Exclusive: Huawei Mate 20 features Kirin 980 & wireless charging, Mate 20 Pro with in-display fingerprint

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The second largest Android smartphone manufacturer, Huawei, is expected to announce their next flagship smartphone line later this year. The smartphone line is expected to consist of the Huawei Mate 20, Huawei Mate 20 Lite, and Huawei Mate 20 Pro. These smartphones follow the company’s Huawei P20 series which first introduced the triple rear camera concept in the Pro model along with an in-display fingerprint scanner and wireless charging in the Porsche Design Huawei Mate RS. Today, XDA-Developers has obtained firmware files for the Huawei Mate 20 which have allowed us to piece together some of the hardware specifications and features for the upcoming smartphone line. Here’s what we know so far.

The following information is based on firmware files obtained by @FunkyHuawei, the man behind the FunkyHuawei.club service, which allows users to update, unbrick, or rebrand Huawei and Honor phones for a fee. He has shared the files exclusively with XDA-Developers.

Huawei Mate 20 Specifications

First off, the Huawei Mate 20 will clearly be a flagship smartphone like its predecessor, the Huawei Mate 10. This time, however, it won’t feature the HiSilicon Kirin 970 system-on-chip. Rather, the Huawei Mate 20 will be the first Android smartphone with the HiSilicon Kirin 980 system-on-chip, which also happens to be the first SoC manufactured on a 7nm process.

While we don’t know the exact specifications of the new chipset, the Kirin 980 is expected to reach a maximum of 2.8GHz clock speeds. (Chinese media reported that sources from Digitimes note that the SoC features Cortex-A77 cores, which are currently non-existent so take that information with a grain of salt.) The new 7nm FinFET technology brings improvements in both performance and power efficiency. The chipset is rumored to have 20% better performance and to be 40% more power efficient than the current-generation chipsets. The HiSilicon Kirin 980 is expected to launch on the 31st of August during Huawei’s IFA Keynote.

Battery

Continuing Huawei’s trend with massive smartphone batteries, the Huawei Mate 20 has a 4,200mAh battery. In comparison, the Huawei Mate 10 and Huawei P20 Pro both offer a 4,000mAh battery while the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Note 9 is expected to offer a 4,000mAh battery. We don’t often see battery capacities this large in flagship devices save for devices intended to be sold on this premise (the Xiaomi Mi Max 3 and Honor Note 10 come to mind).

Display

As for the screen, we see evidence for a 6.3-inch AMOLED panel. The presence (or lack thereof) of the controversial notch (or 3.5mm headphone jack, for that matter) is unknown to us at this time. We don’t know the display information for either the Huawei Mate 20 Lite or Huawei Mate 20 Pro, but earlier leaks point towards the Pro model having a massive 6.9-inch OLED panel.

Wireless Charging

According to the firmware, the standard Huawei Mate 20 supports wireless charging. Thus, we expect the panel on the back to be made of glass. A unibody glass design isn’t out of the picture, either.

Storage and RAM

The Huawei Mate 20 (at least the model for which we obtained the firmware for) has 6GBs of RAM and 128GBs of internal storage. Unfortunately, we don’t know about any other RAM or storage variants at this time.

Huawei Mate 20 and Huawei Mate 20 Lite Model Numbers

There are currently 4 different models of the Huawei Mate 20 in the works, as we discovered earlier:

HMA-AL00

HMA-L09

HMA-L29

HMA-TL00

As for the Huawei Mate 20 Lite, there are currently 6 models that we know of:

SNE-AL00

SNE-AL00B

SNE-LX1

SNE-LX2

SNE-LX3

SNE-TL00

Based on earlier Huawei smartphone build numbers, the AL and TL versions are for the Chinese market. The L09 and L29 versions are international single and double SIM options respectively. We don’t know which countries the device will be made available in.

Huawei Mate 20 Lite and Huawei Mate 20 Pro Details

We don’t have the full firmware for either the Huawei Mate 20 Lite or Mate 20 Pro. However, from what we were able to obtain, it seems that the Huawei Mate 20 Pro will feature an in-display fingerprint scanner. If we assume that Huawei Mate 20 Lite will relate to the higher-end models in the same way that the Huawei P20 Lite and Huawei Mate 10 Lite do, then we can reasonably assume that the Huawei Mate 20 Lite won’t feature the HiSilicon Kirin 980 SoC but instead another chipset like the HiSilicon Kirin 710 found on the Huawei Nova 3i. We can’t confirm what SoC the Mate 20 Lite model will have, though. The Huawei Mate 20 Pro will have the same chipset as the regular Mate 20, but as usual, will offer unique features and likely better cameras. Once we have the full firmware for the Pro model, we’ll let you know what we find.

Huawei Mate 20 Series Software

Interestingly, the firmware is Android P (Android 9.0) based on EMUI 9.0. We attempted to extract some of the system applications and launch them on our Huawei Mate 10 running an early Android P build, but unfortunately, we were unsuccessful in booting it up. We suspect that EMUI 9.0 is significantly changed from EMUI 8.2 judging by how different the UX/UI is in Android P, but we won’t know until we can actually get our hands on a working build.

That’s all the information we have for now. We thank FunkyHuawei for providing us with the firmware. If we find new information about the phones, we’ll let you all know. Of course, we should mention that, as of July of 22nd, there’s no official way to unlock the bootloader on any Huawei or Honor smartphones. If that sours your opinion on this upcoming device, we can’t really blame you for holding those thoughts. But for those of you who are looking forward to this device, we hope this information is useful for you.

Correction: The Kirin 980 is likely launching at IFA 2018, but not the Mate 20.