It was just days ago that Huawei unveiled its new P30 line of phones in Paris, but the bustling tech giant is already looking forward to September. That’s around the time its next flagship phone, the Mate 30, will launch, an executive said in Malaysia on Wednesday.
The Mate 30 is currently being tested in Huawei’s labs, Huawei Product Manager Bruce Lee told reporters at a P30 event in Malaysia. “Now is March and the Mate 30 will be launched in September or October,” he said to press through a translator.
That release schedule would match up with previous years.
Huawei usually releases a slick, camera-centric P device in April and follows it with an improved, more robust Mate device towards the end of the year. Last year saw the P30 Pro introduce a triple-camera setup only for it to be topped with October’s Mate 20 Pro, which featured a more powerful processor and a quad-camera setup. Samsung follows a similar schedule with its Galaxy S and Galaxy Note lines.
The P30 Pro has inherited a similar quad-camera setup and is powered by the same Kirin 980 processor featured in the Mate 20 Pro. No word on how many cameras the Mate 30 will rock — presumably at least four — but it’ll surely pack a more robust CPU.
The P30 Pro was one of two phones announced Tuesday in Paris, alongside the P30. The Pro has a 6.47-inch display while the P30 has a 6.1-inch display and three, rather than four, rear cameras. Both run EMUI 9.1, Huawei’s take on Android’s Pie operating system and pack in-screen fingerprint sensors.
The P30 Pro’s four cameras the real stars of the show. You get a 20-megapixel super wide-angle lens and a regular 40-megapixel lens. Then there’s the big one: a weird-looking square lens that uses a prism-based periscope system to achieve a huge zoom. It offers not only a 5x optical zoom but also a 10x hybrid zoom without much loss in overall quality. The final lens is a time-of-flight sensor that gives depth data to the camera to allegedly achieve better bokeh (background blur) in an image.
Meanwhile, the regular P30 has the same 40-megapixel shooter but combines it with a 16-megapixel super wide-angle lens and an 8-megapixel telephoto camera. Both models have 32-megapixel selfie shooters.