Huawei is supremely confident about its future, and the ability to use Google Android as the operating system on its smartphones, and now we’ve got a potential glimpse at the next major phone release from the company: The Mate 30. In a year when rear camera lens arrays are changing dramatically — whether it’s the Nokia 9 or the Pixel 4 — Huawei may have gone for something radical too.
The render shows a smartphone with Huawei branding, and a large circular lens arrangement at the top of the device, which contains three or four camera lenses, and a flash unit. Whether it’s four camera lenses or three, depends on what all the lenses are. The central lens is potentially a 5x zoom lens (which is stated underneath), while the lens on the right above the flash could be a time-of-flight or other camera-related sensor. Each lens has an eye-catching flash of color around it, making it look highly robotic and very futuristic.
A 5x optical zoom would be consistent with Huawei’s breakthrough tech introduced on the P30 Pro, although if the image is accurate, the shape of the telephoto lens may change. On the P30 Pro, the telephoto lens is set inside a square aperture, but the lenses are all circular inside the render’s camera array. Whether this means it will work in a different way to the periscope zoom on the P30 Pro will only be known later. The Leica lens description — Vario Summilux-H 1:1.6-3.4/16-125 ASPH — is exactly the same as the P30 Pro though.
Is it real? The render was posted on the Weibo social network in China by iChangezone, which has a spotty record with accuracy. There are some differences in the font used for the Leica branding, when compared to the P30 Pro, plus it’s a very different style to the previous leaks we’ve seen for the Mate 30. It’s not clear whether this supposed design will be for the Mate 30 or the Mate 30 Pro. For now, as with all leaks, this should be treated as a concept that does not necessarily reflect what Huawei plans for the Mate 30 or other future phone.
The Mate 30 series is unofficial at the moment, although more rumors have been spreading about it recently. If Huawei sticks with the same basic timeframe for its release as previous versions, it should arrive around September or October this year.
