The Huawei Mate 50 is this year’s crowning glory from the Chinese phone maker. The Huawei Mate 50 boasts top of the line specs, incredible design, and a peak camera performance. 

However, specs, design, and camera are things to be expected from a flagship device. The true highlight here is the innovations integrated into the Mate 50. What makes it so special? What makes it different and stand tall amid the sea of flagship smartphones? 

Two words.

Kunlun Glass. 

Named after the Kunlun Mountains, a place for its exotic and mysterious sceneries, the Kunlun Glass is not just some phrase thrown around lightly. It's developed through a sophisticated process to enhance the glass’ durability. 

To say The HUAWEI Mate 50 is extra-durable is an understatement. This here, is a smartphone that you’ll feel confident of not breaking when it falls, without a protective case.

We have seen this firsthand: The HUAWEI Mate 50 was dropped from about waist high to the floor. Multiple times. Multiple, shocking, times. The phone hit the floor, bounced a little, and when we checked on it, there were no scratches or dents or any disfigurements to be seen. The phone worked perfectly fine, without missing a single pixel on its screen. Again, this wasn’t a one-off thing, it was so casually shown to us a number of times, with HUAWEI representatives asking us if we wanted to see it dropped a couple more times. Of course we said yes. And much later, once the unit had fallen into our own hands, we did, to our own amusement, drop-tested the Mate 50 again, and again, and again. The HUAWEI Mate 50 remained unscathed. It won’t break despite our numerous times of dropping it. Not that we tried very hard though. Surely, if we tried really hard, the device would end up being worn down.

All of these intentional drops had no protective cases. It was just the naked phone itself. There’s a surreal sense here in watching a caseless phone fall a number of times and not see a single crack on the screen. No matter the price range of a smartphone, we add cases as a layer of protection, because the grief of witnessing a broken screen is immense. 

The Mate 50 doesn’t need a case, and by extension, preserves the premium look and feel. We would probably still have to check out cases for the Mate 50 for personalization, and for evening out the very narrow camera bump. You can, technically, put the Mate 50 down screen-first and not worry about getting any scratches. You can always get notifications in your HUAWEI Watch anyway, so there’s no need to constantly pick up the phone. Also, the Mate 50 is IP68, making it water and dust resistant.

Of course, we do not expect such durability to last a long time. At one point, the screen’s extra-tough glass would eventually age, but it’s confident to say by that time we might have moved on to the next big Mate phone. The simple fact the HUAWEI Mate 50’s Kunlun Glass was able to survive drops and get back up like nothing is a testament of innovation.

HUAWEI still made their own cases for the Mate 50. And while everything is sleek and recommendable, we have to point at the Smart View Flip Cover, since it kind of makes the Mate 50 look like a hot sports car. 

Besides its toughness, the Mate 50’s Kunlun Glass supports an 6.7-inch OLED screen with a resolution of 1224x2700. The HUAWEI Mate 50 is powered with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, one of the most powerful processors available for smartphones. RAM is firmly set at 8GB, while internal storage starts at 128GB, then 256GB, and finally 512GB, plus an additional expansion via memory card up to another 256GB.

Cameras are among the things we’re excited for when it comes to HUAWEI. We’ve always been impressed by their picture and cinematic capabilities. Professional photographers have used HUAWEI’s Mate Series in the past through the Earth+Lens campaign, a photography exhibit that celebrates the beauty of the Philippines through the lens of HUAWEI devices.

With the Mate 50, HUAWEI has introduced XMAGE, the newest innovations packaged into their cameras. This includes auto-adjustment of aperture to optimize your image quality and enhanced night and macro photographs. Powering these cameras are 50MP, 12MP, and 13MP. The front camera supports 13MP with HDR and UltraWide. 

HUAWEI also brings three new “Super” features to the table. SuperHold for rapid app launches and seamless web browsing; SuperRender for maintaining stable framerates; and SuperStorage, which can free up to 20GB of storage by compressing less-used apps and stacking duplicate files. A bonus “Super” feature is SuperCharge, which allows the Mate 50 66W wired charge and 50W for wireless. 

HUAWEI also boasts its 1% remaining charge. At most times – actually, every time – a phone tells you it has 1% left in its battery, it is panic-inducing. Because you only have to blink before the power disappears and you’re stuck with a useless brick in your hands. HUAWEI’s Mate 50, however, hides a few secrets under its 1%. In that 1%, the Mate 50 promises you still have 12 minutes of call time and up to three hours of standby time, which makes all the difference, should you ever find yourself in a situation where your phone is almost out of power. 

One of the bigger innovations HUAWEI presented to us with the Mate 50 is the freedom to add widgets. Widgets! Hold up, hear us out, there’s more to this. Besides customizing widget sizes and bundling them up to your liking, you can create stacks of widgets. Imagine creating widgets on a card. Each card will have specific purposes based on the apps you place in. Now, you can stack those cards on top of each other, and simply flip through them when looking for the ones you need. It’s simple and inventive and helps make a cleaner interface for your Mate 50. We like it.