This month, FACT magazine set its sights on the brand-new HUAWEI Mate Xs 2, the latest generation smartphone in the HUAWEI Mate Series.

HUAWEI’s brand-new flagship foldable smartphone, the HUAWEI Mate Xs 2, has hit the market and is making serious waves with its novel design and high-performance capabilities.

Exterior Design

The HUAWEI Mate Xs 2 is a beautifully designed, compact, foldable smartphone that is ultra-flat, ultra-thin and ultralight. It’s constructed from durable materials including glass fibres for the backplane – a material commonly used in the aerospace industry – along with aerospace-grade titanium alloys used in the screen structure. The phone’s Composite Screen comprises of four layers and shares a similar design to the anti-collision system found in modern cars. These layers act as a shock barrier that improve the phone’s resistance to drops and impacts, enhancing its overall durability. Furthermore, it feels great in hand, and fits easily into a pocket or purse.

The HUAWEI Mate Xs 2 showcases the industry’s first Doublerotating Falcon Wing Hinge design – a feature we found to be most impressive. This means the phone has an ultra-flat, foldable screen with no folding line running through the middle of it. In fact, when opened, the screen becomes as flat, smooth and consistent as a mirror. The hinge itself is made of ultra-light, high strength steel that has a substantial load-bearing capacity – again ensuring the phone is both lighter and more durable.

Hardware and Performance

When unfolded, the HUAWEI Mate Xs 2 has a 7.8-inch, TrueChrome Foldable Display with an 8:7.1 ratio. When folded, the screen measures 6.5-inches with a 19:9 display ratio. Additionally, the HUAWEI Mate Xs 2 boasts a resolution of 2480×2200 and a pixel density of 424ppi. This means that the new model has one of the highest resolutions and pixel densities available for a foldable phone. We found the Ultra HD True-Chroma Foldable Display to provide an excellent visual experience with its clear text and refined images. The HUAWEI Mate Xs 2 supports a refresh rate of up to 120Hz along with a touch sampling rate of 240Hz, providing the smartphone with a far faster screen response and an overall smoother display. We were able to effortlessly stream movies without any stalling or decrease in the resolution. Thanks to the fact it’s also an HDR screen that reproduces 1.07 billion colours, the quality of the movies was no less than outstanding. Furthermore, the 1440Hz high-frequency PWM dimming reduces screen flickering and helps to decrease eye strain, especially in underlit areas.

Functionality

A fantastic feature of the new HUAWEI Mate Xs 2 is its splitscreen function that enables both interaction and collaboration between different applications. It also allows for the use of two applications in parallel. This means we were, for example, able to construct emails whilst reading product reviews. We could chat on a videocall and read social media comments at the same time. Additionally, we could shop online and take notes simultaneously. This allows for a new level of time management and multitasking.

Swipe Gesture meant we were able to easily access and control the floating windows. We discovered that a diagonal swipe to the top left corner produced a split-screen; a diagonal swipe to the top right corner generated a new window pop-up; a sideways swipe minimised the window; an upward swipe brought back the full-screen display, and a downward swipe immediately closed the window. This practical approach allows for silkysmooth and efficient operations that save both time and energy.

Camera

Yet another outstanding quality of the HUAWEI Mate Xs 2 is the True-Chrome Camera System. This setup consists of a 50MP True-Chroma Camera, a 13MP Ultra-Wide-Angle Camera, and an 8MP Telephoto Camera. Featuring improved HUAWEI XD Optics, with brand-new information recovery technology, photo clarity has been improved by 10%.

The HUAWEI XD Fusion Pro True-Chroma Image Engine, coupled with the 10-Channel Multi-Spectrum Sensor and colour calibration with more than 2,000 colours, meant we were able to capture accurate and truly vibrant images.

The Mirror Shooting feature allows for both the shooter and the subject to preview the shot in real-time through the digital viewfinder of the camera, on both screens, at the same time. Furthermore, the HUAWEI Mate Xs 2 houses the new generation of AI Remove. When editing our photos, we could simply select various objects in a photo, select the ‘Remove’ function with one click, and voila! The AI image processing technology can also automatically identify the background of a photo and merge the colours and outlines to simplify the editing process.

Battery

The excellent standby battery life of the HUAWEI Mate Xs 2 is due to its high capacity 4600mAh battery. Additionally, this battery supports 66W HUAWEI SuperCharge, which means we were able to charge the smartphone from flat to 90% in just half an hour. This is thanks to an innovative parallel charging technique that increases the charging speed by 15%, allowing users to charge the device both quickly and safely.

Our Verdict

The HUAWEI Mate Xs 2 has surpassed previous generations in all areas of appearance and performance and now offers a truly unique, smooth, responsive and rewarding user experience. In fact, The HUAWEI Mate Xs 2 is our pick for best smartphone currently on the market. ✤

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