Huawei’s long awaited first 5G smartphone, the Huawei Mate 20 X 5G, is out today in some European countries, such as the UK or Italy.
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The Huawei Mate 20 X 5G, announced by the Chinese manufacturer back in May of this year, is finally out, after suffering from a series of setbacks. Initially, it was expected the device would be announced and put on sale together with other 5G-compatible devices, at the same time as carriers announced the launch of their 5G networks. Due to the situation between Huawei and the US government, carriers decided to put on hold their decision, until now.
The Huawei Mate 20 X 5G is coming out today, the 26th of July, in some countries such as the United Kingdom or Italy, under the title of “Be a 5G pioneer” and “Connecting the future”, for a recommended price of 999£/1099€. We’ve already talked about the specifications of the device in the launch article, published a few months ago, but as a reminder, the Mate 20 X 5G is essentially the same device as the Mate 20 X 4G, launched together with the rest of the Mate 20 Series back in October 2018.
The Mate 20 X 5G is equipped with Huawei’s market-leading 7nm Kirin 980, coupled with HiSilicon’s Balong 5000, the world’s first 7nm 5G chipset, supporting both standalone and non-standalone network architectures. We’ve covered in a past article the difference, but in a few words, standalone are networks built entirely around 5G, while non-standalone are networks built on top of existing 4G LTE infrastructure.
The Mate 20 X 5G internals have been entirely redesigned to be able to fit the extra hardware needed to support the new connectivity equipment. This means the battery has been reduced from a massive 5000mAh to 4200mAh, the same as on the Mate 20 Pro and P30 Pro. Meanwhile, the charging has been upgraded, coming with 40W SuperCharge instead of 22.5W. The rest of the specs remain mostly the same, with a 7.2 inches OLED screen and a resolution of 2244*1080 pixels, support for the M-Pen and the same 40MP+20MP+8MP Leica camera as on the Mate 20 Pro/Mate 20 X (4G). Software-wise, the device comes with Google’s Android 9.0 “Pie”, together with Huawei’s latest EMUI9.1 and GPU Turbo 3.0. The RAM and internal memory have been upgraded, moving from 6GB/128GB to 8GB/256GB. An important detail is this new device has no headphone jack, this one having been removed, presumably to have more space for the extra hardware. Finally, the Mate 20 X 5G is currently the only 5G dual-SIM smartphone, an advantage that Huawei is actively using in their marketing.
In the UK, the device is already available from carriers such as Three and Sky Mobile, and is expected to come to more later on. Shops such as Clove Technology or Carphone Warehouse also have the Mate 20 X 5G up for pre-order, shipping in a few days. In other countries, such as Italy, the Mate 20 X 5G can be found on Amazon.it for 1099€, with a launch gift. For a few extra euros, Amazon will also include the Huawei FreeLace.
In the UK, Three’s launch offer includes the Huawei M-Pen, which will be given to the first 1000 customers.
Concerning existing 5G networks, these are still rare. In Europe, the first city (which is, ironically, also a state) to be fully covered by 5G is Monaco, which also picked Huawei to supply all the equipment required to make this happen. Other countries such as Spain, Germany, Switzerland and Italy also have some cities having access to 5G. In the UK, two carriers have already launched 5G networks in various cities, being EE and Vodafone. Vodafone currently covers 15 different cities, with more to come later this year. For those living in Belgium, we’ve already extensively covered the subject in past articles, with the country still trying to figure out what it wants. From the looks of it, Brussels is set to not receive 5G at all, and continue to suffer from its poor 4G network, making the Mate 20 X 5G irrelevant here.
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