Chinese tech giant Huawei yesterday introduced the latest iteration of its flagship smartphone: Mate 30, Mate 30 Pro and Mate 30 Pro (5G). A standout feature is the phone’s advanced AI capability, which enables some futuristic features such as touch-free gesture control and smart rotations.

Gesture control is a trending feature for smartphone manufacturers. Like Harry Potter waving his magic stick, Samsung Note 10 users can perform air control via a dedicated “S Pen.” Google meanwhile has announced plans to add radar-based gesture control to its upcoming flagship smartphone Pixel 4.

Huawei’s entry in the smartphone gesture race is accessory-free and intuitive: users simply swipe their hands to scroll, and “grab” the air for a screen capture. CEO of Huawei Technologies Consumer Business Group Richard Yu says the Mate 30 has the world’s most advanced smart gesture sensors.

The Mate 30 also introduces an AI auto-rotate function that orients screen display in accordance with the user’s eyes. Traditional auto-rotate is performed by a tiny accelerometer that detects changes in orientation, so if a user for example lies down while hold their smartphone display rotation will be inappropriately triggered. The Mate 30 will automatically switch orientation or not to fit the user’s viewpoint.

Another wow moment at the product launch was the Mate 30’s facial recognition empowered “AI private view” mode, which can hide private messages if it does not recognize the face of the person attempting to view them.

These new smart features are enabled by Huawei’s latest generation smartphone SoC, the Kirin 990 5G. The 7-nm chip was unveiled earlier this month and contains 10.3 billion transistors, eight CPU cores, 16 GPU cores, and three neural processing units built on Huawei’s homegrown Da Vinci architecture. The Kirin 990 5G betters Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 855 by 4.7 times in AI performance, and scored 52403 on the AI Benchmark test, ahead of both the Unisoc Tiger T710 and Snapdragon 855 Plus.

The bad news for Huawei fans outside Mainland China is the new Mate 30 will not ship with preinstalled Google services, apps, or the Play Store due to US blacklisting. Instead, the Mate 30 integrates homegrown Huawei software apps and a Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) core.

Synced has compiled some of the Mate 30 tech specifications:

a 6.53-inch touchscreen display with a resolution of 1176x2400 pixels

8GB of RAM

Android 10 operating system

a 4,500mAh battery

Wireless charging

Rear Camera 40MP + 40MP + 8MP

32-megapixel front camera

128GB of inbuilt storage (up to 256GB)

dual-SIM (GSM and GSM)

3D face recognition

158.10 x 73.10 x 8.80mm (height x width x thickness)

198.00 grams

The Mate 30 series will be available in China on September 26 and later elsewhere, starting at EU€799.