Marketing of Mate X: Huawei announces that it is ready

Initially announced for February 2019, Mate X could be launched in the coming weeksaccording to information released by Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei, at the 2019 IFA. It was during this exhibition held in Berlin from September 9 to 11 that Samsung unveiled the improved version of its folding smartphone: the Galaxy Fold, which will be available on the French market from tomorrow (September 18, 2019). It is therefore logical that the Chinese manufacturer should consider quickly bringing its foldable smartphone to market as well so that its direct competitor does not get too far ahead. This competition between Huawei and Samsung for folding smartphones reinforces the trust that Chinese smartphones can have in terms of performance and reliability.

The technical characteristics of the Huawei Mate X

What is behind Huawei’s first folding smartphone? Unlike the Galaxy Fold which folds inwards, Mate X folds outwards. In practical terms, this means that the screen is always visible when the phone is folded. The bending direction remains vertical. For the moment, only Lenovo is considering a horizontally foldable smartphone with the Motorola RazR, a kind of reminder of the famous flap phone, which, according to internal leaks, would be released towards the end of the year. It should also be noted that Samsung has registered a patent on a smartphone with a horizontal folding system without any further information filtering.

Returning to the Mate X, it features an 8-inch OLED display when unfolded (6.6 inches when folded) and offers a resolution of 2480 x 2200 (unfolded). It has 8GB of RAM and 512GB of internal storage capacity that can be expanded to 256GB with a nanoSD card.

 

Once again, Huawei has teamed up with Leica for the camera that will equip the Mate X. It features a 40 megapixel wide angle lens, a 16 megapixel ultra wide angle lens and an 8 megapixel telephoto.

It will be possible to install two SIM cards on Huawei’s foldable smartphone. Another advantage is the SuperCharge technology that allows the battery to be recharged in a few minutes.

 

And under the hood, what do we have? Huawei has equipped its Mate X with the modem Balong 5000 and the Kirin 980 processor. Rumours, supported by Richard Yu himself, suggest that the next version of the Mate X could be equipped with the Kirin 990 processor.

Finally, in terms of connectivity, the Mate X is announced as being compatible with 5G.

Why did you delay the commercialization of Mate X ?

Two reasons explain the delay in the marketing of Mate X. The first concerns the perperiods encountered by Samsung with its failed prelaunch of the Galaxy Fold. As a reminder, the latter was to be released in February a few days before the Mate X. Finally postponed, the release was scheduled for last spring. Beta testers, mainly journalists and youtubeurs, then received a Galaxy Fold preview. But the feedback showed major malfunctions and led Samsung to cancel the release of its smartphone in order to correct them and redesign it. Huawei therefore wanted to be careful and avoid the same inconveniences. This is implicitly confirmed by Richard Yu when he announced that Huawei is waiting for the green light from developers to commercialize its smartphone.

It is also likely that trade tensions between the United States and China also contributed to this delay. These have led to a suspension of commercial relations between Huawei and Google and could force the Chinese giant to do without Android for these next smartphones.