Huawei unveils Mate 20 series, takes aim at Apple, Samsung

LONDON -- Huawei's Mate 20 series is the first phone that can charge other phones wirelessly from its own battery and during its launch here Tuesday, the company flashed on a giant stage a photo of its new flagship powering up Apple's new iPhone XS Max. 

Huawei Consumer Business Group CEO Richard Yu took aim at the iPhone XS and Samsung's Galaxy Note 9 with the Mate 20 and Mate 20 Pro, packing his keynote here with benchmarks pitting the flagship phones in terms of power, performance, artificial intelligence and camera technology.

Shenzhen-based Huawei overtook Apple in terms of sales, placing second behind Samsung, but that was before the launch of the iPhone XS, XS Max and XR. The Mate refresh is among the last flagships to be unveiled before the end of the year. 

The Mate 20 and Mate 20 Pro are the first to be powered by Huawei's own Kirin 980 processors, which has twice the number of onboard neural engines compared to 2017's 970.

The Mate 20 and Mate 20 Pro are also the first Huawei devices to ship with Android 9 Pie, overlaid with its EMUI skin, with a simpler interface and gesture navigation. 

A 7.2-inch Mate 20 X, a refreshed Porsche Design Mate RS and the new Watch GT with 2 weeks battery life were also announced.

Unlike the Apple and Samsung flagships, however, the Mate 20 has Leica-engineered triple cameras on the back and an in- display fingerprint sensor on the Pro model.

The Mate 20 Pro's 4,200 mAh battery is the largest ever on a Huawei device. Its fast charging was also upgraded, capable of adding up to 1 percentage point of battery life in 30 seconds. 

The Mate 20 has 6.53-inch display while the Pro has a 6.39-inch screen, compared to 6.5 inches on the iPhone XS Max and 6.4 inches on the Note 9. The Mate 20 Pro has an iPhone-style cutout that allows for three-dimensional face unlock. 

The smaller Mate 20 has a "teardrop" style cutout. It also retains the back-mounted fingerprint scanner, lacking the advanced front camera in its more expensive sibling.

The 2018 Mate line improves upon the Leica-engineered triple cameras of the P20 series from earlier in the year. The Pro has a 40-megapixel wide angle lens, a 20-megapixel ultra wide angle lens and an 8-megapixel telephoto lens with up to 3 times zoom. 

The Mate 20 has a 16-megapixel ultra wide angle lens, a 12-megapixel wide angle lens and an 8-megapixel telephoto lens with 2 times zoom. 

The lenses are stacked in a square module, along with the flash, unlike the vertical, side mounted shooters on the P20 line.

The water and dustproofing were upgraded to IP68, at par with the iPhone XS line and the Galaxy Note 9. It will come in Emerald Green, Midnight Blue, Black and Huawei's signature Twilight gradient. 

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Huawei bets on Mate 20 vs latest from Apple, Samsung

LONDON -- Huawei, the world's second largest smartphone maker, is expected to showcase here Tuesday its latest Mate flagship to take on supersized offerings from Apple, Samsung and Google.

The Mate 20 series, the first phones to be powered with Huawei's own Kirin 980 chip, will be unveiled at the ExCel Exhibition Center at 1 p.m. (8 p.m. in Manila).

Shenzhen-based Huawei, which recently overtook Apple in terms of sales, is teasing "higher intelligence" for the Mate 20 line, which is traditionally geared towards power users and carriers over the camera technology from the P Series that are released earlier in the year.

The P20 Pro, which went on sale in April, was the first to offer triple rear cameras, engineered by Leica. It's the highest rated mobile camera on review website DxOMark, with its artificial intelligence-assisted scene recognition and up to 5 times optical and digital zoom.

The Kirin 980, which has 2 neural units, double that of the 970 from 2017, can recognize faces, objects and scenes up to 120 percent faster, according to Huawei.


Huawei also claims a 20-percent bump in performance, a 40-percent improvement in power efficiency and a 58-percent increase in overall energy efficiency.

Samsung also touted improved scene recognition with its Galaxy Note 9 while Apple showcased the AI smarts of its own A12 Bionic chip on the iPhone XS, XS Max and XR.

Google's Pixel 3 and 3 XL unveiled last week stuck with a single rear camera, but still harnessing the US internet giant's software smarts to deliver great shots that made the Pixel 2 and 2 XL one of the most highly rated mobile cameras of 2017.

In 2017, Huawei released the Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro, the first Mate phones with glass backs. The handsets had dual Leica cameras on the rear. The more premium Pro model had a tall, AMOLED screen compared to the LCD screen with a more conventional aspect ratio on the regular model.

source: news.abs-cbn.com