You may recall that when Huawei started accepting reservations for its 2022 flagship Mate 50 series, the company has received over one million reservations. The phones were introduced on September 6 and included the Mate 50, Mate 50 Pro, Mate 50 RS Porsche Edition, and entry-level Mate 50e. Sales started on September 21 and Chinese consumers gobbled them up.
Strong demand greets the release of the Huawei Mate 50 series
Long queues in China greeted the Mate 50 series at Huawei company stores and after selling out its first production, Huawei’s head of consumer products Yu Chengdong (known to PhoneArena readers as Americanized by Richard Yu) said the company would quickly ramp up production. to answer the question. Yu said: “Yesterday, the Huawei Mate 50 series officially went on sale, and a large number of enthusiastic consumers came to Huawei stores across the country to buy machines. Thank you very much for your love and support for Mate 50 series! We will speed up production to ensure product supply so that more consumers can use the powerful Mate 50 series mobile phones.”
Yu’s Weibo page (via HuaweiCentral) was filled with photos of the long queues of consumers across the country who were so eager to buy a Huawei Mate 50 series phone. Huawei used to produce two flagship series every year, the P line photography-focused (pun intended) at the start of the year, followed by the feature-rich Mate series towards the end of the year. But US restrictions on Huawei have limited its ability to source chipsets, which has limited the company to shutting down between flagship models each year. For example, in 2023, Huawei will launch the P60 series.
The chips used for three of the Mate 50 phones are the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 SoC. Now you might be wondering how Huawei can use Qualcomm’s most advanced application processors if it’s prevented from doing so by the United States. The answer is simple, these are modified to work only with 4G networks. The cheaper Mate 50e has the Snapdragon 778G 4G under the hood.
Huawei is reportedly targeting sales of 10 million units for the Mate 50 lineup and it looks like that goal will be reached in just a few days. The company still has a long way to go to get back to its previous peak when it was the world’s second-largest smartphone maker. But the United States, claiming that Huawei poses a threat to national security, has placed the company on the Entity List, which bars it from accessing its US supply chain. This meant there was no longer a Google Mobile Services version of Android requiring the company to develop its own Harmony operating system (with version 3.0 released with the Mate 50 line).
The following year (exactly one year to the day, really suspicious timing), the United States changed its export rules preventing foundries that use American technology to produce cutting-edge chips from shipping them to Huawei. The Chinese manufacturer was at the time the second customer of TSMC after Apple. This tells you something about the demand for chipsets that TSMC could lose this business and continue to thrive.
Mate 50 Pro and Mate 50 displays support a billion colors
The Huawei Mate 50 Pro sports a 6.74-inch AMOLED display with 1212 x 2616 resolution and 19.5:9 aspect ratio. The display supports 1 billion colors and has a refresh rate of 120 Hz. The device has 8 GB of memory and 256 GB or 512 GB of UFS 3.1 storage.
Long queues in China greet Mate 50 series selling out
On the back is a 50-megapixel camera sensor with a variable aperture ranging from f/1.4 to f/4.0. A 64MP periscope telephoto lens offers 3.5x optical zoom and a 13MP sensor drives the ultra-wide camera. A 13MP selfie snapper is on the front along with a Time of Flight 3D camera for facial recognition. Oh, did we mention the Mate 50 Pro sports an iPhone-like notch? A 4700mAh battery keeps the lights on and charges at 66W. It also offers 50W wireless charging and 5W reverse wireless charging.
The Mate 50 has a 6.7-inch AMOLED display with 1224 x 2700 resolution and 90Hz refresh rate. It comes with 8GB of memory and 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB of storage. It has the same 50MP camera sensor as the Mate 50 Pro with variable aperture. There’s also a 12MP periscope telephoto lens with 5x optical zoom and a 13MP ultrawide camera. The 4460 mAh capacity battery has the same charging speeds as the Mate 50 Pro.
If you’re a phone enthusiast, it might warm your heart to see strong demand for Huawei’s latest flagship phones.