At Huawei’s latest ‘flagship product launch’ held in Dubai last night, the tech company unveiled a host of new products, including the new folio-style foldable Mate X6, new additions to the mid-range Nova smartphone series and MatePad tablet range, and a new pair of wireless earbuds. We’ll get to those shortly but another announcement caught our eye.
Stuff wasn’t able to attend the event this time around but we’ve learnt that Huawei’s tri-folding Mate XT was confirmed to arrive in South Africa next year via our friends at Hypertext.
Have you met my new Mates?
There was no local launch initially planned for the Mate XT (although you can still import a Chinese model for over R100,000), however, Peter Feng, GM for Consumer Business Group, Huawei South Africa confirmed to Hypertext that the device would land in SA around March or April 2025. No official local price has been confirmed yet but R50,000 was the rough estimate thrown around by Feng.
That’s less than half the price of importing the device but if that’s still too much for you, you’ll have to ‘settle’ for Huawei’s new Mate X6. Sure it can only fold in one direction but that should be enough for most folks.
Behind the 7.93in 120Hz foldable OLED display lies a chipset of some description – Huawei isn’t saying which one for the moment – along with up to 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage (although South Africa is likely to get the 12GB/512GB model if Huawei follows previous device configurations). Among those components, you’ll also find a 5,200mAh Silicon Carbon battery capable of 66W wired charging and 50W wireless.
Unsurprisingly, Huawei is making a big fuss over the rear quad sensor array on the Mate X6. Those include a 50MP main camera with a variable aperture and OIS, a 40MP ultra-wide camera, a 48MP telephoto macro camera that also features OIS, and something called a “1.5 M Spectral Channels Ultra Chroma Camera” which is said to improve colour accuracy.
The Huawei Mate XT will be available in South Africa sometime in April 2025 in the Nebula Gray colourway. No details on local pricing just yet. Expect that to turn up closer to the launch.
Huawei goes nova
Moving down to the mid-range, the new Nova 13 and Nova 13 Pro are slated to arrive in South Africa in February next year. The pair of devices share most of the same specs with noteworthy differences in their displays and camera arrays. The Pro model boasts a slightly larger 6.76in LTPO OLED display to the non-Pro’s 6.7in OLED, and it features three rear camera lenses to the non-Pro’s two.
Both models feature a 60MP selfie camera with the Pro featuring an additional front-facing 8MP telephoto camera. Both will ship with 5,000mAh batteries and both support 100W wired charging.
Together with its smartphones, Huawei announced the Freebuds 4 Pro and MatePad 11.5. It isn’t certain that the former will come to SA but the latter should be available from “mid-February 2025”.
