Huawei is announcing the Mate 40 line of devices tomorrow.
The devices are, of course, launched in October of every other year, but this time around, things will be slightly different.
First, the Mate 40 line will be released in small batches owing to less interest from consumers. In defense of buyers, the devices will not ship with Google Services. Instead, Huawei has been pushing HMS and HarmonyOS as the future of its devices, with the eventual plan being exiting the Android and Google ecosystem.
The Mate 40 series will not ship with HarmonyOS – but there are prospects of them being updated in the future to the new OS.
Also, we are not going to see a significant chipset bump for the line, probably because Huawei has been facing bans with chip fabricators.
Nevertheless, the series will reportedly be equipped with a Kirin 9000 chip with 5G. It is a 5nm chipset, the second of its kind following Apple’s A14 Bionic chip in the 2020 iPhones that were announced the other day.
Contextually, it has 4 big A77 cores spinning at 3.13 GHz and another 3 A77 cores clocked at 2.54 GHz. An additional A55 4 cores run at 2.04 GHz.
The GPU under the hood will be the Mali-G78.
Horsepower aside, the Mate 40 Pro is seemingly an upgrade over the Mate 30 in every aspect. It will allegedly ship with 8/12 GB of RAM and 128/256 GB of storage.
Unfortunately, the device is likely going to launch with Android 10 and not 11. The OS will be polished with EMUI 11.
The Mate 40 Pro’s screen is a 6.76” slab. A high refresh rate is also expected.
Of course, the display is expected to be curved to hide bezels in a world where manufacturers such as Apple are making screens very flat.
Huawei always outperforms itself every year regarding camera improvements, and we expect the same with the Mate 40 line. Rumour has it that a 12 MP periscope is part of the camera system, alongside 12 MP telephoto sensor. The main shooter is reportedly a 50 MP sensor.
The series will feature the less specc’d Mate 40, alongside the Mate 40 Pro+.
We will know more tomorrow and update you accordingly.
One thing to note: these devices will very unlikely make their way to Kenya. The Mate 30 series did not launch locally, and we will let you figure out why.
