Huawei Mate X6 Review
Pros
- Slim, classy design
- Decent displays
- Strong camera set-up
Cons
- Prohibitive software
- Poor dust and water resistance
- Sub-par performance
Key Features
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Variable aperture camera The main 50MP camera lets you manually adjust between f/1.4 and f/4.0 apertures.
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Super skinny body At 9.9mm thick when closed, the Huawei Mate X6 is one of the slimmest foldables around.
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50W wireless charging Buy the appropriate Qi charger, and the Huawei Mate X6 will charge extremely quickly without needing to plug it in.
Introduction
While it’s always imperative to review the product that’s sat in front of you, I’d be lying if I said that using the Mate X6 over the past few weeks hadn’t prompted me to think about what might have been.
Huawei’s situation here in the West really hasn’t changed since I reviewed the Mate X3 back in 2023. The company continues to make some of the best foldable phone hardware in the business, but its software continues to be scuppered by US sanctions.
Those constants have really steered the focus of this review onto two key considerations: is Huawei still ahead of the pack on hardware, and has it managed to make any headway on its notorious Google problem?
With a hefty asking price of €1,999 in Europe (there’s no sign of a UK release at the time of writing), you have to hope so on both counts. Former Huawei sub-brand Honor now makes the best book-style foldable on the market in the Magic V3, while the OnePlus Open and Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold are supplying fierce competition. Things aren’t getting any easier for Huawei.
Design
- Slim, premium foldable design
- Vegan leather back
- No IP dust resistance
Huawei hasn’t reinvented its foldable design language with the Mate X6, but it has managed to gently refine things.
The phone looks and feels much the same as the Huawei Mate X3 I handled two years ago – a premium full-sized foldable with tight tolerances and a solid, rounded aluminium frame, with a prominent circular camera module drawing the eye.
Huawei has polished things up a fair amount, however. Most notably, the Mate X6 is even thinner and lighter than before. At just 4.6mm thick when open, and with a true gapless hinge (made of 1900 MPa ultra-high-strength steel), it manages to just about squeak under the magic 10mm mark when closed.
That still makes it 0.6mm thicker than the Honor Magic V3, but no other foldable phone feels so much like a normal phone when you’re using it closed up. This is a vital attribute if full-sized foldables are to become genuinely mainstream propositions.
It helps that it weighs just 239g. That’s a little heavier than the Honor Magic V3, while the OnePlus Open and Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 are a match, but it’s still light enough to keep the phone within ‘normal’ smartphone boundaries – albeit standing right at the northern border.
Another premium flourish I appreciated was the use of vegan leather on the rear of my Nebula Red model. It aids greatly with grip in both closed and open orientation, and it also resists greasy fingerprints – useful attributes in a phone that’s designed to be handled more than most.
One hardware conundrum that Huawei hasn’t managed to solve is proper dust resistance. Indeed, at a mere IPX8, it doesn’t even get as far as the IP48-certified Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6.
On the other hand, Huawei’s second-generation Kunlun Glass is said to provide significantly improved drop protection. I obviously didn’t put this to the test, though, what with the whole €2,000 price tag.
Screen
- 6.45- and 7.93-inch OLED displays
- Minimal screen crease
- Outer screen is slightly brighter
You hopefully know the drill with these folio foldables by now: there’s a big square screen that’s accessible when you open it out, and a regular-sized screen covering one of the exterior surfaces for when it’s all closed up. Both displays are of a very high quality.
The main event is a 7.93-inch OLED panel with a 2240 x 2440 resolution and a 120Hz maximum refresh rate. With a peak brightness of 1800 nits in limited HDR scenarios, its output isn’t as scorching as any of the major rivals we’ve mentioned already, other than the Honor Magic V3.
Even so, it’s a pleasure to use, with ample screen space and accurate colour output. Huawei takes a different approach from its rivals in positioning the selfie camera in the top right corner, which feels less intrusive.
You’ll certainly feel the dip that vertically bisects the screen, but there’s no obvious visual distortion unless you view the screen from an acute angle.
