone

It has two displays that make up the 8-inch tablet: a 6.6-inch main screen and a 6.38-inch secondary screen. Speaking of display, two layers of aerospace-grade polyamide are fused together with an optically clear adhesive and so, yeah, no fake glass like the Galaxy Z Flip, which also means it will be susceptible to scratches pretty easily.

Mate Xs touts a new hinge technology called “Falcon Wing” that boasts over 100 interlocking parts and made with a zirconium-based liquid metal.

Mate Xs is still a true blue Android device with EMUI 10.0.1 running on top of Android 10. EMUI 10.0.1 supports multi-window function, which allows for two apps to be displayed side-by-side simply by dragging and dropping the apps.

If two windows aren’t enough for you, it also supposed a third floating window, so you can do things like texting without moving away from the other two apps.

NOW READ  Vivo X100 Series Smartphone Launched, Promise Pro Photography

On the imaging end, it has a Leica Quad Camera setup that serve both as the main and selfie camera. It has a 40 MP wide-angle lens camera, a 16 MP ultra wide-angle lens camera, an 8 MP 3x zoom telephoto lens camera and a Time-of-Flight camera.

The camera is bolstered by phase focus, contrast focus as well as AI Images Stabilization (basically software image stabilization).

The Huawei Mate Xs is a 5G-enabled device, but it is worthy to note that it is not using mmWAVE 5G; it’s a sub-6 5G device that has better coverage over the millimeter wave, but has lower top speed.

The new Mate Xs is powered by HiSilicon Kirin 990 5G SoC announced last year, featuring an octacore processor (2x Cortex-A76 based 2.86 GHz + 2x Cortex-A76 based 2.36 GHz and 4x Cortex-A55 1.95 GHz), a 16-core Mali-G76 GPU, and a dual “Big Core” + Tiny Core Neural-network Processing Unit (NPU).

It has 8 GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage, and supports storage expansion up to 256 GB with NM SD card. The device is kept juiced with a 4,500 mAh battery that supports Huawei SuperCharge, and it has, of course, the usual like dual-band WiFi, Bluetooth 5.0, USB-C, GPS, NFC and a bunch of sensors.

Not sure when it will be available, though. But when it does become available, be prepared to shell out an exorbitant sum of €2,499 (or around US$2,710). So, yes, Huawei’s folding screen device is finally available outside of China.

All images courtesy of Huawei.

Published by Mike

Avid tech enthusiast, gadget lover, marketing critic and most importantly, love to reason and talk.