Huawei unveils new P60 and Mate X3 phones in China

Huawei has lifted the lid on its new flagship phones Huawei P60 and P60 Pro, announcing their availability for the Chinese market alongside the company’s latest foldable Mate X3.

Apart from these anticipated devices, Huawei also showcased the remarkable P60 Art (see image above), a smartphone with an asymmetrical camera array and a pearlescent blue finish.

While these phones are only available in China for now and will be available for purchase in early April, a Huawei spokesperson confirmed to Tech Advisor that “foreign versions will be announced on May 9th in Munich.” What kind of device is not disclosed.

It’s been a long time since the launch of the Huawei P50 Pro back in August 2021, and Huawei’s move to an occasional release mirrors that of the Mate 50 Pro, which happened about two years after the Mate 40 Pro.

There is nothing wrong with that – I advocated the abolition of the annual update cycle. The anticipation allowed Huawei designers to get creative.

These phones may not have Google services, but in China it doesn’t matter, and here Huawei is pumped to the limit.

The P60 Pro has a distinctive camera design that, like many P-series phones before it, is designed to be held in a landscape orientation, emphasizing the device’s camera-first character. It’s also available in Rococo White, which has a marbled look that Huawei says is unique and different on every device.

Assistant X3

The foldable smartphone and the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4 rival the Mate X3 and look incredibly premium with a huge foldable 7.85-inch internal display and a virtually bezel-less 6.4-inch external display. Both have a 120Hz refresh rate, and like the Honor Magic Vs and Oppo Find N2 Flip, the Mate X3 closes completely flat.

The Mate X3, regular P60, P60 Pro, and P60 Art are powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1, a chip released in 2022. Due to Huawei’s current US trade ban, this chip is limited to 4G only – there’s no 5G here. .

The P60 Art is the most powerful model of the P60, with the same dual 48MP main and telephoto lenses as the P60 Pro, but with a superior 40MP ultra-wide lens compared to the Pro’s 13MP lens.

This is reflected in pricing, with the P60 Art starting at ¥8,988 ($1,320 / £1,070) for 512GB storage and going up to ¥10,988 ($1,600 / £1,300) for 1TB. The foldable Mate X3 starts at a whopping 12,999 yen ($1,900 / £1,550).

As with the Mate 50 Pro before it, the 48MP primary sensor has a physical variable aperture, while moving parts allow you to select from f/1.4 to f/4.0 in ten different steps.

All three P60s have the same 6.67-inch 120Hz OLED panel, but the regular P60 has cameras with the same 48-megapixel variable aperture main lens, as well as a 12-megapixel telephoto lens and a 13-megapixel ultra-wide-angle lens.

But while this telephoto lens has a lower resolution sensor, it’s curious that the P60 has a 5x optical zoom, while the P60 Pro and P60 Art only offer 3.5x. However, the latter two can increase digital zoom up to 200x with Huawei’s new “Super Spotlight Night Vision Telephoto Lens”.

These small details show how incremental updates and differences between the best smartphones of 2023 are. All of these new Huawei phones look like good choices for the Chinese market, especially considering the regular P60’s starting price of 4,488 yen ($650/£530).

The large 5100mAh battery in the P60 Art is a silicon-carbon cell rather than the traditional Li-ion batteries used in other P60s and all other smartphones. The technology is supposed to have a higher energy density to increase the service life.

It is making its way into phones in Asia, including the recent China-only version of the Honor Magic 5 Pro.