The inner screen might be the bigger and more unique screen of the two – and arguably the whole point of the foldable form factor – but for my money the smaller external screen is more important. It’s the one I always end up using far more of, especially while I’m out and about.
Thankfully, the Huawei Mate X6’s outy is as impressive as its inny. Even more so, in fact. This is a nicely sized 6.45-inch OLED with a 2440 × 1080 (FHD+) resolution and a 120Hz maximum refresh rate.
It actually gets brighter than the inner screen, with an official peak figure of 2500 nits. Given what I just said about using this screen more outside, this is a smart move, though it’s notably half as bright as the Honor Magic V3 equivalent.
Fresh out of the box, Huawei will dynamically adjust both the resolution and the refresh rate to suit the current task. As is the way with all of our test phones when given the option, I cranked both to max throughout my time with the phone.
These are two high-quality displays, and they’re sufficiently well-matched that you can flit from one to the other without experiencing a massive shift in the experience beyond the obvious size difference.
Performance
- Kirin 9020 chip shows signs of progress
- Still way behind Snapdragon rivals
- Zippy everyday performance
While it’s predominantly presented as a software issue, one of the big hits Huawei has been forced to take by those US sanctions relates to its access to modern ARM chip technology. As such, the Huawei Mate X6 is stuck using a sub-par home-brewed Kirin 9020 chip, backed by 12GB of RAM.
With that said, it represents a notable 40% performance bump over the Kirin 9010 that so underwhelmed us in the Huawei Pura 70 Ultra. This despite the fact that Huawei subsidiary HiSilicon has stuck with a rather dated 7nm manufacturing process.
In cold hard benchmarking terms, however, that’s still not enough to make the Huawei Mate X6 in any way competitive with most of its rivals.
You can see the comparative benchmark results below, but the TL;DR of it is that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 crowd (encompassing all but one of the Mate X6’s key rivals) crushes the Mate X6 in both CPU and GPU terms. It does manage to hold its own against the Pixel 9 Pro Fold with its own underpowered custom chip, which is progress of sorts.
I’d love to talk more about how that translates to real-world performance, but the simple fact is that I was unable to source my usual demanding test games (Genshin Impact, Wreckfest, and now GRID Legends) through Huawei AppGallery or its Petal Search system. But that’s an issue for another section.
In day-to-day terms, I had no performance complaints. I was able to run windowed apps over another full-screen app without issue, and zipping around the UI felt fast and fluid. Unlocking the phone feels flagship-smooth, while firing up and snapping with the camera app proved suitably swift.
Camera
- Decent 50MP wide sensor with variable aperture
- Very good 48MP 4x periscope with OIS
- Solid 40MP ultra-wide
You have to hand it to Huawei, it never uses the engineering challenges of the foldable form factor as an excuse to compromise on camera quality.
It’s still pushing things forward with the Huawei Mate X6, which boasts three strong cameras. The main 50MP wide sensor is arguably the most interesting one here, not just for the quality of its shots, but for the inclusion of a variable aperture.
Pop into Pro mode in the Camera app, and you’ll find the ability to adjust between f/1.4 and f/4.0 apertures. This is a genuine mechanical system too, as you can see if you look at the main camera whilst manipulating that virtual slider.
Using this you can adjust the degree to which your foreground subject is in focus against an artfully blurred background, aka bokeh. A wider aperture also lets more light in, giving you more options when using Pro settings in low light.
I’d like to see Huawei and any other manufacturers using such a system (the Nubia Z70 Ultra also recently had one) integrating it more into the main camera UI, perhaps with some kind of rebranded aperture priority mode. As it is, I suspect that a fair proportion of Huawei Mate X6 users won’t even realise that this feature is there, or else will forget about it.
Even in regular point-and-shoot mode, however, the Huawei Mate X6 camera has much to recommend it. Shots are sharp, generally well exposed, and natural looking.
There’s clearly plenty of processing going on in the background, as there is with every smartphone, but Huawei shows admirable restraint in not punching those colours up too much. It’s enough to make me think that the presence of a dedicated Ultra Chroma Sensor might not be a total gimmick.
