Huawei teases first look at its upcoming Galaxy S21 Ultra challenger

The P50 Pro is expected to set a new standard for smartphone photography.

What you need to know

• Huawei teased the upcoming P50 series phones at its HarmonyOS launch event today.
• The company has claimed that the P50 will lift mobile photography to a new level.
• The Huawei P50 and P50 Pro are expected to launch sometime later this year.

At its HarmonyOS launch event today, Huawei offered our first look at the P50 series. Teasing the upcoming launch, Richard Yu, head of Huawei’s smartphone business, said that the P50 series “lifts mobile photography to a new level.”

Huawei is “trying to figure out how to make this great product available to you,” but isn’t ready to share a specific launch date yet. As you can in the official teaser above, the P50 series will indeed have an egg-shaped camera module on the back. The unique new design was first revealed in March when popular leaker @OnLeaks shared CAD-based renders of the Huawei P50 Pro.

The P50 series phones are rumored to come with a 1″ Sony IMX800 main sensor, which should give them an edge over the best Android phones in the camera department. Sharp’s Aquos R6 is currently the only Android phone with a 1-inch camera sensor. The impressive custom primary sensor will be joined by three other sensors on the P50 Pro, one of which is expected to be a periscope camera.

Rumors also suggest the vanilla P50 will arrive with a 6.3-inch display featuring a centered hole-punch cutout for the selfie camera. It is expected to be powered by a 5nm Kirin 9000E chipset, while the Pro model is likely to have the slightly more powerful Kirin 9000 under the hood. However, we wouldn’t be surprised if Huawei chooses to use Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 888 to power its next flagship phones.

The new 10.8-inch MatePad Pro announced earlier today is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 870 chipset. You can also expect to see a 120Hz refresh rate on both P50 series phones, along with support for at least the same 66W charging speeds as last year’s Mate 40 Pro. On the software front, the upcoming phones will run HarmonyOS 2.0 out of the box.