It feels like it’s been forever since we had a new Huawei smartphone announcement to marvel over. Hopefully, the reveal of the Huawei P50 has been worth the wait. If you live in China, then perhaps it has because that’s the only place the new HarmonyOS handset with the intimidating (camera) bulge has been confirmed for.
There are, of course, two different models for fans to look out for — the stock 6.5in 90Hz OLED-screened P50 and then the 6.6in 120Hz OLED P50 Pro, which you’ll see in our header image above. Typically a Huawei flagship would use one of the company’s own Kirin processors but the recent American sanctions have meant the Chinese company has had to mix it up a little.
What’s inside the P50?
One of the Pro models will ship with a Kirin 9000 processor inside but that’s where it ends. The other models, both above and below the Pro line, will all land packing Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 888 — the chipset all the cool phones are wearing this year.
As usual, there are a few different storage options — the P50 ships with 8GB of RAM and up to 256GB of internal storage, while the Pro will offer either 8GB or 12GB of RAM and up to 512GB of storage to users. There aren’t any real surprises here, this feels like just another day at the office for Huawei — though the IP68 rating across the range is nice. The base handset totes a 4,100mAh battery, the Pro scales that up to 4,360mAh and both support up to 66W fast charging. Should make for some speedy top-ups.
Remember we mentioned that camera bump earlier? The design is a little different to what we’ve seen from Huawei in the past but the dual circles will still house some interesting tech. The P50’s rear packs in three camera sensors — a 50MP main, a 12MP 5x optical zoom telephoto and a 13MP ultrawide. The Pro adds another sensor and upgrades one of the existing three, for a 50MP main, 64MP 3.5x optical zoom telephoto, 40MP monochrome and 13MP ultrawide combination. There’s the same 13MP front-facer on all of Huawei’s newest handsets.
The P50 starts, in China, at around R10,200 (4,488 yuan), with the Pro setting buyers back at least R13,500 (5,988 yuan), but whether we’ll see pricing anywhere outside of that country is a little murky at the moment. Which might be as well — based purely on the on-paper features, we’re not sure there’s as much innovation here as Huawei would have wanted. Not being able to get components looks to have stalled development — though we’d be happy to be proved wrong if (or, hopefully, when) the P50 launches here in SA. Yes, even if it is running HarmonyOS.