One area where I might slightly question Huawei’s photographic taste is in Night mode, where shots can look freakishly well-lit. It’s a testament to Huawei’s image processing mastery, but it doesn’t always capture the shadowy reality of the scene.
Huawei’s 48MP f/3.0 periscope telephoto camera is a strong performer, capturing sharp and clear 4x optically zoomed shots that match the tone of the main sensor admirably well.
Zoom in a little further, and 10x hybrid zoom shots still look pretty good, while at the extreme end, even 100x shots look way cleaner than many other phones (though still too grainy for me to actually want to take them regularly).
The 40MP f/2.2 ultra-wide doesn’t let the side down, even if it is the weakest of the three cameras. Detail levels obviously aren’t a match for the other two sensors, and there’s a little softness at the edges, but they still look crisp and tonally consistent.
What with this being a full-sized foldable, there are technically two front-facing cameras here – one 8MP f/2.2 unit on the outside, and one 8MP f/2.4 example the inside.
They both take decent enough selfies despite their limited pixel count, albeit with the odd struggle with dynamic range. Both will be relegated to video call duty when you discover the Flip Screen button, which lets you use the main camera for the job.
Software
- EMUI 15 is fast and customisable
- Way too much bloat
- Lack of Google apps is a killer
The Huawei Mate X6 runs on EMUI 15.0, which is a heavily modified UI running on a pretty old core of Android 12.
It’s a familiar-looking UI with the kind of iOS-style split notification centre that many Android manufacturers use these days. As previously mentioned, it’s nice and snappy, and Huawei’s split screen system lets you run two apps simultaneously in split screen, with a third tucked off to the side.
All in all, it’s far from my favourite UI, but it’s fast and customisable, and certainly not meaningfully worse in general operation than rival efforts from Xiaomi and Oppo.
There’s still far too much bloatware, however. I can understand the number of Huawei apps here – it needs to fill a vast Google-shaped void – but the folder full of bad-quality games is irritating on a premium-priced phone.
Let’s address that lack of Google access head-on, because it’s the biggest reason I wouldn’t recommend the Huawei Mate X6 to anyone. With no official access to the Google Play Store and Google Mobile Services, the phone can’t readily access the core apps and APIs that form the backbone of the standard Android experience.
I’ve already mentioned that I was unable to get Genshin Impact up and running. I managed to source the APK file for the game, but when it came time to log into developer Hoyoverse’s servers at set-up, I ran up against a Google log-in brick wall.
Even Huawei’s own Petal Search work around let me down here. This is a fairly potent but clumsy app search system that drags in app files from around the web, allegedly making the process of sourcing apps through less official means more secure and intuitive.
It was never as easy as it should have been, but here, it flat-out stopped working for me after the first day or two. Even a late factory reset didn’t fix the issue.
Confusingly, I was still able to get Petal Search results from within Huawei’s AppGallery App store. Even then, the likes of Netflix and Genshin Impact didn’t show up, forcing me to scour the wild west of third-party app stores through the web browser.
Technically savvy types are no doubt readying their protestations relating to the MicroG Project workaround, which can open out the app experience to something approximating normal Android. I encountered a set-up issue that meant this simply didn’t work for me, but even if it had the point would remain: the Huawei Mate X6’s app experience is a total mess out of the box.
Battery Life
- 5110 mAh battery
- 66W wired charging
- 50W wireless charging
Huawei has steadily upped the size of its foldable battery, to the point where the Mate X6 runs on a very respectable 5110 mAh cell. That’s bigger than the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra‘s, let alone the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6’s.
This results in a foldable phone that’s comfortably good enough to last you through a day of moderate to heavy usage. The Honor Magic V3 can obviously pair a similar capacity with a more efficient 4nm chip, but the Huawei still holds up reasonably well.
30 minutes of light gaming sapped 5% of a charger, while an hour of Netflix ate up 4% on the inner screen. The latter sounds like a great result, but it’s worth noting that the Netflix experience on the Huawei Mate X6 runs at SD resolution and without HDR.
