Huawei Mate 9 Pro Rumored to Sport 4X Optical Zoom & Cost up to $1,300 (For Specced-out Variant)

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We’ve known for a while that Huawei is preparing to launch their flagship for the year, and that it will be called the Huawei Mate 9. We recently talked about how this is the perfect time for the company to introduce the smartphone to the market because of the issue Samsung has been having with the Galaxy Note 7. Huawei has already been taking some of Samsung’s smartphone market share in China, and this launch will likely take more from them.

A couple of weeks ago Evan Blass leaked some small press renders that claimed to show the front of Huawei’s upcoming smartphone. We didn’t get to see much detail here since they were so small, but we did learn that Huawei was planning to launch two different variants of the device. The rumor indicated that they would be going the flat/curved route that Samsung has been doing with the Galaxy S series for a couple of years.

This weekend though, we learned some additional information about the Pro (curved) variant of the Huawei Mate 9. If the rumors are true, the Huawei Mate 9 Pro will have a 5.9″ 1440p display, Kirin 960 SoC, 4GB of RAM, storage ranging from 64GB to 256GB, Android 7.0 installed out of the box, it’ll be Daydream VR ready, and a similar rear camera setup to what we saw earlier this year with the Huawei P9 (with improved sensors).

Later that day, Evan tweeted out some additional information about what his sources are telling him for this variant. He says the Mate 9/Pro will feature a 4X optical zoom thanks to its rear-facing camera setup. Not only that, but we’re told the most expensive version of the Mate 9 Pro will be priced at $1,300. We saw a lot of complaints about how much Samsung decided to charge for the Galaxy Note 7, and saw more complaints about how much Google is charging for the Pixel and Pixel XL. So we ask you:

Do you think $1,300 is too much to pay for a smartphone that has 256GB of internal storage, top internals and a 4X optical zoom rear camera setup?