Days before Huawei is due to reveal its new flagship Mate 30 lineup, launching without Google apps or services on September 19th, promotional images of four of the upcoming devices appear to have leaked online. The images were shared by leaker Evan Blass, and show off what he claims is the new Mate 30, Mate 30 Pro, Mate 30 Lite, and what appears to be a Porsche Design edition of one of the new handsets.
At the top of the lineup is the Mate 30 Pro. The images suggest the phone will be equipped with a wide notch at the top of the device and a display that curves around the left and right sides of the phone like Oppo’s “waterfall screen” seen on Vivo’s new Nex 3. On the back we can see the familiar Leica branding along with four sensors that are contained within a circular camera cutout. One cryptic tweet suggested that these will consist of a pair of 40-megapixel sensors, an 8-megapixel sensor, and a time-of-flight sensor. There also appears to be two signal strength indicators on the top left of the screen, suggesting there’ll be a dual-SIM version of the device.
In comparison to the Pro, the regular Mate 30 appears to have a much smaller display notch, which MSPowerUser speculates could be because this model includes fewer sensors for face unlock. Dual-SIM functionality also appears to be on the cards for this model. We’re still waiting on images of the back of the device to reveal the rear cameras.
Both the Mate 30 Pro and Mate 30 are expected to use Huawei’s new Kirin 990 chipset, which has a variant that includes a built-in 5G modem. A 5G signal indicator is clearly visible on the image of the Mate 30, indicating that there could be a 5G-equipped model of this handset.
The Mate 30 Lite has a very different design from its two siblings, with a hole-punch camera cutout on the front, a square camera array on its rear, and a rear-mounted fingerprint sensor. In a follow-up tweet Blass said that the phone is the same as the Nova 5i Pro, which was announced back in July, and which uses a less powerful Kirin 810 chipset.
Finally, there’s the Porsche Design edition of the Mate 30 Pro, which appears to add a leather covering to the rear of the phone. Blass shared renders of the handset in black and red.
Away from the design of the phones, the more pressing aspect of these devices will be their software. Recently, Google announced that the lineup will not be able to launch with official Google apps, thanks to the USA’s ongoing ban on companies doing business with Huawei without a license. As well as not having access to Google’s first-party apps, the move also means the phones won’t have access to services like the Play Store, the primary source of Android apps. Although Huawei’s previous phones have been able to function without the Play Store in China for years now, it will be much harder to convince Android users in Europe — where Huawei had been gobbling up market share — to buy a phone without easy access to the operating system’s primary app store.
There’s no official word on pricing for the new Mate devices. For that, we’ll have to wait until they’re unveiled in Munich on Thursday.