After the cancellation of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona due to the coronavirus, Huawei unveils its new products online, in streaming. Huawei's Consumer Division CEO Richard Yu speaks from a stage in Barcelona, but not in front of the usual crowd of industry insiders, to show the Mate Xs. It is the company's new folding smartphone that will arrive in Italy in a few weeks without Google's apps and services, due to the announcement imposed by the Trump administration last May.
Yu highlights the company's results in 2019, an unconventional year given the U.S. ban. Deliveries of Huawei smartphones in 2019 increased by 16.8% to over 240 million units, which allowed to consolidate the second global place in front of Apple and behind Samsung. Consumer division revenue increased to $ 67 billion. In Italy, Huawei's deputy general manager Pier Giorgio Furcas explains to ANSA, "we managed to keep our market shares. In 2019 our market share in the Italian smartphone sector was 28%".
The Mate Xs, Mate X's successor unveiled last year but blocked in the West by the US ban, has a 6.6-inch main screen and a 6.38-inch secondary screen. Open, the smartphone turns into an 8-inch tablet. The difference with the predecessor - in addition to support for 5G networks, improved opening gears and scratch-resistant film - is the Leica-branded photographic system positioned on the sidebar and composed of 4 cameras: a main 40 megapixel camera, an ultra-wide angle 16 mp, an 8mp telephoto lens (hybrid zoom up to 30X) and a 3D Depth Sensing Camera.
The leaflet is based on the open source version of Android and is equipped with Huawei's Kirin 990 5G processor. The application store is Huawei's App Gallery, on which the company allocated $ 1 billion - 10 million in Italy - to attract developers last fall.
"In November, the App Gallery had one million developers, today there are already 1.3 million", notes Furcas stressing that "each app must pass four levels of security before being published on the store". Mate Xs will arrive in Italy in a few weeks at a price of around 2,600 euros. Huawei has also unveiled the Mate Pad Pro, a 10.8-inch tablet with thin edges, magnetic keyboard and nib. Multitasking oriented, it has Kirin 990 processor, 6 GB of Ram and 128 GB of memory. It is expected soon in Italy at around 550 euros.
Finally, space for the latest models of MateBook laptops with Windows operating system: the new MateBook X Pro, powered by the 10th generation Intel Core processors; and the MateBook D. series