Can the Huawei Mate 60 Pro connect to a 5G network?

Foreign online media (mainly Chinese) are reporting that the new Huawei Mate 60 Pro smartphone (retail price $960) includes a 5G chip, but we have not received official confirmation from Huawei at this time.

Huawei released the Mate 60 Pro with remarkably little fanfare, which is surprising for such a flagship phone. They also haven't released all the details, including the chip/processor which is usually at the top of the specs. Any mention of the chip is noticeably absent on the official website of the phone, je pa omenjena “boljša komunikacijska izkušnja” in “bolj stabilna omrežna povezava”, čeprav to ni ravno dober pokazatelj, da gre resnično za 5G povezljivost.

Te informacije so se pojavile v t. i. “unboxing” videoposnetkih telefona in recenzijah, objavljenih na spletu. O njih je poročal tudi tehnološki medij Gizmochina, ki pravi, da naprava vključuje Kirin 9000 za podporo za 5G in tudi za satelitske klice. To naj bi bila najnovejša različica nabora čipov Kirin, ki smo jo nazadnje videli v seriji naprav Mate 40 leta 2020. Vendar pa Gizmochina opozarja, da “je zelo malo informacij, ki jih je mogoče potrditi” o tem, ali je podjetje zares postalo samooskrbno z novimi procesorji.

If the Huawei Mate 60 Pro included its own 5G chip, it would mark a huge milestone for the Chinese giant. In 2019, the US government banned US companies from selling software and equipment to Huawei due to national security concerns. Things got worse for Huawei when the US made it harder for foreign chipmakers that own US technology to do business with the company.

After Huawei began to run out of stock of existing chips, rumors surfaced that the company was focusing all its efforts on the development of 5G chips using Chinese technology and the help of SMIC.

SMIC is said to use 7-nanometer technology to manufacture the chips. This is still not as efficient as the 4-nanometer and 3-nanometer processes used by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). It makes chips for Apple, NVIDIA and Google. Still, there are concerns that all the blockades to date have pushed China into self-sufficiency, contrary to the plans the US government had in mind, which hoped to cripple Chinese manufacturing and technology development with the measures.

We asked the Slovenian representative office of Huawei for a comment, but we have not yet received a reply.

What will potential 5G connectivity mean for Slovenian customers? Incompatibility with Google programs will still be a major obstacle for users. Of course, there are solutions/applications that, with the help of virtual environments, allow almost flawless use of popular Google programs, but for many people this is not a sensible solution.

If you don't depend on Google or only use one or two apps (for example Gmail and Drive) and the 5G network also doesn't mean much to you, Huawei's hardware is still fantastic phones, which we also highlighted in our phone tests P60 Pro, Mate 50 Pro, Mate X3 …

Huawei has focused a lot of energy on the development of smart watches, where they can boast of quite a few excellent examples (Huawei Watch 4, Huawei Ultimate ...), which we also tested in the editorial office. The company's latest research Counterpoint revealed that the global smartwatch market recovered slightly in the second quarter of 2023 (11 % growth) after two worse quarters. At the same time, Huawei increased its domestic market share to 39 % and rose to second place globally. In the same period, Apple recorded a 10 % drop, while Samsung saw a drop of 19 %.