A look at the innovations that Huawei planned to unveil at the Mobile World Congress

The Huawei Mate Xs is equipped with a quadruple Leica photo sensor that offers wide-angle, ultra-wide-angle and 3x-optical-zoom telephoto lenses. — AFP Relaxnews

The cancellation of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, due to risks related to the Covid-19 coronavirus outbreak has not done much to disrupt Huawei's plans. The Chinese manufacturer has gone ahead and unveiled, via an online conference, its latest innovations. They include a folding-screen smartphone, a tablet and a laptop.

One year after the Mate X, Huawei has presented an updated version of its folding-screen smartphone, the Mate Xs. Inheriting its form factor from the Mate X, the new handset still offers an 8in diagonal OLED screen when fully unfolded. However, the design has been made more robust with an upgraded hinge structure and more powerful with a 5G-compatible Kirin 990 chip and 8 GB of RAM.

As for the camera, or rather cameras, the new device is equipped with a quadruple Leica photo sensor that offers wide-angle, ultra-wide-angle and 3x-optical-zoom telephoto lenses. A single version of the new smartphone with 512 GB of storage is due to go on sale in March 2020, at a price of €2,499 (RM11,458).

In addition to the new smartphone, Huawei also took advantage of the occasion to announce upcoming European launches for a number of other products, starting with its latest tablet, the Huawei Mate Pad Pro. The new device offers an innovative functionality that enables it to mirror the screen of a paired smartphone. It is also the first tablet in the world to be equipped with a two-way wireless charging system, which means it can be used as a power source for other devices. Like the iPad Pro, on which it is modeled, it can be used with a wireless keyboard and a dedicated stylus.

Eager to display its advances in the world of PCs, the Chinese giant also presented the Huawei MateBook X Pro, a laptop equipped with the latest generation of Intel Comet Lake chips. The new device stands out for its remarkably slim form factor, and also for its virtually bezel-less touch screen, which covers 91% of the surface area devoted to it. Finally Huawei also unveiled the Sound X, an intelligent speaker made in collaboration with French audio technology company Devialet.

A Huawei MateBook X Pro laptop being connected to a Mate 30 Pro, during a media event in London, Britain, Feb 18. — Reuters

– AFP Relaxnews