Huawei Launches The Mate 20 X 5G Smartphone, Next Month in the UK

Huawei has announced the launch of its first commercial 5G handset after the initial reveal at MWC earlier this year. The Huawei Mate 20 X 5G will be available from June and has an RRP of £999. Yikes.

The phone is a 5G version of the Huawei Mate 20 X that we reviewed back in February, joining the regular Mate 20 and the Mate 20 Pro that rolled out last year. EE has confirmed that it will be offering the handset on its 5G network that will go live in 16 cities over the course of 2019, starting with London, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Belfast, Birmingham, and Manchester. Glasgow, Newcastle, Liverpool, Leeds, Hull, Sheffield, Nottingham, Leicester, Coventry, and Bristol will follow.

The Mate 20 X 5G comes with Huawei’s HiSilicon Balong 5G modem along with support for SA and NSA bands, though with reduced battery unit for housing an additional modem inside the phone. The Balong 5000 is the world's first 7nm 5G multi-mode chip, which is also set to be housed inside the upcoming Kirin 985 chipset.

Earlier this week at the OnePlus livestream event, EE revealed that the OnePlus 7 Pro 5G will be making its UK debut exclusively on EE. The service provider has also stated that it will be "bringing the previously unveiled Huawei 5G CPE Pro 5G home router and the Huawei Mate X 5G folding smartphone to the UK."

"Powered by Kirin 980 and the world’s first 7nm 5G multi-mode chipset Balong 5000, the latest Huawei smartphone introduces consumers to 5G with a premium experience comprising high-speed connectivity, flagship performance, large display, reliable battery life and more," reads the press release.

"The 7.2-inch 1 smartphone harnesses a wide spectrum of patented technologies to support standalone (SA) and non-standalone (NSA) 5G networking modes, as well as multiple generations of network technology, allowing consumers to experience high speed connectivity regardless of their mobile network operators’ infrastructure maturity."

Mate 20 X 5G features a 4,200 mAh power unit compared to the 5,000 mAh battery on the Mate 20 X. However, the 5G-enabled variant comes with a faster 40W fast charging while the non-5G model only features a 22.5W charging adapter. Additionally, the Mate 20 X 5G will also support the M-Pen stylus functionality which offers 4,096 pressure levels and is sold separately.

Besides that, the Mate 20 X 5G comes with the same Kirin 980 chipset which powered the original Mate 20 X with up to 8GB of RAM and 265GB of storage. The phone comes with a 7.2-inch FHD+ OLED display with a resolution of 1080 x 2244 pixels and a screen-to-body ratio of 87.6 percent.

The Mate 20 X 5G also equips the same camera setup which features a triple lens layout at the back. There’s 40 MP primary camera with f/1.8 aperture combined with a 20MP ultra-wide lens and an 8MP telephoto lens. The phone also features a 24MP selfie camera on the front with an aperture of f/2.0. The Mate 20 X 5G runs on Android 9 Pie with EMUI 9 on top.