Huawei has unveiled some brand new mates in a bid to topple its enemies.
The new Mate 20 and Mate 20 Pro were shown off at the firm's global launch in London on Wednesday morning and while they're high on tech, they're noticeably lower in price than recent devices from its two main rivals.
Huawei's CEO of Consumer Business Group, Richard Yu, has enthusiastically called the new range the "best 'mate' of consumers, accompanying and empowering them to enjoy a richer, more fulfilled life".
What he means is they're good for professionals and Huawei has certainly thrown everything it's got at them.
The Mate 20 Pro is the more premium of the range with a 6.39-inch display, an infrared 3D Facial recognition system, three cameras (but with more improvements and in a fancy new arrangement) and a fingerprint sensor embedded in the display.
Under the hood is the Huawei Kiri 980 processor, the firm's first to be produced at 7 nanometres, matching Apple's latest A12 chip in the 2018 phones.
The triple camera set-up uses a 40-megapixel camera, an 8-megapixel telephoto camera with 3x optical zoom and a 20-megapixel ultra wide angle camera. This latter one replaces the monochrome sensor which was used on another Huawei camera earlier this year - the Huawei 20 Pro.
The company said today that its latest EMUI 9, based on Android 9 Pie, will apparently be able to launch apps up to 51 percent faster and respond to taps 47 percent faster.
The company also took aim at Samsung, claiming that in testing the Mate 20 Pro launched apps 400 milliseconds faster than the Samsung Galaxy Note 9, starting Chrome, Google Maps and Facebook faster.
One seriously cool feature is that it can even share its battery, wirelessly charging other devices and phones. It also offers expandable storage with a new flash memory format the size of a nano-sim.
The Mate is the cheaper device of the two but it's still a good phone. It's actually the larger device, with a 6.5-inch display and a tiny notch, for just the the selfie camera.Huawei claims it's an extremely power-efficient display without compromising on battery life.
It loses the two-way wireless charging, the advanced face unlock and in screen fingerprint scanner.
An interesting feature announced was 3D Live Emoji, which might one-up the AR offerings from Apple. Using Google's AR Core technology, it allows real-world objects to be scanned in and then placed and animated in a mixed reality environment.
Ben Wood, an analyst from CCS Insight, said other manufacturers may be concerned to see Huawei's latest devices, particularly the Mate 20 Pro.
"If it can replicate the performance on the P20 Pro it will further underline Huawei's growing status as a smartphone camera maker," he said.
Huawei's devices have already grabbed a substantial share in markets such as Europe and Asia/Pacific but has so far struggled to get into the US, prevented by a ban on Huawei products.
And despite the current fashion for banning Huawei among US allies, New Zealand will not automatically follow Australia and ban Chinese firm Huawei from participating in upcoming roll outs of 5G mobile services.
Pre-orders begin this Friday, 19th October, and the phones will be available in stores on November 2nd priced at $1,199 for the Mate 20 and $1,499 for the Mate 20 Pro.
Newshub
