Huawei teases its upcoming P50 flagship phone

During Huawei’s HarmonyOS livestream, the company provided a first look at its upcoming P50 series phone. Few specs were given, and it didn’t talk pricing or tease a release date, but the sizzle reel did reveal a close-up look at its interesting camera array.

Four camera lenses are visible, along with two flashes. It’s tough to say exactly what we’ll be getting with this phone in terms of megapixel count and sensor size; the photo below confirms that Huawei is working alongside Leica with its optics. We’ll have to wait to see if Huawei improved on its periscope telephoto lenses that my colleague Sam Byford saw great results with on the P40 Pro Plus.

The company claims it will “lift mobile photography to a new level.” Given that the size of the camera bump seems to have increased compared to the P40 Pro Plus (which we deemed “the smartphone zoom king”) it seems reasonable that Huawei might have crammed some even larger sensors and lenses in the P50.

You can see the tease time-stamped in the YouTube video below:

As for the rest of the phone, all we have to go on so far is what Huawei executive Richard Yu said during the livestream: that it will have a “lightweight design” and an “iconic” design language. The P50 will likely ship with Huawei’s new HarmonyOS operating system built in, but it didn’t confirm it in video (or even show the display powered on, for that matter).

As for when it might release, the company said that it is “trying to figure out how to make this great product available to you.” That reads to me as Huawei — like all tech companies right now — dealing with the impacts of a global semiconductor shortage. US sanctions placed on the company have slowed its production of in-house parts, which might also be causing supply strains around its Kirin processors. To that end, the MatePad Pro tablet it announced today has a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor instead of one of Huawei’s own processors.