After a longer than usual wait, the Huawei Mate 40 Pro is ready to be introduced this Thursday, on October 22. There have been limited leaks and some may prove to be inaccurate. This latest bundle of info has been compiled by the reliable Roland Quandt and should be the most accurate yet as it comes so close to the launch.

The phone will feature curved sides for both the display and the sides. The design is meant to make the side bezels disappear when you look at the display head on. The new Mate will be curvier than the P40 Pro, but without sacrificing the side buttons like the 2019 Mate did.

The display will measure 6.76”, the largest in the series and will be slightly sharper with a pixel density of 456 ppi, thanks to a screen resolution of 1,344 x 2,772 px. There’s no word on the refresh rate, but at least 90Hz seems like a no-brainer.

This leak paints a different picture from what we saw in early renders. There’s no periscope for one, instead a classic 12 MP tele camera with 5x optical zoom (125 mm focal length) will be used (you can check out an official camera sample).

Another interesting change is that the Laser autofocus will be paired with an optical depth sensor. This will be used to improve autofocus, though it’s not yet clear how. There will be a depth sensor on the front too, sharing the pill-shaped punch hole with the 13 MP selfie camera – beyond bokeh effects, this will be used to detect hand gestures.

The main camera will have a 50MP sensor and a lens with f/1.9 aperture and optical image stabilization. It will record 8K video and will feature both a dual tone LED flash and an ambient light color sensor for better color rendering. The third camera will be a 20MP ultrawide module with an f/1.8 aperture.

The Huawei Mate 40 Pro will be powered by the Kirin 9000, the first 5 nm chipset to feature an integrated 5G modem. However, this may only be sub-6 GHz (Chinese carriers are still in the planning stages of a mmWave rollout).

Anyway, the CPU of the chipset will use Cortex-A77 for its big cores with a prime core clocked at 3.13 GHz and three more A77s running at 2.54 GHz, plus four A55 little core at 2.04 GHz. The GPU will use ARM’s Mali-G78 design and as we’ve seen from early benchmarks, the Kirin leaves the Snapdragon 865+ behind in terms of graphics performance.

For Europe, Huawei is reportedly planning a version with 8GB of RAM plus 256GB of UFS 3.1 storage. The version for China will go up to 12GB of RAM. Storage will be expandable through Nano Memory cards.

The new Mate will exceed all previous Huawei models with 65W wired fast charging support, battery capacity will be 4,400mAh, so about the same as last year. Wireless charging (including reverse charging) will be supported too, though we don’t know the speeds of those.

The phone will launch with Android 10 + EMUI 11 out of the box, paired with Huawei Media Services (as Google services are still locked behind a trade embargo). It may take until next year for the new Mates to arrive in Europe, though the phones will probably be out in China before the end of 2020.

Rumor has it that the October 22 event will also bring a Mate 30 Pro E, a revamped version of last year’s model. This may be able to squeeze through a loophole and have Google Play pre-installed (just like the P30 Pro New Edition did, but we’ll find that out on Thursday.

Huawei Mate 40 Pro

We can expect special editions of the Huawei Mate 40 Pro this year as well – an RS model that will feature Porsche Design looks and a Pro+ model which will upgrade the camera. Whether these reach Europe remains to be seen (though it’s quite unlikely, at least for the Pro+ model).

A leak showing Mate 40 Pro+ renders and the retail box suggests that instead of a donut, the rear camera design will be based on an octagon. Huawei officially teased the Mate 40 design, showing a similar angular camera island though not an octagon.

Source (in German)