Huawei’s foldable is thinner, lighter, and has more battery than Samsung

Huawei still makes phones, even though the US-China trade war has left most of the solid Android component vendors in complex relationships with Chinese tech companies. Huawei’s new phones are the flagship Huawei P60 Pro slab phone and the flagship foldable Huawei Mate X3.

The trade war has made these phones unique in the Android world. First, it has Qualcomm chips, but since Huawei is not allowed to use his Qualcomm’s latest tech, both chips in these phones are ‘Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 4G Mobile Platform’. . Besides being last year’s chip, this is a special Huawei-exclusive chip branded as ‘4G’. His 5G bands of both mmWave and sub-6 GHz are stripped.

Another oddity is the international shortage of Google Play apps. Huawei is not allowed to ship Google apps due to export bans. This is normal in China (where Google Play is not available), but abroad, YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Assistant, Docs, Search, Photos, etc. all use Android as a competitive consumer OS. Instead of the Google ecosystem, you’ll get an OS with Huawei Mobile Services, which includes Huawei AppGallery, Huawei Petal Maps, and Huawei Assistant (which looks more like a search tool and some widgets than a voice assistant). Huawei Pay, Huawei apps for books, music and videos.

The OS is branded “EMUI 13.1”, which probably means it’s based on Android 13. In China, the spec sheet lists the phone with Harmony OS 3.1, but internationally it gets Huawei’s EMUI 13.1, the name of his Android skin. The company claims that Harmony OS for mobile phones is his Android rival, not a copy-and-paste of Android’s source code. But when I looked into the phone version of Harmony OS 2.0 in 2021, I found a renamed Android code with no major additions or changes other than his usual Android skin. Huawei once claimed that its rival Android would launch internationally in 2022, but that has yet to materialize.

The Chinese and English phone promotion sites use the exact same pictures and apps, even though they appear to be on different operating systems. Some of the English-language photos that are supposed to show only his EMUI for the English market are labeled “HarmonyOS.” Indeed, the two OSes can share designs and have similarly branded apps. However, Huawei does not appear to have provided any real evidence. Android and Harmony OS seem to be the same OS with two different names.

Trade wars aside, the P60 Pro is pretty much a regular slab smartphone with a 6.67-inch 120 Hz, 2700×1220 OLED display, 8 GB of RAM, 256 GB of storage, and a 4815 mAh battery. IP68 dust and water resistance, USB-C port, Wi-Fi 6, 88 W wired charging, 50 W wireless charging.

The most striking part of the design is the super-large camera opening on the back. It is only described as a 48 MP “ultra lighting camera”. It’s unclear if the super-large camera aperture is there for some function, or just to make the camera look bigger and more impressive. Had it used an inch sensor, I suspect Huawei would have said something about it. I like the big camera, though. It has a bit of a compact camera design that I’ve always been a fan of.Flanking the big camera is his 13 MP wide-angle lens and his 48 MP telephoto camera with an undisclosed zoom rate.