Huawei Mate X2 (2021): Everything You Need To Know
The Pitch
The Huawei Mate X2 sees Huawei abandon its own spin on what a foldable smartphone should look like in favor of trying to beat Samsung at their own game.
As far as high-end foldables go, the Mate X2 makes a more conventinal pitch, but it’s backed up by some pretty serious specs.
The Specs
Processor: Kirin 9000 5G
Inner Display: 8-inch OLED @ 90Hz
Outer Display: 6.45-inch AMOLED @ 90Hz
Resolution: 2200 x 2480 pixels
RAM: 8 GB
ROM: 256 GB / 512 GB
Expandable Storage: Yes, via Huawei’s Nano Memory support
Headphone Jack: No
Fingerprint Scanner: Yes, side-mounted
Operating System: Android 10 /EMUI 11 (no Google services support)
Battery Size: 4500mAh
Rear Camera: 50-megapixel (f/1.9) wide lens + 12-megapixel (f/2.4) telephoto + 8-megapixel (f/4.4) periscope + 16-megapixel (f/2.2) ultrawide
Front-Facing Camera: 16-megapixel (f/2.2) wide lens
The Reviews
Even if the Huawei Mate X2 comes with a lot of the same caveats and asterisks as the Mate Xs, the polished hardware has inspired a lot of praise from tech reviewers.
Android Authority’s Kris Carlon went so far as it to call it “the perfect foldable, with a giant asterisk for the Western market.”
The Huawei Mate X2 is poisoned perfection. Hardware heaven in a software purgatory. Like Huawei’s other recent flagships, it’s recommendable to only a small sliver of the population. The difference is that there are dozens of competitive alternatives to Huawei’s regular phones but no challengers to the Mate X2. It’s that good.
TechAdvisor’s Dominic Preston was similarly ambivalent. He concluded that consumers shouldn’t buy the Mate X2, but should really want to.
Huawei already feels like it’s mastered the foldable form factor, and from a design standpoint it’s hard to see all that much room for improvement — an astonishing feat so early into the foldable era.
The Verdict
While there are some power users out there who might be willing to work within the limits of the software in exchange for high-end hardware on offer, the Huawei Mate X2 probably asks too much of most consumers.
Even if the Mate X2 is a reminder not to count Huawei out of the foldable space just yet, it’s also a reminder that they have still have some fairly serious problems that they need to resolve.
