Huawei Mate X6 arrives with HarmonyOS Next, slimmer body and larger screens

26 November 2024

Huawei Mate X6 is now official with a body under 5 mm thick when unfoled. It is a massive upgrade over its year-old predecessor with slightly bigger displays, a new set of cameras and the in-house HarmonyOS Next straight out of the box.

As Huawei tradition goes lately chipset is not mentioned. We expect a Kirin 9100 – a 6nm platform that is still nowhere near modern flagships.

Inside the Mate X6 is a foldable 7.93" LTPO panel with a nearly 1:1 ratio and a resolution of 2,440 x 2,240 pixels. The display has a 1-120 Hz variable refresh rate. It comes with up to 1,800 nits peak brightness and over 1 billion colors.

The cover has a 6.45" LTPO OLED display with a 1080p resolution. It matches the refresh rate of the foldable screen, with the peak brightness going even higher – 2,500 nits.

There are four cameras on the back of the Mate X6. We have already seen three of them on other Huawei phones. The 50 MP main one with f/1.4-f/4.0 variable aperture comes from the Pura 70 Pro+, and the 48 MP telephoto with 90 mm equivalent focal length and up to 4x optical zoom is from the Mate 60 Pro. The 40 MP ultra-wide-angle with AF is also available on the Pura 70 Ultra.

The fourth lens is for a hyperspectral sensor that receives over 1.5 million colors. Its job is to enhance the performance of the other shooters and adjust color accuracy with an engine called XD Fusion.

Huawei Mate X6 measures an almost impossibly thin 4.3 mm unfolded, but it is heavier than the Mate X5 with a weight of 239 grams. The battery capacity on is either 5,110 mAh or, in the case of the 16 GB RAM version, 5,200 mAh.

Wired charging is rated at 66W and the phone supports up to 50W wireless and 7.5W reverse wireless charging.

The new foldable has a redesigned antenna, dual-satellite communication (only the Chinese satellites Beidou and Tiantong), a three-dimensional vapor chamber with liquid cooling and several graphite layers, and a second-gen Kunlun Glass protection for the cover display.

Huawei also improved the water drop hinge, and it is now smoother when moving while also being more durable because apparently it is made of steel material used in rockets. The Mate X6 is also IPX8 certified for water protection, and the cover screen can still work underwater.

Huawei was left to develop its operating system over five years ago, and the Mate X6 is one of the first products with a new OS built on an entirely new in-house kernel. It is called HarmonyOS Next and brings many AI features powered by a domestic large language model (LLM).

The phone, being designed for multitasking, comes with exclusive split-screen features like gathering notes while watching a video lecture, document preview and summary, and rewriting captivating texts for social media.

We must point out that only some devices will ship with HarmonyOS Next 5.0 out of the box. The rest come with HarmonyOS 4.3, which is still based on the Android AOSP kernel.

Huawei offers Mate X6 in five colors – Gray and White with a glass/plastic finish, and Black, Red, and Blue with a leathery finish. All of them are on the company e-store with a starting price of CNY 12,999 ($1,800/€1,700) for the base 12/256 GB version.

The 12/512 GB variant is CNY13,999 ($1,935/€1,835), the 16/512 GB is CNY 14,999 ($2,070/€1,950), while the 16 GB + 1 TB option is CNY 15,999 ($2,200/€2,100).

The company has not commented yet whether this phone will go global or will be the third foldable in a row (after the Mate X5 and Mate XT Ultimate) to stay exclusive for China.

Source (in Chinese)