Huawei Mate X2 announced with in-folding design, periscope camera

Huawei announced its latest flagship smartphone, Huawei Mate X2, at an event in China yesterday. The phone is wedge-shaped – it’s thickest near the camera module, and it gradually slims down to just 4.4 mm on the other end. The camera end is the thickest part, and for a good reason – this is the first foldable phone with a periscope lens.

The inner display measures 8” in diagonal and has a squarish aspect ratio of 8:7.1 and a resolution of 2480 x 2200. The external screen is 6.45” in diagonal and has a 21:9 aspect ratio.

Both screens are OLED panels with a 90Hz refresh rate. The internal panel supports DCI-P3 colors, and the external one does not. The external one wins out in terms of touch sampling rate, 240Hz vs. 180Hz.

The inner screen boasts the industry’s first “magnetically-controlled nano-optical layer.” That’s a fancy way of saying it minimizes light reflection and glare (reflectivity is below 1.5%, compared to 5% or higher for the Galaxy Z Fold2). There’s no ultra-thin glass, however.

The Kirin 9000 chipset powers the Huawei Mate X2. Unlike the competing Snapdragon and Exynos chips, this one is fabbed at TSMC’s 5 nm foundry. It has four Cortex-A77 cores (one of which runs at 3.13 GHz) and four A55, plus a Mali-G78 MP24 GPU.

Interestingly, the official specs list the OS as EMUI 11.0 based on Android 10. We were expecting HarmonyOS out of the box. Anyway, the phone has 8 GB of RAM plus 256 or 512 GB of storage.

The quad-camera on the back (co-developed with Leica) is built around the 50MP main module with a 1/1.28” RYYB sensor. It has an f/1.9 aperture and supports OIS, and can record 4K video.

An ultrawide module is available, too, with a 16MP sensor. It doubles as a macro camera as well (2.5 cm distance). The lenses’ exact focal lengths are 17mm, 23mm, 70mm, and 240mm.

The 4,500 mAh battery supports Super Fast charging at 55W using the supplied adapter. The retail package is actually pretty well stocked with a USB-C cable, USB-C headset (there’s no 3.5 mm jack), a leather protective case, and screen protectors pre-applied on both screens.

The Huawei Mate X2 comes in Black, White, Crystal Blue, and Crystal Pink colors, is priced at 17,999 yuan (US$ 2783) for the 256GB storage version, and the 512GB storage version costs 18,999 yuan (US$ 2938).

Huawei Mate X2 specifications