Huawei Mate 10 release date, news and features

It’s been a big year for flagship phones, and the Huawei Mate 10 – along with the Huawei Mate 10 Pro – is likely to be the last significant one before everything kicks into gear again in early 2018.

But it might well have been worth the wait, as Huawei’s new phone is a big, powerful flagship with a sharp screen and a dual-lens camera.

We’ll let you know how well it all comes together when we’ve put the Huawei Mate 10 through a full review, but here’s everything you need to know about the specs, release date and features.

Cut to the chase

What is it? Huawei's new big screen flagship
How much will it cost? Probably around AED 2,299
When is it out? Soon probably

Huawei Mate 10 price and release date

Huawei hasn’t yet revealed the exact price or release date of the Huawei Mate 10, but we imagine you’ll be able to buy it soon, and if you do you’ll probably pay a lot, but potentially less than many other recent flagships.

The Huawei Mate 9 was priced at AED 2,299 and there’s a good chance the Huawei Mate 10 will have a similar price, though if anything it might well be more expensive, as it looks to be a reasonable upgrade.

Huawei Mate 10 design and display

The Huawei Mate 10 has a somewhat familiar yet distinctive design. It’s glass-backed, but with a reflective band running across it, and the edges are curved to help it sit comfortably in your hand.

The dimensions are 150.5mm x 77.8mm x 8.2mm and it weighs 186g, making it a similar size and weight to the Huawei Mate 9. You’ll be able to get the Mate 10 in Mocha Brown, Black, Champagne Gold or Pink Gold.

There’s a 5.9-inch LCD screen, just like on the Mate 9, but it’s had a resolution boost, as the Huawei Mate 10 is 1,440 x 2,560, giving it a pixel density of 499 pixels per inch. Oddly that actually makes it sharper than the Huawei Mate 10 Pro’s display – though that phone uses OLED, which is arguably superior.

The screen supports HDR 10 content, and the bezels around the Mate 10’s display are fairly small, though not as tiny as on the iPhone X or Essential Phone, and it's got a conventional 16:9 aspect ratio.

Huawei Mate 10 camera and battery

There’s a dual-lens camera on the Huawei Mate 10, consisting of a 20MP black and white sensor and a 12MP color one. Typically you’ll be using both sensors to take photos, with the Mate 10 combining image data from the two for a more detailed shot.

The main lens has an f/1.6 aperture, which means it has a larger lens opening than most smartphone snappers, which should help in low light conditions, as should its optical image stabilization. There’s also an 8MP front-facing camera.

As for the battery, the Huawei Mate 10 has a 4,000mAh one, which is bigger than most phones have, though the same size as the Huawei Mate 9’s.

It worked well there, delivering a lot of life, so hopefully the same will be true here. If nothing else the Mate 10 should charge fast, as Huawei claims it can get a day of life from 20 minutes plugged in.

Huawei also claims the battery management software will intelligently allocate resources to maximize life.

Huawei Mate 10 specs and OS

The Huawei Mate 10 is powered by an octa-core Kirin 970 chipset, with four cores running at 2.36GHz and four going at 1.8GHz. It’s aided by 4GB of RAM and a neural network processing unit (NPU), which Huawei claims improves performance and efficiency for AI-related tasks.

How well this will actually work remains to be seen, but we’ll be sure to properly put it to the test in our full Huawei Mate 10 review.

There’s 64GB of storage built-in, plus a microSD card slot supporting cards of up to 256GB. You also get Android Oreo, overlaid with Huawei’s new Emotion UI 8.0.

If you’ve used a Huawei phone before this should be familiar, but it comes with a few new tricks, such as a Smart Screen function, allowing you to easily run two apps side by side in split-screen.