[ UPDATE 22/10/20 22:00 ]: The Huawei Mate 40, Mate 40 Pro and Mate 40 Pro+ are now official. Learn more here.
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The Huawei Mate 40 series is launching very soon and this could be one of the last flagship smartphones to launch in 2020. The device could also be the very last Huawei flagship smartphone to run on a Kirin processor.
Ahead of the launch event, we now get a clear look at the Huawei Mate 40 Pro thanks to high-resolution images from serial leakster Roland Quandt. Just like last year’s Mate 30 series, the new Mate 40 still features a rather large circular camera bump.
According to Roland, the Mate 40 Pro will come with a dual-curved 6.76″ OLED display that pushes a resolution of 2772×1344 pixels. Previously it was speculated to come with a 120Hz screen refresh rate but it isn’t confirmed at the moment. If you look at the sides, Huawei is bringing back the traditional volume rocker for the Mate 40 Pro and it still gets a power button that’s coloured in red.
Under the hood, the Huawei Mate 40 Pro runs on a 5nm octa-core Kirin 9000 processor which uses high-performance Cortex-A77 cores. The new chip is said to outperform the current Snapdragon 865+ processor which is to be expected. Due to the ongoing restrictions by the US government, the Kirin 9000 would be the final Hi-Silicon chip to be produced by TSMC.
Huawei is expected to offer just one Huawei Mate 40 Pro variant for the European market with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of non-expandable UFS 3.1 storage. Roland added that Huawei has planned to introduce more models in China including the Mate 40 RS and a Mate 40 Pro+ model.
Serial leakster Ice Universe has also just shared a picture which appears to be the Porsche Design edition of the Mate 40. The octagon camera bump looks like a stop sign with 6 cut out holes. This is likely to be the Mate 40 RS, the successor to last year’s Mate 30 RS.
Huawei’s partnership with Leica continues in the imaging department and they are offering a triple-camera setup for the new Mate 40 Pro. The new camera setup will feature a 50MP f/1.9 main camera with OIS, a 20MP f/1.8 ultra-wide-angle camera and a 12MP f/3.4 telephoto camera. If you look at the top left corner, it appears to be a squarish periscope camera module, which is a first for a Huawei Mate series.
The Leica label that’s placed right smack in the middle of the bump states 1:18-3.4/18-125 ASPH. Interestingly, this is similar to the Huawei P40 Pro as shown below. The Mate 40 Pro is expected to offer 5x optical zoom which is likely to be able to push up to 50x in digital zoom.
In front, Huawei is finally ditching the wide notch, opting for a wide-punch-hole for its selfie camera. It is said that the front also get a 13MP f/2.4 camera for 3D sensing and could also support hand gesture like its current Mate 30 Pro.
The Mate 40 is said to come with a 4,400mAh battery that will support 65W fast-charging via USB-C. There’s also fast wireless charging support which is likely to be similar to its current 40W wireless SuperCharge on the P40 Pro+.
Obviously, Huawei will be banging hard on its 5G capabilities and it will also support the latest WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2. However, the new Mate 40 Pro is said to be still running on Android 10 with EMUI 11. Again with the current situation with the US government, the devices will ship without Google apps and services pre-installed.
The Huawei Mate 40 series will launch at 8pm next Thursday, the 22nd of October and the event will be streamed live. Since Malaysia is a key market, we expect pre-orders to start shortly after the global launch.
