Even though Mobile World Congress or MWC 2020 had plenty of companies pulling out due to the coronavirus scare, there are still several companies still attending and showing off new things maintaining their schedule.  Huawei is one of those companies are dropped a new folding phone for 2020: the Huawei Mate XS 5G.  

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The Mate XS continues what Huawei started on their 1st folding phone that only available in China.  You have a folding OLED panel that folding backwards compared to every other foldable we’ve seen thus far.  This is a tall + narrow 6.6inch display that fold out to an 8inch display measured wide thanks to its new Falcon Wing Hinge design. 

The internals offer their latest octa-core Kirin 990 5G CPU, 8GB of RAM, 512GB of storage expandable via microSD to add another 256GB, running EMUI 10.0.1 based off of Android 10, and a 4500 mAh battery w/ 55W Huawei SuperCharge fast-charging technology.  On the camera side of things, you got a f/1.8 40MP wide angle lens, f/2.2 16MP ultra wide-angle lens, f/2.4 8MP telephoto lens w/ OIS, and a ToF camera for better portrait shots and such.  These are all Leica lenses save for the ToF sensor and the way the hinge is built, it also doubles as the front-facing camera.  

The new Mate XS supports multi-tasking up to 3 apps at once but still suffers from the lack of Google Play services and apps.  The somewhat good news is that it will arrive to places other than China.  Huawei’s release says ‘global markets’ starting next month.   However, you’ll still have to swallow that large pill of pricing which equates to about $2,700.

Like last year, Huawei makes the most interesting folding phones IMO.  Just hard to pick one up due to pricing and no Google apps.  

Thoughts?

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