In many ways, China’s Huawei might be classified as a fitting rival for Korea’s Samsung given both company’s size and ambitions. Still, customers in the USA haven’t had as many opportunities to get their hands on top-end products from the former as they have an assortment of Galaxies, at least not via carrier contracts. This may be about to change, however, as rumors are now swirling that AT&T will see the release of Huawei’s Mate 10 come February.
It makes sense given the CEO of its Consumer Business Group, Richard Yu, had as recently as just last week indicated the flagship would be launched in the States as part of a major expansion effort:
“We will sell our flagship phone, our product, in the U.S. market through carriers next year. I think that we can bring value to the carriers and to consumers. Better product, better innovation, better user experience.”
The Mate 10 phablet packs a 5.9-inch QHD LCD, Huawei’s own 2.36GHz Kirin 970 octa-core SoC, Mali-G72 MP12 GPU, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of internal storage, dual rear cameras (12MP and 20MP, both with an aperture of f/1.6), an 8-megapixel front camera, a 4000mAh power cell, and Android Oreo. The phone also includes microSD support and a front-facing fingerprint reader.
Some had expected the Mate 10 to make use of even slimmer bezels, however, this wasn’t the case and as a result, the display aspect ratio comes in at a standard 16:9 and, as mentioned, manages to place the bio-metric reader below it.
It should be noted that Huawei also sells a Mate 10 Pro smartphone which does have reduced bezels, a rear-mounted fingerprint sensor, and packs an OLED display rather than the LCD seen in the standard variant. There is currently no clear information if the Pro would also launch in the USA, although given it’s even price point, the product might be an even harder sell with the likes of existing Galaxies already for sale and the Galaxy S9 in wait.
‘AT&T Android Oreo release timeline‘
Pricing information for the potential US release of the Mate 10 has not been mentioned, although in last week’s interview Mr. Yu did indicate it would be “competitively priced”. What that ultimately means remains to be seen given the current retail price internationally of roughly $825. It is likely that more concrete details will be revealed in just a few short weeks when CES 2018 kicks off, and things are sure to be quite noticeable given the company’s plans to spend a whopping $100 million in advertising expenditure for the USA market come next year.
Source: The Information | Via The Verge
