HUAWEI Mate X6: Unfold the Classic

2024-12-23

The HUAWEI Mate X5 was awesome, but only people in China got to experience it. Its successor, the HUAWEI Mate X6, began its global rollout this week, so more people will have access to HUAWEI’s cutting-edge foldable technology. The company considers this its true flagship foldable.

HUAWEI’s folding design has slimmed down significantly since the Mate X5. The new Mate X6 measures only 9.85mm thick when folded (and 4.6mm when unfolded), compared to 11.1mm/5.3mm for its predecessor. It’s a bit lighter too at 239g vs. 243g.

The quad-curve frame offers rounded corners for your palms in both configurations for extra comfort. When folded, the Mate X6 offers a 6.45” OLED display (1,080 x 2,440px) with a 120Hz LTPO panel. The big inner display measures 7.93” and it is an LTPO panel too (120Hz) with 10-bit colors to boot. The exterior is protected by second generation Kunlun Glass, which is 25 times more durable against drops.

HUAWEI says that the middle frame was the most important element in the Mate X6 design. It used aviation-grade aluminum (with a yield strength of 550MPa), which has good bending resistance.

The flexible inner display is backed by a carbon fiber plate whose high deformation resistance (380GPa) and higher stiffness (+65%) provide more protection.

HUAWEI has been working on improving smartphone photography and video capture for nearly a decade now and its efforts have crystallized in the XMAGE brand. And foldables need the most work, so only a select few models have an impressive set of cameras.

The HUAWEI Mate X6 is among them with a 50MP main (OIS), 48MP periscope (90mm, 4x, OIS) and 40MP ultra wide (13mm, 120°, AF). The main is an “Ultra Aperture” camera with an adjustable aperture – it goes from f/1.4 to f/4.0 in ten steps.

At night, you want as much light as possible reaching the sensor, so the phone opens the aperture wide (f/1.4). In good lighting conditions or when you want more depth of field, the aperture can be closed down. The phone handles this automatically – for example, it uses an aperture between f/2.8 and f/4.0 when photographing distant objects. For large groups of people, it switches to f/4.0 to ensure that everything and everyone is in focus.

The telephoto lens is actually capable of macro shots – its 90mm f/3.0 lens can focus at 5cm/2in. Tele macro lenses suffer from a shallow depth of field, so HUAWEI added a Frame function, which does depth of field stacking (combining multiple images focused at slightly different distances). The phone actually has another macro camera – the 40MP ultra-wide module can focus at 2.5cm/1in.

Accurate color rendering may be the trickiest part of photography. There are several flagship phones that leverage a color spectrum sensor to measure the ambient light and adjust their image processing accordingly. However, they often only have three channels: the familiar red, green and blue.

The HUAWEI Mate X6 is equipped with an “Ultra-Chroma Camera”, which is the branding for the company’s multi-point multi-spectral sensor, which has a whopping 1.5 million channels and brings an impressive 120% improvement in color reproduction. It helps the camera better capture the true color of people’s skin, their clothing and various other natural colors.

The camera app can create what HUAWEI calls “Moving Pictures”. No, not videos, but instead photos that create a feeling of motion – or remove motion instead.

There are two modes. One is Multiple Exposures, which creates a trail that traces the path of a moving object, offering a sense of its motion and speed. The other mode is Long Exposure that will remove the bustling crowd from your photo and only keep the subjects as long as they keep still.

The HUAWEI Mate X6 is priced at €1,999 for a 12/512GB unit. It’s not available just yet, but the first deliveries will start on January 6.

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