We have seen so many leaks of what is apparently the Huawei P20 I have no doubt that most of you, like me, are lost. It happened last year for the Mate 10 release as Huawei brought quite a few versions of the Mate 10 to market it made it difficult to marry up all the rumours.
Today we have seen what are apparently renders of the P20 and P20 Plus (or is it the Pro? Or is there a Plus AND a Pro?), leaked from a Weibo account that has a history of accurate Huawei leaks. Digging deeper into the leaker’s account, ichangezone, gives possibly even more information. As you can see below (renders are not to scale) the renders of the P20 and P20 Plus look very similar to another phone we all know.
Gone is the upper bezel, replaced with a notch. It will be interesting to see how Huawei incorporate EMUI into this notch (or is that vice versa — notch into EMUI?). We are assuming that the phone with the button on the bottom bezel will be the P20 and that without the button but instead the Huawei name will be the P20 Plus as per the Mate 10 naming convention. Both phones have hardware volume keys unlike the supposed leak we saw the other day.
While we may assume that there is a fingerprint sensor on the back ala the Mate 10 Pro, reading further into ichangezone’s weibo posts, it seems that he/she seems to suggest that the P20 Plus will come with an in-display/under-display fingerprint sensor. This may well be one of the distinguishing factors between the two phones. The Mate 10 had an LCD display and the Mate 10 Pro had an OLED display. If this follows onto the P20 series, the above assumption may well fit. An OLED display is required for an under-display fingerprint sensor as seen in the latest Vivo phone.
Not only will the P20 Plus possibly have an under-display fingerprint sensor it will apparently include an IP68 rating and have improved AI capabilities over the Mate 10 series. This is of course expected with every phone release Huawei have. Their AI is still young and in continual development — hopefully the improvements are also ported backwards to the Mate 10 series.
ichangezone also states that the camera on the P series phones will be improved over that in the Mate 10 phones. The P series of phones will once again be the “designer”series of Huawei phones with a focus on its styling and its looks — wonder if Pantene were consulted on the colours again?
The P20 Plus is expected to arrive with a 6 inch FHD+ display with 18:9 aspect ratio (and a notch). It will of course be powered by the Kirin 970 and be available in 6GB/128GB and 8GB/256GB variants. A very decent battery at 4000mAh will be rounding out the specs.
The cameras will be a triple rear camera setup with a 12MP colour sensor, a 16MP black and white sensor and a 16MP telephoto lens (covering nearly all bases, now they just need to add a fourth camera with a widescreen lens). The all-important front-facing camera will be 8MP with f/2.0 aperture size.
As with all rumours these features above should be taken with a huge helping of salt. With so many rumours floating about any number of them could be correct, especially given Huawei’s recent penchant for releasing several variants of a phone into various markets under different names.
Assuming this is the Huawei P20 and P20 Plus how do you feel about the design? Do you like the notch and while Apple didn’t do it first will it still look too much like a case of me-too? Would you buy the P20 if it looked like this?
