Huawei launches Mate Xs, its second generation foldable

Huawei overnight announced its second foldable phone, and it’ll be pretty familiar if you’ve been watching the market. The Mate Xs doesn’t significantly change the form or design of last year’s original Mate X, but does bring a few changes under the hood.

First things first – the Mate Xs is still an 8-inch foldable device with an outward-facing screen (6.6-inches in the front and 6.3-inches on the rear) and a “post” (now called a “sidebar”) that holds cameras and other equipment, and locks the folded screen into place.

Mate Xs features a rear-facing SuperSensing Leica quad-camera array with 40MP main, 16MP wide and 8MP zoom cameras supporting up to 30x hybrid zoom (and, being a Huawei phone with a Leica-developed camera system, we expect will be pretty great). There’s no separate front-facing camera – for selfies, you can flip the phone around and use the rear display so you can see what you’re doing.

Mate Xs is a 5G phone, supporting non-standalone and standalone standards for connection to any network, along with older radio standards back to 2G. It also supports dual-sim 5G/4G.

Inside you’ll find one of Huawei’s most powerful processor systems yet, the Kirin 990 5G – an octa-core processor with base clock speeds of 2.8Ghz. we haven’t got specs on RAM and storage yet though, and suspect we won’t find out final details of specs on local units until closer to laumnch.

Any folding phone is only as good as the hinge design over which its flexible screen is placed, and companies love to talk about their hinges on these devices. Huawei’s bringing an updated version of the original Dragon Hinge that the company says features over 100 moving parts all working together in harmony.

Huawei’s EMUI 10 is running the show, based on open source Android. There’s no Google apps/services in line with current US regulations but you’ll find Huawei substitutes like AppGallery instead of the Google Play store. How these alternatives work for you will very much depend on how Google-y your life is.

The Mate Xs user experience has a big focus on multitasking capabilities – you can run multiple apps simultaneously across multiple areas of the screen, and even in a floating window if needed.

Huawei Australia says the Mate Xs will be coming to our shores later this year – we can expect detailed specs, pricing and availability closer to launch.