Huawei had released quite a few smartphones this year, and yet, the Huawei Mate 8 which was released last year is still their flagship phablet. Now, the company had introduced the Mate 7 phablet during IFA in Berlin back in September 2014. The Huawei Mate 8, surprisingly enough, was not launched at last year’s IFA, Huawei introduced the Mate S instead, and the Mate 8 arrived in November.
That being said, Huawei has started sending out invites for the September 1st press event, and everyone immediately assumed that Huawei plans to introduce their next-gen Huawei Mate 9 phablet. Well, the company’s Mobile Product line manager, Bruce Lee, says that won’t happen. He basically said that the Mate 8 was announced in November, so it would be too soon to introduce its successor in September. So, what can we expect the company to announce on September 1st? Will they introduce the Mate S2 handset maybe? Well, it is possible, even though their Mate S handset did not really attract all that much attention from consumers next to the Mate 8 and all the other devices Huawei had introduced last year.
Now, as far as Mate 9 goes, Huawei might stick to their release schedule this time around and introduce this phablet in November this year. Now, we did not see a single leaked render of this device just yet, but we did spot several rumors. The Huawei Mate 9 is rumored to ship with the Kirin 960 SoC, a next-gen flagship SoC by Huawei. Their Kirin 950 SoC is quite powerful, and it fuels the Huawei Mate 8, so the Kirin 960 is actually a logical next step. The Huawei Mate 9 will probably be made out of metal, just like its predecessor, and you can expect Huawei to include the pressure sensitive display this time around, and also an improved camera. The phablet will almost certainly arrive in a 6GB RAM variant, though knowing Huawei, they will offer several variations of this phablet and let you choose which one to buy. You can also expect the device to ship with a new version of Huawei’s Emotion UI (EMUI) skin, though we still don’t know if it will be based on Android 6.0 Marshmallow, or the upcoming Android N.