Late last month, Huawei unveiled the Mate RS featuring a 6-inch flexible OLED panel, two fingerprint scanners, and a triple camera set up at the rear. At that point, not much attention was paid to the display of the handset. Huawei had previously used OLED panels on its flagship handsets which it had sourced from Samsung. For the Mate RS though, Huawei has taken a slightly different route. A Korean report claims that LG Display has supplied Huawei with the 6-inch OLED panel used on the Mate RS. If true, it would be a major win for LG which was widely criticised for supplying sub-par OLED panels to Google for use in its Pixel 2 XL handset. It is actually interesting to see Huawei use OLED panels sourced from LG on the Mate RS which costs upwards of $1,800. For such an expensive handset, one would expect Huawei to source premium components but LG’s OLED panels are far from that. LG Display had previously supplied its OLED panels to Xiaomi and LG, though none of those handsets carried such a high price tag.
Our Take
It remains to be seen how good the OLED panel on the Huawei Mate RS is. Given the price of the handset, it will be a huge disappointment if the OLED panel does not turn out to be as good as the one used by Samsung on its latest flagship panels. The move of supplying OLED panels to Huawei will also help LG Display in improving its yield rates and capture a small share of the OLED market which is currently dominated by Samsung.