Given the limitations of our usual test materials, I ran the PC Mark Work 3.0 benchmark test, which simulates a range of work-related tasks, and I recorded a score of 10 hours and 55 minutes. This pitches it somewhere in the middle of the foldable pack.
There’s a decent 66W wired charging provision, and such a charger is bundled into the box. Unfortunately, my own test model didn’t come with said charger included. Using a 120W Vivo charger, it took an hour and 12 minutes to go from empty to full, but the official charger should bring that well under the hour mark.
You also get support for up to 50W Qi wireless charging, though you’ll need to purchase the requisite official charger for the job.
Should you buy it?
You're willing to jump through software hoops
The Huawei Mate X6 offers some of the best foldable hardware out there, and there are software workarounds to its glaring issues if you’re willing to jump through some hoops.
You want a foldable that just works out of the box
Fresh out of the box, the Huawei Mate X6 offers no access to Google apps, and even many popular third-party apps.
Final Thoughts
The Huawei Mate X6 is another slim and stylish foldable phone that practically no-one in the West should buy. Its hardware is impeccable, with a gloriously slim body, accomplished cameras, rich OLED screens, and decent stamina.
However, ongoing sanctions mean that it isn’t as strong a performer as most of its rivals, while the lack of Google app support hammers multiple nails into the coffin. There are workarounds, but the out-of-the-box experience really isn’t up to snuff.
Especially not now that the foldable alternatives are so strong. The Honor Magic V3 gets very close to ‘best of both worlds’ status, with many of the same appealing hardware attributes and none of the more glaring software hang-ups. Elsewhere, Google’s second-gen foldable provides everything that the Huawei doesn’t on the software front, alongside a very competitive camera.
It’s always been hard to provide a convincing case for buying Huawei’s foldables, as well-built as they are. Now that the unencumbered competition has started to catch up (and even overtake it), that case has become all but impossible to make.
Trusted Score
How we test
We test every mobile phone we review thoroughly. We use industry-standard tests to compare features properly and wherever possible we spend time using the phone as our main device over the review period. We’ll always tell you what we find and we never, ever, accept money to review a product.
Find out more about how we test in our ethics policy.
- Used as a main phone for over a week
- Thorough camera testing in a variety of conditions
- Tested and benchmarked using respected industry tests and real-world data
FAQs
It’ll last you a full day on a single charge.
7.93 inches external, 6.45 inches external.
Yes, the Mate X6 offers up to 50W Qi charging.
Test Data
| Huawei Mate X6 Review | |
|---|---|
| Geekbench 6 single core | 1601 |
| Geekbench 6 multi core | 5022 |
| 1 hour video playback (Netflix, HDR) | 4 % |
| 30 minute gaming (light) | 5 % |
| Time from 0-100% charge | 72 min |
| 30-min recharge (no charger included) | 61 % |
| 15-min recharge (no charger included) | 29 % |
| 3D Mark – Wild Life | 3883 |
| GFXBench – Aztec Ruins | 50 fps |
| GFXBench – Car Chase | 51 fps |
Full Specs
| Huawei Mate X6 Review | |
|---|---|
| EU RRP | €1999 |
| Manufacturer | Huawei |
| Screen Size | 7.93 inches |
| Storage Capacity | 512GB |
| Rear Camera | 50MP + 48MP + 40MP |
| Front Camera | 8MP + 8MP |
| Video Recording | No |
| IP rating | IPX8 |
| Battery | 5110 mAh |
| Wireless charging | No |
| Fast Charging | No |
| Size (Dimensions) | 144.1 x 4.6 x 156.6 MM |
| Weight | 239 G |
| Operating System | EMUI 15 based on Android 12 |
| Release Date | 2024 |
| First Reviewed Date | 24/02/2025 |
| Resolution | 2240 x 2440 |
| HDR | No |
| Refresh Rate | 120 Hz |
| Ports | USB-C |
| Chipset | Kirin 9020 |
| RAM | 12GB |
| Colours | Nebula Red, Black, Nebula Gray |
| Stated Power | 66 W |
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