Overnight, Huawei has announced two new phones that it thinks will beat out all comers. The new Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro take on the best of Apple and Samsung and Google with the brightest camera lenses ever, Huawei’s slickest design and some brand new hardware and software inside. Here’s how much they’ll cost, and when you can get them in Australia.
Both phones use the Kirin 970 chipset announced at IFA, which is the first device to have a hardware neural processing unit (or NPU) built in as well as a 12-core graphics processor and octa-core CPU.
By all accounts, it’s a very powerful piece of silicon — and it lets the Mate 10 do some impressive stuff. That neural processor, for example, has been trained with hundreds of thousands of pictures to distinguish a cat from a dog or a flower from a landscape, to optimise photo settings for each scene.
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On the surface, the difference between the new Mate10 and Mate10 Pro is clear. The 5.9-inch Mate 10 uses a 16:9 ratio 2560x1440pixel LCD that supports HDR10 video, while the 6-inch Mate 10 Pro uses a 18:9 ratio 1920x1080pixel OLED — also with HDR support.
Because of that longer screen, the Mate 10 Pro’s fingerprint reader is around the back while the Mate 10 has one at the lower front; the Pro is also the only one of the two that’s water resistant.
We’ll get a black Mate 10 and a blue Mate 10 Pro in Australia, both of which have a glass body curved on all four sides.
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But beyond those, both are similar. The Mate 10 and its Pro variant both have that Kirin 970 processor inside, as well as massive 4000mAh batteries and Supercharge fast charging to top them up quickly.
Leica-branded camera lenses — two of them — remain on the rear, with both a 20-megapixel monochrome and 12-megapixel colour sensor. The entire show is run by Android 8.0 Oreo and Huawei’s new EMUI 8.0 skin on top of that — so expect some smooth performance and all the latest features.
Only here for the Australian pricing and release dates? Well, here you go.
The $899 Mate 10 will be on sale November 15 through Vodafone and retail sales in a black 64GB variant with 4GB of RAM, while the $1099 Mate 10 Pro will be out on December 4 only through Optus with 128GB of storage and 6GB of RAM.
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