Huawei announced the Mate 80 series in China today, and at the top of the lineup sits the new Mate 80 Pro Max. It’s the most powerful and most durable Mate phone from Huawei, featuring an all-metal chassis, a new dual-layer OLED display, and satellite connectivity. 

Huawei Mate 80 Pro Max Specifications

The Mate 80 Pro Max is built around an all-metal body with Huawei’s second-generation Kunlun glass at the front. The company claims this setup increases drop resistance by 20 times, improves bending resistance by 20 percent, and doubles scratch resistance over the previous generation. 

The phone is also IP69 and IP68 rated for dust and water resistance.

More impressively, the Mate 80 Pro Max is the first smartphone in the industry with a dual-layer OLED screen. As a result, it can reach a peak brightness of 8000 nits, and the dual-layer structure is touted to offer great efficiency and better viewing contrast. 

The screen measures 6.9 inches and features a 120Hz refresh rate, a 10-bit color gamut, 1440Hz high-frequency PWM dimming, and 300 Hz touch sampling rate.

The entire Mate 80 range also includes a full 3D ToF setup on the front for biometrics. It combines a depth-sensing sender, depth-sensing receiver, and a 13MP front camera into what Huawei calls an AI posture-aware design. Essentially, it’s supposed to recognize faces more accurately and track body movement more precisely.

On the performance side, the new phone is powered by the Kirin 9030 Pro chip in conjunction with Huawei’s Ark Graphics Engine. Huawei says the Mate 80 Pro Max is 45 percent smoother and loads apps 34 percent faster than last year’s Mate 70 series. 

The phone also supports 3DGS rendering acceleration and hardware-accelerated ray tracing capable of 20 million rays per second, which should improve gaming, video rendering, and motion graphics.

Huawei says the Mate 80 Pro Max offers the highest integration of communications systems in any smartphone. It supports Wi-Fi 7 Plus, standard cellular networks, Tiantong satellite communication, and Beidou satellite messaging. 

Huawei is pitching this as “ground network + sky network + no network,” with support for 700MHz emergency communications in situations where carrier networks are unavailable.

Cameras

The Mate 80 Pro Max debuts with Huawei’s second-generation Maple Leaf Imaging System. It’s built around a redesigned primary imaging sensor with 2.45μm equivalent pixels and claims a 96 percent increase in total light intake. 

Huawei says the phone offers 300 percent higher dynamic range thanks to a dual-real-time fusion system, and can sense color more accurately through an upgraded spectral array.

The main camera itself is a 50-megapixel, 1/1.28-inch RYYB sensor with a 10-stop variable aperture that can shift between f/1.4 and f/4.0. There’s also a 40MP RYYB ultrawide camera, a 50MP macro telephoto with 4× optical zoom, and a second 50MP periscope with 6.2× optical zoom and up to 12.4× “optical quality” zoom. 

If that’s not enough, the phone also supports a 3.3× teleconverter via a new add-on accessory kit. 

And then there’s the Mate 80 RS | Ultimate Design

If the Pro Max still isn’t enough, Huawei has something even more premium: the Mate 80 RS | Ultimate Design. This limited version builds on the Pro Max hardware, adds a more luxurious design, and maxes the memory to 20GB. 

Pricing and Availability

The Huawei Mate 80 Pro Max starts at 7,999 yuan (around $1,100) for the 16GB + 512GB model, while the 16GB + 1TB variant is priced at 8,999 yuan (approximately $1,240). 

The Mate 80 RS | Ultimate Design comes with 20GB of RAM and either 512GB or 1TB of storage, priced at 11,999 yuan ($1,650) and 12,999 yuan ($1,790), respectively.

Both models will go on sale on November 28th.

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