Last year we got the Porsche Design Huawei Mate 9, a rebadged version of the Mate 9 Pro, with a fancy new paint job, a weird custom theme, and a ludicrous 256GB of internal storage. Oh, and a $1500 price tag.
This year, the Porsche Design partnership continues, and so does the astronomical pricing of the co-branded handsets. The Porsche Design Huawei Mate 10 — once again, based on the "Pro" variant of that phone — will sell for €1,395 when it's made available in November.
Like last year, the PD Mate 10 is effectively a supercharged Mate 10 Pro.
So what's different? Well, the new Mate 10 PD sports a murdered-out black paint job on the outside, with (thankfully) more subtle Porsche Design branding where the Huawei logo would usually sit. Around the back, there's a more ostentatious "PD" logo around the camera area, along with a distinctive cutout that provides some visual differentiation compared to the plain old Mate 10 Pro.
On the inside, Huawei has bumped up the RAM to 6 GB, while storage, once again, sits at an enormous 256 GB. And on the software side, you also get some moody Porsche Design-themed icons and wallpapers.
With Huawei focusing on the Mate 10 Pro for the U.S. and UK this time around — not to mention the largely identical design and paint job — the allure of the Porsche Design model may be lessened. That being said, the Porsche Design partnership is arguably more about creating a halo effect around Huawei's smartphones, as opposed to shifting PD-branded phones in large numbers.
Check out the Porsche Design Huawei Mate 10 below. And for a closer look at the phone it's based upon, head over to our Huawei Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro hands-on preview,
