Huawei will enter the US smartphone market early next year with the help of the country’s second largest carrier, AT&T, according to a report from South Korea claiming that the Huawei Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro will be offered by the network operator starting early next year following a formal unveiling at CES in Las Vegas. The smartphone series has already been released in the United States, though only through retailers like Amazon, and if these reports turn out to be correct, then this will mark Huawei’s first time to offer one of its handsets in the United States in partnership with a local carrier.
Moreover, the report claims that while Huawei has already partnered with AT&T for the purpose of launching its Mate 10 series in the country, the Chinese OEM is also currently negotiating with the country’s largest carrier, Verizon Wireless. It’s still not entirely clear whether Huawei intends on launching only one of the Mate 10 smartphones or both in the US. As far as availability is concerned, the report suggests that the OEM will officially bring its products at CES in January, with AT&T then being expected to release the smartphone(s) in the first quarter of next year. Assuming that Huawei will also partner with Verizon, it remains to be seen whether the New Jersey-based carrier will target a similar launch window as AT&T.
Pricing details also remain unknown but nevertheless, the unlocked Huawei Mate 10 launched through Amazon a couple of weeks ago is available for $699, whereas the unlocked Mate 10 Pro carries a starting price of $878. Both smartphones are powered by the HiSilicon Kirin 970 chipset housing eight CPU cores and a Mali-G72 MP12 graphics chip, and while both the Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro feature 64GB of on-board memory and 4GB of RAM, the latter can also be acquired with 128GB of storage and 6GB of RAM. Both smartphones run Android 8.0 Oreo with the EMUI 8.0 Android skin and share the same dual-camera configuration, as well as a generous 4,000mAh battery. With the US being the world’s largest flagship market, Huawei is likely looking at it as a potentially major growth generator.