Huawei will announce its P40 lineup without Google in Paris on 26 March

Huawei’s P-series range has always been a launch to look forward to and now, we know when it’s all going down. That’d be 26 March this year and the place is Paris, France. No big surprises there. It’s also no surprise that the Chinese company is bringing its A-game — the P-series’ brilliant specs and camera tech blow us away every year, but this year something is different…

Huawei’s P40 range won’t launch with Google Mobile Services, but rather with the company’s own Huawei Mobile Services. This is all thanks to Pres. Trump and that darned Entity List. This list bars any US company from trading with Huawei… which includes Google and its software. 

Remember the Mate 30 Pro announcement? It went down in a similar way, as the restrictions on the company were already present late last year. As a result the Mate 30 Pro never really launched in South Africa. Huawei has been grinding to get all of the South African apps on its AppGallery (their Play Store replacement), so it can comfortably launch Huawei devices running HMS in the country. 

We suspect the P40 Pro will actually land at retail in South Africa though. A recent media briefing at Huawei South Africa made it clear that the company has a stringent timeline to get all the relevant apps on the app store and available to South African users before the first HMS device launches here. 

P40 Powerhouse

That doesn’t mean that Huawei’s gonna skimp on specs, however. The new devices are rumoured to launch with 120Hz OLED displays for both the P40 and the Pro. The P40 will feature three rear-mounted camera lenses. 

According to a report on Android Central, the P40 Pro will have between four and five rear cameras — featuring one 64MP primary camera, a 20MP ultra-wide camera, a 12MP telephoto lens, and a ToF sensor.

All of ‘em will ship with Android 10 (open source), fitted with Huawei’s EMUI 10 skin. The previous few P-announcements have all been held in Paris, so MWC being cancelled didn’t really muck up their plans. We’ll see Huawei launch its new (and probably brilliantly specced) P40 series on 26 March.