The Huawei Mate RS Porsche Design is now available for pre-orders in the United Kingdom, with retailer Clove being the first to officially offer the device in the country. The base model of the device starts at £1,692 ($2,400) including value-added tax, which is in line with the €1,695 price tag Huawei announced last month. While the handset costs almost twice as much as Huawei’s P20 Pro flagship which debuted alongside the more niche phablet late last month, the Chinese tech giant is seeking to justify that price tag with a number of ultra-premium features including two fingerprint readers, one of which is integrated into the screen of the device itself. Clove is expecting to receive the first Mate RS Porshe Design units on April 23, which is when it’s set to start shipping them to customers.
The model that’s now available for advanced pre-orders has 256GB of internal flash memory and the British retailer made no mention of the 512GB storage variant whose availability still remains unclear, with Huawei only stating it’s planning to launch it in China and select European countries. Likewise, the company’s home country is the only market set to receive the red version of the device, whereas Europeans will only be able to purchase the black one. Compared to the P20 Pro, the Mate RS Porsche Design comes with a higher-resolution 6-inch screen that’s of the QHD+ variety and uses the 18:9 (2:1) aspect ratio.
The Android handset is also advertised as the world’s first smartphone with a microcapsule PCM aerospace-grade cooling system and boasts a 4,000mAh battery, as well as 6GB of RAM and the Kirin 970 chip from Huawei‘s subsidiary HiSilicon. The Mate RS Porsche Design will never be officially released in the United States where the Chinese company is having major issues with lawmakers and regulators who have been accusing it of posing a national security threat due to its close ties to Beijing for nearly a decade now.